I think we both felt we were getting a good honest deal. I contacted him as soon as I saw the ad, and gave him every penny he was asking for it without any negotiation. Possibly better.Īfter owning the bike for more than a dozen years, my friend listed it quite unexpectely on Facebook one evening several years ago now (at a time when I was still a part of that compromised clusterfuck of a website) for a very fair price, along with a couple other bikes that he said he wasn't riding very often any more. It looks a hell of a lot better on the Chester than that ol' Shimano horseshoe ever did. And I also took off the fugly carbon Shimano brake booster and replaced it with a one-of-a-kind brushed tubular steel Vulture Cycles brake booster (handmade for me in Oregon by Wade in the 1990s on IRD Rod Moses' jig, I'll have you know). I did replace the Thudbuster post with a lovely Ti unit that I had in my parts bin, and the too-narrow Answer Monkeylite carbon bars and too-short 50mm Salsa stem with a much wider (725mm) sexy blue anno SpankSpoon unit (matches the top caps on the Fox fork), along with a gorgeous 80mm silver Thomson stem. it's a sweet now-vintage build and I've done little over the years to alter its stance. So, once the frame-build was finished, he had the bike shipped down the road a few short miles to where it could be assembled by the good folks at Absolute Bikes in Salida, Colorado, with what, in my world, I can only describe as "quite a bit of (classic 2003-era) bling," silver Chris King hubs and a black King headset, Stans ZTR hoops, Fox F29 80mm fork, Hayes Oro hydraulic front disc brake, black/silver Pauls rear v-brake lever, Avid Black Ops Research rear v-brake, XT M760 175mm cranks, 36t Blackspire ring. My friend, the guy who originally arranged with Chester to have the bike built for himself is, to put it mildly (and especially in comparison to myself), something of, shall we say, a man of means. In fact, he's another mutual friend of mine and the guy in Salida who was renting Matt Chester shop space in his garage. I bought my Chester singlespeed some five years ago from the person who was its original owner. Thus it has gone with mine, a 2003 Matt Chester MuTinyman 29" singlespeed, serial number #whothehellknows 1. Regardless of his motivations, and with little forewarning, he announced mid-2006, on his now defunct Livejournal blog, that he was officially going to stop framebuilding, presumably with a number of orders still unfulfilled and deposits unreturned. It appears he was at times years behind, failing to deliver to those who had put down $1000, $2000 or more, anything but empty promises of "Soon," proffered only after persistent pestering and almost always via email.įinally, near as I can figure, by 2006, Chester's operation was likely failing in earnest, possibly due to the recurrent concussive traumatic brain injuries he occasionally complained of which rendered him unfit or unable to work, or possibly because he met a girl who lived in Canada and he chose to refocus his life-goals around being with her instead of making bikes, or possibly because he became fixated on the fact that, as a Canadian, she offered him a way out, beyond the reach of his increasingly disappointed and often angry customers and creditors. As with most such schemes, Chester's seems to have eventually come apart, as he most likely fell further and further behind in fulfilling his orders. It would seem that, around this time, Chester began to carry-out a kind of haphazard, perhaps even initially unintentional, deceptive scheme amongst his customer base, apparently taking new orders along with hefty deposits, purchasing tubing and supplies for older as-yet undelivered orders with the new-customer money, and hoping everyone, including his friend (a mutual friend of both of ours, as a matter of fact) who was leasing him shop space in his garage, would remain none the wiser (he did not he got wise). He refused to install disc-brake tabs, entirely shunned eccentric bottom bracket shells, yet nonetheless eagerly charged people for repairs to other manufacturer's broken or damaged titanium frames.Īlso, near as I can figure, sometime around 2003, Matt Chester, now a resident of Salida, Colorado, had moved his operation down-valley to the south and was building his bikes in a friend's garage. Per his now-mothballed website, he only built bikes from Ti, focused his work exclusively on singlespeed bicycles, and tried very hard (though not always successfully) to convince all of his customers to get their bikes built with 29" (700c) wheels. Near as I can figure, Matt Chester, a resident of Leadville, Colorado, began fabricating and selling bicycles made from titanium tubing out of his home workshop sometime early in 1999.
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