Yes, it’s needlessly self-indulgent, but we’re aiming to drag in some of your contributions for this somewhat neglected “regular” slot, so what better way than to tell you about one of our own bikes?

I like to think that it’s quite an interesting bike in some ways, though, so it’s not completely gratuitous. The vision in white that you see before you is a 1995 Kona Kilauea (which is one of those bike names that you don’t want to think too hard about how to spell – just hit the keys and use the force) with certain custom mods.

Some back story: Before getting this bike I’d been doing some races on a Kona Humuhumunukunukuapua’a singlespeed cruiser thing. It was a fun bike to ride, but not by any stretch of the imagination a race bike. It was heavy, it was slack, but most of all it had chainstays as long as its name and a turning circle measured in furlongs. When I encountered a race course with a corner that it was actually too long to fit around (it got wedged between two trees) I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and get a “nice” singlespeed.

All of this was before there was the huge choice of off-the-shelf singles that we enjoy (or mutter about, depending on personal gearing philosophy) – if you didn’t want a Humu or a BMX then some degree of customness was going to be involved. I wasn’t in a position to get a full custom frame, but I was in a position to bag an old broken frame from the warranty pile at the then Kona importers Second Level Sport. £40 for a Tange Ultralight chromoly frame? Can’t be bad, even if it did have a broken dropout. But that didn’t matter – I had no intention of using the original dropouts.

Stage two of Operation Singlespeed was to take the slightly broken and rather tatty cream frame to Argos Cycles in Bristol. They performed a number of minor operations – off came the vertical dropouts and on went a pair of track ends. All the gear cable stops were cut off, and an extra brake cable stop added to the top tube to render it V-brake friendly (the bike was originally specced with cantis). Then the whole thing was resprayed in a lovely pearlescent white, that inevitably sustained a huge great gouge to the top tube first time out (it’s under the One Really Nice Speed sticker, and also the slightly less polite sticker that that covers).

Naturally, the components have been in a state of flux ever since. It started out with Marzocchi Bomber Z2 forks, then spent many years with a RockShox SID XC gracing the front and currently sports an 80mm Magura Ronin that’s not quite the right shade of white. Plenty of people run bikes of this vintage with longer forks, but to me the handling goes a bit wibbly – it’s not quite as razor-like as it would have been originally, but it’s still good and sharp.

The Magura fork necessitated fitting a front disc on account of not having any V-brake bosses. I couldn’t bear to take the lovely Avid Ultimate levers off, though, so an Avid cable disc was pressed into duty at the front. An Avid V sits at the back. Fitting a disc also meant losing the Mavic front hub that I’d been using on various bikes for about 14 years. That wasn’t the oldest bit on the bike, though – the Mavic cranks are still going strong, despite the fact that I’ve had them since about 1992 and they were second-hand then.

The RockShox suspension seatpost (sadly no longer made) supports a Specialized Toupe saddle, chosen mainly for whiteness but it’s actually pretty comfy. I’ve done 12 hours at a stretch on it and still been able to sit down afterwards, at any rate, so it can’t be too bad.

All in all, it’s a pretty well sorted bike. It’s not perfect – the track ends are actually positioned a little too far forward, so I have to run the back wheel almost right at the back of them to get enough tyre clearance at the front of the chainstays. That limits the amount of chain tension adjustment – there’s currently a half-link in there to help matters. Gearing geeks may wish to know that it’s a 34T TA ring up front and an 18T Shimano DX sprocket out back. That’s a whisker lower than the “traditional” 2:1 ratio, but I quite like to spin…

I have an aversion to screw-on freewheels, so the rear hub is a Shimano DX designed for BMX. It’s got a narrow freehub body designed for one sprocket and a couple of spacers. It’s also designed for narrow dropout spacing, but a new axle and some spacers (all sorted out by Wheelpro) dealt with that.

So there it is. It’s one of my favourite bikes – it nearly always works, it’s a delight to ride and, to my eyes at least, it looks lovely.