Bike Build · Parts board

The look of the thing

One picture of the whole bike, and the decisions behind it.

The accepted render: purple Wizard with brown-tan tyres, a gold stem, brown-wrapped drop bars, a full waxed-canvas frame bag, olive panniers on a front rack, a rear rack with a dry bag, black fenders
  1. 1Frame — Magic Components "The Wizard", XL, Hermit PurpleOrdered Chromoly 26" ATB, rigid steel fork, rim brakes, and a rear end to cold-set 132.5 → 135 mm for the hub. The $44 bolt-on single-speed dropout went on the same order; it tensions the chain. The deposit is paid, the balance auto-charges on 9 September, and Omafiets expect the shipment that month.
  2. 2Handlebar — VO Crazy BarChosen 780 mm, 35° sweep, 40 mm rise, 31.8 mm clamp, kept uncut. The horns give a forward hand position while the sweep keeps the grips upright. That is why the Jones Loop lost, and why the clip-on aerobar is off the list.
  3. 3Stem — VO Happy Stem, black, 110 mmChosen 1‑1/8" threadless, 31.8, +45°. Beat the prettier Crust LD on adjustability: a 45° stem on a 70° head angle is a height adjuster rather than a reach one, and the Happy Stem adjusts with spacers where the LD needs an exact steerer cut. Sold out in every variant at Heaps Good Garage.
  4. 4Shifter — bar-end, into the hornOpen The microSHIFT BS-N08-R eight-speed indexed bar-end is the candidate, mounted in the Crazy Bar's horn so the shifting hand is the forward hand. Caliper the horn's inside diameter before buying: 19 mm or more and it goes in; under 18 mm and a thumb shifter takes over. The Paul Thumbie left the list with the Jones bar it existed to convert.
  5. 5Brakes + levers — Paul, blackChosen Motolite V-brakes with Love Levers. Paul's own spec confirms the lever is long-pull with a 22.2 mm clamp, matching this frame's V-brakes and the Crazy Bar's sweeps. Salmon pads for wet rims.
  6. 6Front rack — Tubus Tara, chromoly, blackVariant open A$160, rated 18 kg by Tubus and 15 kg by US retailers — load it to 15. A true low-rider, and the one rack that mounts to a single outside-face boss per blade, which is what this fork has. Two variants: the standard Tara (599 g) is rated for a 50 mm tyre, and the trip tyre is 54 mm plus a fender, so the Tara Big Apple (562 g, 60 mm, narrower 124–134 mm mounting range) is the likely buy. Buy chromoly either way: if the boss height is wrong, the fallback is the $40 LM-1 clamp set, and it fits chromoly only.
  7. 7Front panniers — brownOpen Brown, synthetic acceptable. Waterproof and genuinely brown turn out to be disjoint sets off the shelf, so this is heading toward DIY, with Restrap's olive 13 L as the fallback. The Tara's rails are 10 mm, and that gates every hook.
  8. 8Frame bag — full triangle, home-madeOpen Route settled, bag not: sew one in October off a cardboard template, ride it over summer, commission a made one in February only if the prototype disappoints. The triangle is a quadrilateral, since the 180 mm head tube is a real fourth side, and the panel runs ~1900–2000 cm².
  9. 9Water — two 64 oz KanteensOpen Open despite being bought: the bottles are here, and nothing on the bike will hold them. The full-triangle bag claims the down-tube and seat-tube positions, the Pizza Rack whose uprights would have carried them is gone, and a full 64 oz is 2.3 kg — too much to hang off the fork's single M5 boss. The titanium King Cages wait on the bag, and 64 oz may be the wrong size anyway.
  10. 10Rear rack — Surly Rear Rack, blackChosen Steel, so a welder in a country town can fix it — which is the point on a ten-day trip out of reach of bike shops. 150 mm deck, half again the Old Man Mountain Divide's, and two-tier all-tube so a rope finds purchase anywhere. Verify the SKU's deck length and branding from a photo before paying.
  11. 11Tyres — GravelKing SK for the trip, everyday set contestedOpen The trip is settled: Panaracer GravelKing SK V2 26 × 2.10, brown wall on black tread, bead-to-bead puncture belt, in stock in Australia at A$100. The everyday set is not. Schwalbe Big Ben 26 × 2.15 held it on the strength of being the only 26" tyre that is brown all over, but no Australian shop stocks it and its 2013 article number means what is left is residual European stock. The Ultradynamico Mars Race 26 × 2.2 in Red may take that slot instead — red tread over a tan wall, no black rubber anywhere, A$135 and domestically stocked. Its casing is thin, which is a problem a week from a bike shop and close to none on a commute, so the objection lands on the trip half rather than this one. What it costs: nothing on the bike would be brown all over any more.
  12. 12Rims — Ryde Andra 30, 36h, blackChosen Machined brake track, pinned joint, no eyelets (the eyeleted sibling is the Sputnik), ~19 mm internal — sized for a 2.0–2.35" tyre, not a compromise across everything. Spokes, front hub and both wheel builds are still ahead.
  13. 13Rear hub — Shimano Alfine 8, SG-S7001-8Owned 36h, 135 mm solid axle, black. Northside Cycles, $370, collect in store. It ships bare, so the cassette joint, the 23t sprocket and the non-turn washers are a separate order — and without the cassette joint the hub cannot shift at all.
  14. 14Pedals — black, metalOpen Open again: the orange OneUp Composites were bought, rendered in place, and rejected — the decal-accent argument lost to the eye. Metal is the candidate, VO Sabot-like, in black. Everything else at that end of the bike is leather or metal.
  15. 15Finishing kit — CrustOpen 24 Palms headset (A$105), Catalog seatpost 27.2 — its own maker calls it "a simple seat post with no branding" (A$55), HYH grips, black steel spacers, a fistful of Voile straps. Brooks C17 in black with copper rivets is the saddle candidate. Two gates. Stock: Heaps Good Garage has neither the grips nor the black straps, and Crust are out of black spacers in 5 and 50 mm. Size: Crust only make a 30.0 mm seat clamp, so measure the seat tube first.
  16. 16Fenders — black, and a clamp-on centre standOpen Buy fenders last: they cannot be sized until frame, wheels and tyres are in hand, and they must recede. The double-leg centre stand clamps on, since this frame has no kickstand plate.
Paid for or on order Chosen — decided, not bought Open — still a question Image is a generated render, indicative only.
HERMIT PURPLE
SPARKLE
DECAL ORANGE
WAXED OLIVE
BROWN RUBBER
WARM METAL
MATTE BLACK
The palette is a rule, not a mood Geometry first, colour second. Bags, tape and straps can move the look afterwards; a stem that doesn't fit cannot be talked into fitting. Then: tan, gold, copper or orange, used selectively, and otherwise default to black, matte preferred. Silver and cream are actively avoided — light finishes stand out and look wrong on this bike. That one rule settled the stem finish, the low-rider and the fenders without three more arguments, and it rules out most of Nitto's catalogue, whose house finishes are nickel and silver.
You will probably not be able to stand over this frame Standover works out at about 85.5 cm against a measured 83–84 cm inseam — roughly one and a half to two and a half centimetres of interference, estimated from published geometry to a couple of centimetres, on a frame already ordered. This is a stopping problem, not a riding one: stand on your toes, or drop the saddle and stay seated with a foot down. Investigate a 27.2 mm mechanical dropper, which makes the second one a lever rather than a spanner. The smaller frame clears, and the XL stays. Why this went unnoticed for two months: the sizing reasoned from height, and the number that decides standover is inseam. A 600 mm seat tube under a level top tube puts it there regardless of wheel size — 26" wheels claw back only about 35 mm against a 29er.
What this render changed The big move is that the front load comes down: panniers hung low on a low-rider, rather than a big bag displayed high on a front deck. That reads better and handles better, and it retired the object the whole carry system had been designed around since June — the Brooks Hampstead Holdall, which at 1.6 kg empty never earned its place in a plan that now rides low and light. It keeps its job for groceries. The front deck went with it, and so did the footprint-matched basket programme and the Old Man Mountain Pizza Rack, along with the clearance arithmetic worked out for it.
Seven things in the picture are not the plan The renderer dressed the cockpit wrong three times over — drop bars where the build runs the Crazy Bar, a gold stem where it runs a black one, and a brown saddle where the candidate is a black C17. It also drew a suspension fork, where the Wizard's is rigid steel, and made the panniers olive rather than the specified brown. The tyres are wrong twice: the sidewalls read “27.5” on a 26" bike, and the brown tread is the one colour here you cannot buy — no brown-tread knobby exists in this size, which is what put the trip and the everyday sets on different rubber in the first place. Otherwise the picture is for the load, the colour and the stance, and those are the plan.
A Surly Bridge Club fitted with Velo Orange Crazy Bars on a tall black stem, parked against an orange Volkswagen Beetle
The same bar, and what looks like the same stem, on a real bike. Every bar-height claim in this build was trigonometry off published specs; this is what those numbers look like. The bars sit clearly above the saddle, and there are spacers under the stem, so this rider went higher still. Different frame, so treat it as the character of the setup, not a measurement.
Head tube detail: a pink wizard decal and the Wizard wordmark in flat orange, on the purple-to-blue flip sparkle paint
The decal, up close, on a real frame — a pink wizard, the wordmark running orange, all of it on purple sparkle. Orange is a sanctioned accent in the palette, and this is where it comes from.
Magic Components' own drive-side photo of an XL Wizard in the purple flip finish, built up with a front rack, chainstay protector and 26 inch tyres
The real thing, and the right size — Magic's own XL (“23.6 inch”) in the purple. The render shows the build as intended; this shows the frame as it is. Two details came straight off it: the fork carries a single mid-blade boss per blade, and the black wrap on the chainstay is a chainstay protector. This build wants one for the paint's sake, even though a tensioned single chain barely slaps.

Board reflects decisions as of 3 September 2026. Order numbers live in shopping-list.md and the full open-question list in 01-decisions.md. Most of what remains here is a measurement rather than a decision, waiting on the frame's arrival in September.