I always had a special place in my heart for the old Klunkers based on beach cruisers created by the pioneers of mountain biking like Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher.
So when choosing a frame for my new monstercross build Stooge Cycles was the obvious choice. Stooge is a one man band run by Andrew Stevenson. He makes small batches of unique and beautiful steel and titanium frames. Check out the website HERE! This is the third frame from a small British bike brand in my stable. Singular and BTR being the other two. I love that the UK have lots of indie brands, that´s why Brexit sucks even more.
Stooge has quite a line up but make small batches of steel frames that are hard to come by. My choice fell on the Speedball, a rigid 29+ triple top tube ripper. The Speedball is a MTB and is supposed to run flat bars. But i wanna ride it like a Monstercoss with drop bars. Here is the beauty of dealing with small brands.
As said, Andy makes the steel frames in batches but the titanium frames are made to order! Of course i want titanium, cos it´s space metal! That also makes it possible to make a few tweaks on the geometry. I contacted Andy and let him know my thoughts about making the Speedball better suited for dirt drops. So we shortened the ETT with 20mm, made the rear boost and added an extra set of bottle nipples under the down tube. After running the tweaks by the welder a couple of times he made it happen. Yeay!
The Speedball runs classic 1.1/8 head tube and comes with a beautiful and comfy biplane steel fork with triple mounts, eccentric bottom bracket and a awesome retro look with the triple headtubes and clearance for up to 29×3.35″ rubber.
The build.
This is my gravel/trail/bikepacking bike. It´s supposed to be simple and beautiful so mechanic diskbreaks 1×11 and wide comfy bars.
I run a 11-40 Shimano drive train with Microshift barend shifters. Middleburn RS7 square taper cranks with eggbeaters. BB7 with simple Tektro levers. Bombtrack saddle on aThomson elite seatpost and the super comfy Daija Far bars mounted on a 50mm Race Face Horizon stem. On the dirt side, 29×2.6″ Bontrager XR2 Team Issue tyres on Halo Vapor 35 rims.
I have a lots of different bags for bikepacking but the one that looks the best is my Ostrich S2 saddle bag on an Carradice bag rack. I also love the Monkii cage bottle holders. Fits all bottles.
I´m super happy how this bike turned out. It handles like a dream on rough gravel roads and trails. It´s very stabile when going fast downhill and super easy to pack. It also looks like a million bucks!
My upcoming project is to get a framebag. Since i´m pretty handy with a sewing machine i´m gonna try to make one by myself. I´ll be coming back with the progress here on the blog.
A huge thanks to Andy for the superb customer service and for keeping his dream alive and making unique and beautiful bikes that rides like bats out of hell! Cheers!
Bike life in Swedish Lapland 
Bike looks great, I’ve always been disappointed that I’m too small to get away with a Stooge frame.
Thanks! Well that sucks. It’s too bad the size range is limited.