Got a new fork!

The kind that goes on a bike, not the kind you eat with.

The steel rigid fork I ordered from Igleheart came in the mail today. I'm excited. The craftsmanship on the fork is amazing. When I first got my new-to-me Fat Chance frame I thought long and hard on how to outfit the front end - suspension fork or rigid fork. The former needed to be at most 80 millimeter travel and V-brake only. Why V-brake? Although I didn't want this the bike to be a period correct build I wanted to "keep it real" with V-brakes. And I really wanted to try out the Avid Ultimate V-brakes. My cousin Brian had them on one of his bikes and they were hella nice V-brakes. Finding a fork with 80mm AND V-brake post mounts these days is going to be pretty hard.

I didn't want to spend a lot of time searching for the perfect suspension fork so rigid it is. But what kind of rigid? steel? carbon? I wanted something that matched the frame in terms of ride quality and aesthetics. Another eXotic carbon rigid fork could be had in a 425mm A2C but more research led me in another direction.

Some of the Fat Chance frames went out into the world with segmented rigid steel forks and they looked great with the skinny tubed frames. There weren't any segmented steel forks out in the regular markets online. The solution? Go the custom route. Groovy Cycles was suggested but there was a wait list. "F" that! West Coast builders like Sycip, Soulcraft or Retrotec? No Go - you had to buy a frame to order a rigid fork. Where else can I source a rigid fork?

Further research uncovered Igleheart. Apparently he was a former Fat Chance employee and who better to get a fork from. So I emailed him asking for an appropriate spec'd segmented fork for my Fat Chance frame. He replied back that he had recently built the perfect fork for my needs and would send it to me COD! What company still offers that? I thought it was rather cool and trusting of him to do that in this day in age.

So the fork is a rigid steel segmented fork in 425x25cm and will be perfect for the '98 Fat Chance Bro Eddy I'm building up. I'm really stoked to say the least.