About Ebykr
Ebykr celebrates classic and vintage lightweight bicycles through provocative imagery and opinion. Ride along with us.
A 1970s Team Fuji track frame in Fuji 331 double butted chrome molybdenum, built out of the Japanese track parts bin: Nitto, Sugino, Suzue, Araya and HKK.
Founded in Chicago in 1895, Schwinn ran an extraordinary double life: a mass-production giant selling balloon-tire cruisers and electro-forged ten-speeds by the million, and a small hand-build shop producing Paramount racing frames and fillet-brazed lightweights that could stand against anything made in Europe. This timeline follows the company from the 1890s boom through the Wastyn Paramounts, the Sting-Ray, the bike boom it failed to capture, two bankruptcies and the 2023 closing of Waterford.
For most of the twentieth century Schwinn was simply the American bicycle, which is exactly why enthusiasts of classic lightweights tend to look past it. Behind the balloon-tire cruisers and the electro-forged Varsity sat a Chicago hand-build shop turning out Paramount racing frames, and a second line of fillet-brazed lightweights so badly marketed that almost nobody recognized what they were. This is the story of a company that built superb bicycles and could never quite bring itself to sell them.
Step back into the workshop of Spécialités TA, the small Clamart firm whose duralumin chainrings and cranksets carried some of the biggest names in cycling for over 70 years. This gallery gathers the company’s period advertisements, catalog pages and technical…
All About the Francs, and Palmarès Very few marques from classic cycling’s golden years are as simultaneously transparent and opaque as Cycles Mercier. Wonderful examples of the company’s craftmanship abound in their namesake bicycles, spanning the pre-War 1920s through the…
The story of Cycles Mercier is inextricably linked to its master strategy of brand management and horizontal integration, a philosophy that ensured its longevity even as smaller rivals struggled to survive. Over its 66-year reign, Mercier established no fewer than…
The storied history of Cycles Mercier spans well over a century now, marked by rapid industrialization, a long-running racing dynasty, pioneering technical innovations (like the Méca Dural frame), and dramatic corporate collapses and revivals (note the use of plurals here).…
MAFAC’s story is that of a specialist brake innovator facing the rise of integrated groupsets. For 20 prosperous years, MAFAC filled a crucial gap by creating brakes—like the pioneering Criterium cantilever and revolutionary Racer center-pull models—that were revolutionary in their…
Introducing MAFAC In the historical archive of classic lightweight and vintage bicycles, some components get relegated to lowly footnote status, while others stand tall as towering monuments to engineering achievement. Among the latter, the name MAFAC—an acronym derived from the…
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