June 30, 2011

Bikes of Vilas: Kopish's Panasonic

As we go through the Vilas photos you may notice that there were a whole bunch of very nice bicycles in attendance including 4 handbuilts. We'll eventually get to all of them, but lets start off with one of the nicest production bikes I've ever seen. Brian Kopish's old Panasonic.

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Word is that it is a Panasonic brand 80's frameset that had it's top tube crushed and replaced by Minneapolis wheelbuilding legend Reed who also had it repainted.

It was then sold to Brian by Reed.

Take a look at the lovely lug work, the fast back stays, and most impressively the complete internal cable routing. I've never seen this style of external braze ons before.

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detail of downtube routing

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here it is popping out of the seattube for the front der

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the rear cable exiting the chainstay

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I absolutely love this thing.

1 comment:

mark$ter said...

Just don't change the front derailleur cable. Takes 45 minutes to a skullcrushing hour.