NAHBS: Ground Up Shows Up with Creative and Fun Race Car Stylings

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Master Frame Builder of the Trifecta Bicycle-Tubing of steel, aluminum and titanium Eric Baar of groundupdesigns showed up to the North American Hand-Made Bicycles show with his home brew creations complete with his artist’s hand in the paint pots Featuring dazzling glitter paint under a heavy clear coat, his frames are also hand-lettered and pinstriped – often having the finishing touches being done before your very eyes on the showroom floor. Reminiscent of 70’s muscle cars and drag racing styling, as well as your older sister’s Schwinn Stingray, it’s certainly apparent that Baar is having an incredible amount of fun experimenting.

Baar perfects his T.I.G. welding techniques while working for da Vinci Designs whose shop is local to this year’s NAHMBS in Denver, and in his free time, he churns up these creations, where his imagination can run wild.

Barr produces custom track bikes, which are often utilized at the famous 7-11 Olympic training velodrome that’s local to Barr’s Colorado Springs shop, this one is former two-time National Track Champion Dean Tracy’s  track machines, done up recently with over-glitter goodness and hand-lettered signage,

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Certainly nothing beats seeing glitter, well glitter in real life.

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Also on display is this polo bike, with a unique belt drive tension system, located near the bottom bracket.

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The seat stay/seat tube meetup is hinged, the chainstay  seat tube has basically dropouts that allow the rear triangle to be positioned to give you that perfect belt tension. This allows Baar to run a simple vertical dropout in the back, and have a rear disk brake – as well as a beefy disk guard. Ultimately all for the love of doing something so whacky

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Even Eric’s welding mask did not escape the glitter paint,

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Eric also lead a T.I.G. workshop at NAHMBS which started as a “back to basics” on how to weld, and quickly evolved to all the advanced nuanced master techniques Eric has been accumulating over the past decade+ of cranking out his speed, tandem, and strictly-fun machines.

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