Krazy Koga

Found this crazy little gem of a mountain bike on campus the other day when all I had was my phone on me. Kinda took a look at it from afar and almost blew it off. I'm glad I didn't because the wickedness is all in the details. Looks like a bonded aluminum construction, with a strange metal finish or anodized rather than painted tubing. XTR M900 crank, early XT everything else. Some interesting details on the brake levers: not sure if they just couldn't get that XT logo on there enough, or they figured the inside of the brake levers were the only place they wouldn't get worn off by super-high end semi-pro shredder types.

I love that sharkfin chainstay guard, wish someone would reproduce these things. You get a little extra cred when your chainstay guard backs up your whole bike's single track-eating good looks. I really flipped out when I saw the rims on this bike up close, though. Check them out: Mavic 217 rims with an anodized finish -- not a single color but a continuous gradient all the way around. Sickness, buddy.

Would like to do more research on this bike, but I don't have a lot of time on my hands. From what I can tell Koga-Miyata was making some far-out bikes in the early to mid '90s, including this little chunk of bling. If you've got more info, hit me up.

XT rear deer, Sharkfin and sweet Mavic 217's

Glad you put that extra logo on it, I wasn't sure

The wild Keirin in its native habitat

Getting a lot of traffic this weekend on my Tumblr dashboard related to the Keirin meet-up in LA. Kind of cool to see the real reason behind the existence of NJS parts and Japanese track bikes getting some legitimate attention. Pretty interesting sport, wish I had tried harder to figure out where and when the meets happened while I was still in Japan.

A friend of mine that was in the know 8 years ago, asked me to see if I could track down any frames while I was in Japan. I was in a pretty small village way up in the mountains, so bikes faded pretty far from my consciousness, but every once and a while I would find a shop in a larger town and ask around. No leads. I remember asking a guy at a small shop in Takayama wether he knew anything about Keirin and he looked at me like I was nuts, probably because he thought I was asking about Kirin, which you could buy from a vending machine on any street corner. It wasn't until the week before I left, that I found a velodrome right around the corner from a friends house in Gifu. Doh.