bon bon bon

I was poking around on EBay the other day, and I stumbled across a bike worth looking at. It was a Bontrager titanium mountain bike, size large, complete with an 8-speed XTR grouppo. I started lusting after a Bon in about 1992, when Bicycle Guide (blessings on its long-departed soul) featured a Bontrager RaceLite. Keith Bontrager came from a cyclocross background, and built his mountain bikes using what he’d learned there: short top tubes, steep head angles, and comparatively little fork rake, all combined to put more of the rider’s weight on the front wheel for traction. At the time, I had relatively few hours on singletrack, but plenty of playtime in construction site mud pits, where the red Georgia clay turned into an excellent lubricant at the first sign of rain. I had a hearty terror of my front wheel washing out at speed, and the Bontrager’s design assuaged that a little.
Keith also has a background in mechanical engineering. Unlike a lot of builders who worked from rules of thumb or tradition, he calculated loads and strengths, and had concluded long ago that bicycles needed more strength vertically at the head tube than anywhere else. So he built his frames light, too light to survive, and then welded little scalloped gusset plates at the sites of stress, like the headtube junction and the bottom bracket. They had a look somewhere between purposeful and Frankensteinian, and I was smitten. Unskiddable in front, expensive, with weird features, and a name I couldn’t pronounce. I started saving my pennies.

Fast-forward to 2006. I’d bought an entry level ‘cross bike, with an aluminum frame and fork, steep geometry, and loads of toe overlap. I was riding at Yellow River (all my bikes get singletrack time, even the velodrome fixie) and hating it. My hands were on top of the bars, and I was keeping my weight on the saddle, just trying to keep from getting shaken to death. On a downhill, I moved my hands to the drops, just to reach the brakes, and suddenly, it made sense. With weight on the front wheel, the running-on-stilts feeling disappeared. The front tire knifed into the dirt, and the rear drifted just the least bit as I swept the turns. And I realized again that I still needed a Bontrager.

Seventeen years later, I still haven’t ridden a Bontrager. But there’s one heading for my house right now. In the time since reading that first review and now, I’ve gotten the kind of career that makes a $1400 frame a matter of flashing the plastic. Unfortunately, Bontrager hasn’t waited for me.
At the time of that first review, Bon frames all came with a Switchblade fork, straight replaceable blades pinch-bolted into a machined crown. The idea was that the blades could be made light enough for resiliency, and just tossed if they got bent. When suspension forks, with their unvarying geometry started springing up (ouch!), Keith simply bolted Mag-20 fork legs into his own crowns and raised the head tubes on his frames. But shortly thereafter, the oil-pissing Mag series went extinct. For a while, RockShox was willing to make custom- crowned Judys for a few larger small customers, like Tom Ritchey, with his penchant for 1” steerers, and Bontrager. But soon enough, the books quit balancing, and Keith folded his frame shop, taking a job designing (and destruction testing) components for Trek.

When I bid on the EBay Bon, the price was holding at $510, with less than a day to go. I bid a grand plus a buck, not to buy it, but to keep the other bidder from stealing a nice bike for half of nothing. And I won. Total price, with shipping, was $950.
I hadn’t had time to think, or to ask too many questions, either of myself or the seller. But the more I think, the more I believe that I haven’t realized any Bontrager dream.

This is a titanium Bon, a last ditch attempt to give cachet to a bike that deserved it but had lost its market. It was probably made by Litespeed, which isn’t bad in itself, but the master (or should I say El Patron) never even saw it, much less wielded the torch. Since Ti frames are always strong but occasionally noodle-y, it’s almost certainly made from straight-gauge tubing, with no need for gussets. And finally, by ’95 or ’96, the custom fork crowns were long gone, and Bontragers were all married to that bitch Judy, with geometry to accommodate her.

It sounds like I’ve just bought a regular Ti bicycle, just another damn Litespeed. A nice enough bike, especially with the XTR, but nothing to get overwrought about. And one that’s unlikely to threaten my custom-geometry Moots. I look forward to riding it, and finding out. I’ll keep you posted, but I expect that I’ll strip the Bontrager, give its better components to the Moots, and ride it as a singlespeed.

More to come.