INSIDE Berlin’s Underground Bike Scene is Actually Magic

While the mainstream industry was waiting with bated breath to see if the 32-inch wheel would win Unbound, we went to Berlin for something completely different, the Mini Bike Fest. As the name suggests, it's a bike festival celebrating the small wheeled bike. Started initially by Paul and Tony as a bit of a joke when another show fell through, in its second year it has grown into an actual event attracting builders outside of Germany. Out of a joke basically why not just invite a few builders and they should bring their 20-inch bikes and we thought about the name and then just had a really like low effort get together. From the decision to make it till the event was like four weeks and we did everything ourselves just Paul and me and now we have people like yeah a lot of people more that helped us. There are so many cool bikes at this event. I didn't quite get a chance to talk to everybody but these were some of the highlights. This show coverage is made possible by the folks over at Velo Orange. Join the tiny bike club today. I'm Elias from Endless Bikes from Munich. We basically are a compact cargo bike shop. We do frame building for fun and this is a bike we've built some months ago. It's like an grown-up version of our Lusty the kids cargo bike that showed at Bespoke last year and I wanted to try if the frame can handle adults weights and adults loads. It can, it can. It rides quite funny actually. It's basically a wheelie machine because the saddle is so at the back of the bike so you're more or less over the axle of the rear wheel so all you can do is wheelie but if you have got some load inside the box it rides fine. It's a good city bike. It almost looks like a stingray in the back. Yeah yeah yeah yeah because I thought this would be enough but it wasn't so I got a little bend here and I put in the other tube. The drivetrain was just the most basic thing we could find with 16 inch worth for trying. It's a three gear nexus with any crank that we still had. It's a little mix and since we're a cargo bike shop and I like the changing system so much it's called MIG it's possible to... that was also a prototype quick and dirty but you can click that in and I thought it would be nice to have a box that you actually can lock so you've got a little trunk on your bike. Interesting like raised bottom bracket here. Yeah that was that was the main issue because I've done one bike the first one the first project had the bottom bracket where it's for the kids bike but with the short cranks it rides really strange so we thought okay I have to put the bottom bracket higher and I wanted to keep those lines of the tubes like parallel and that's why it had to move so we could ride decent cranks. Hi I'm Paul from Abes Cycles and this is actually kind of like a rescue bike we got this frame from from a friend of us who works at a bike shop shout out Marcos and it's actually a crash frame somebody crashed it car crashed into it luckily nobody was riding it at the time and so we got it gifted and we were like okay hey are we just gonna build the regular Omnium Minimax up again since the whole rear was bent sideways like 12 degrees something like really bad totally misaligned and we're like okay since we like 20 inch bikes so much we're just gonna take this as a whole joke and we didn't have any like overview how it's gonna turn out but yeah I'm quite happy. No that's actually a very frequent question I just took grinding tape like this and you have to get rid of the paint because if you if you got the torch and the flame the paint will burn and the steel will not stick here so you need to remove the paint before and that's why it looks like there's kind of this tube inserted here right all the silver parts are new these parts we bent it and Tony my workshop friend he said like oh why we added why not just take our favorite seat stays design and make a triple triangle GT style just add all the weirdness we could think of to this frame and yeah here it is and actually one more thing maybe this frame color is usually matte and we took some some uh how's it called like shiny paint and put it over there also to prevent rust here and now it's like it really transformed the character in a way and I also added decals shout out to Omnium they sent them over for free when they learned about this project because the regular model doesn't have bottle bosses here and as you can see I had to grind it away and these are the burn marks you can still see so the logo burned off here I glued over the black one in a kind of like a yeah artsy style so you have this shadow and here this white part is missing there it burned away the stem is built by Tony once again heavily involved in this project and for some weird reason he just has this epic stuff laying around in the workshop like yeah I'm not going to use it just yeah if you want it it fits this bike sure and all the other parts are just like leftover stuff I had um yeah lying around the sander bar was on some other project these grips are actually very shitty I don't know your hands stick but somehow with the color matching everything everything looks yeah kind of cohesive in a way we're here with Adam you're from Poland yes we're I'm Adam Kowalski that's the name this is basically an old mountain bike frame it was basically cut down into tubes and rebraced with the custom geometry and the idea was you know I had the mini velo itch to scratch yeah after the velorance neutrino was published few years back and I'm a big guy so I needed something that sits tall guys because in the neutrino basically my my seat would be above the rear axle bike is quite quite a bit longer yeah yeah and so many bellows not just for short people exactly because you know you can have the small wheels fun yeah but you need to adjust the geometry the whole seat stay area is made from scratch basically this is just you know my creativity spirit coming out from me and yeah this was just a classic two tubes seat tube it was cut off and remade from old old tubes from old frames because that's what I do I just repurpose the old steel bikes because you know if the tube is not rusted away it's still good to go well tell me about the the rack area yeah so I can show you because this this is basically a quick mount for for the for the box yeah you can take it off and use it as a platform for anything else but yeah the whole platform was designed designed around this box yeah to fit it like to fall between those tubes and then you can remove this whole thing if you want to yes yes exactly because I wanted to keep the bike you know the same as it was because it was great I really liked it and but to be honest the cargo if it's empty it doesn't really make much difference the you know the bunny hops are more difficult but still manageable so tell me about these things these are kind of interesting yeah so I put this rubber band here so that when the box is full yeah you have a big pile of stuff you can have additional mounting points so you can like attach yes exactly you can I have the longer ones so we can basically extend your bungee cords are these connected to each other yes this is this is one rubber band and 3d printed bar ends because those tubes are 22.2 yes the handlebar diameter so as you can see here that the regular bar ends just just fit yeah and and those are 3d printed to have holes in them so that I can you know yeah pull the band through and and use it as an additional structure so we're here with Sammy tell me about this this Brompton Brompton looking thing okay so it's it's actually partly a Brompton that's that's what you that's what you've identified correctly this the the painted part of the frame like that says Brompton yeah it's the basically only original left part on here that's actually Brompton it was a 1994 Brompton yeah which is really really early that it's it has a serial number 7 000 which is interesting because nowadays they have over 1 million yeah yeah I I bought this this Brompton like a year or two years ago it had a crash it was like really really bent up in the front it was still rideable though so so I rode it at first for for like half a year or something then I took it apart so for the last year I didn't have a folding bike which was really sad how's it different from a from a regular Brompton yeah so so the the difference is that it's a 20 inch and disc and also you have a rear derailleur instead of right instead of a shifting hub that you usually have in Bromptons and yeah it's just a little bit more red basically yeah also like a huge skate wheel exactly this it's inline skate wheels instead of the original yeah rollers that you get from from Brompton I think you could actually mount the original Brompton rollers but I went with the cheap solution basically tell me about the fork it looks very cool and steampunky yeah so so the fork is is a biplane fork it's it's constructed in the same way that I that I constructed the rear part of the frame yeah it's only made out of sheet metal and tubes wow I think like it's it differs very very much from the original Brompton style and this was also like what I was trying to achieve a little bit because it would be boring if people looked at it and would be like oh yeah that's just a Brompton without paint or whatever right so yeah that's that's the choice for the what was the biggest challenge in the construction by far the biggest challenge of the construction was not just getting a rideable bike but a bike that's also falls correctly because there are so many parts that you have to get out of your like normal way of thinking about bikes when you when you design a folding bicycle and for example on on like on the rear frame as you can see here like this flat section yeah that's one one of the situations where I realized um after building the frame that that it won't fold up correctly because it was colliding with the chains uh with uh with the chain ring with the chain ring um so yeah I I had to grind that down and raise a little bit of sheet metal in here yeah um and yeah it's so so like even like I 3d modeled the whole thing and like even then you you get up realizing and like you realize that some parts just collide or like there are some cables that get twisted up and yeah so that's by far the the biggest challenge was just a family project for my kids and me to drive to school together yeah and we did this for much more than one year was a really really nice time now they've grown up it's big for the bike but uh yeah it was it was a big fun and uh I learned a project this frame was just a standard bike yeah and I bought it for I think 10 bucks and uh yeah all the rest and like all these uh frame stuff I welded myself yeah yeah the steering was one of the hardest part because um every time there was a problem here there was a problem there also that it's in german called Freilauf that I built this completely myself at 35 services yes a project in Moabit where people come together and work on the project yeah and yeah I built this I think about three years ago used it for two years and now I have no idea what to do with it anymore so the good thing is that you can adjust all the things you can move these two things you can move these things you can bring higher lower okay the plan was that everybody driving on the bike can can look forward because if you have other bikes the kids sit behind you they just can see your back and that's very boring for the kids yeah so here the smallest kids it's the first position everybody can can look at everything when when they were pedaling can you actually uh feel them moving the bike forward or did they help much when you're when they were pedaling yeah so they they can help yeah they don't have to you can also um alone yeah and they can rest oh okay that was also a important part of the concept that you that they can help if they want to yeah it's not a must yeah we're here with aaron from aprico bikes uh last time we we were we were talking this was uh on the verge of launching how has it gone uh yeah it's pretty exciting times right now actually because I have like two stuck in customs in Leipzig yeah so I sent two of the pre-production in advance to like check everything and one is actually for my new show bike built so I couldn't make it in time um and the others are just getting assembled right now okay and then they are like in the um how you say ship yeah in like two weeks I hope and then obviously on the seaway yeah has anything changed in the design or not really from from that one um that one is just uh those are still the aluminum wings and the production is in steel um it's also a little tight here at the moment just because it's a prototype um so we have nice shims in between so everything is nice and smooth the platform itself it holds a euro bike box like 600 400 mil and then actually you can fold it up so just pull those two triggers um it kind of stays there you can do also a loop on top here to hold them together because now in the upright position you can put two pannier bags um on on there like left and right yeah um recommended are the smaller ones like I think the one big brand has like the city ones one time and they are you have to have a little look with the tire and with the steering sometimes I even like ride it like that so one side pannier bag and like one side whatever a box or something so that works as well um and yeah that's up folded one still helps it in like you know staircases in the train in tight parking spots obviously like many places yeah so yeah so we're here with Volker uh tell me about this bike yeah basically uh we were last year the first time on this mini bike fest yeah it was the first mini bike fest anyway so uh yeah we had a lot of fun and my son wanted to have a cargo bike and found his love for 20 inch wheels yeah so we combined a cargo bike with 20 inch wheels so this is not a new concept I know but yeah this is basically the story behind yeah I did not brace everything because he did but the the history is this is I think frame number 10 or 11 something and I introduced him into the brazing stuff so I did the design and he did the notching and mitering and and also the mainframe brazing okay what's the inspiration of the of the color scheme this he can answer better but the idea behind was to have it like an british sports car but then it turned out that the green doesn't match perfectly british racing green yeah but uh we liked it anyway so yeah uh tell me a little bit about the the racks this one looks like it can be removed that one's just fixed that can be removed that is braced on and uh the the box can be dismounted with four screws yeah and that's it basically got the racks uh so there's a bike but but what about the trailer yeah the trailer was just a fun project from me and I thought it would be nice to have something weird for this exhibition basically yeah it's not very practical because it's pretty wide yeah and uh very low so uh yeah you touch the ground pretty easy but uh yeah as I said it's just a fun project what's the wheel size on the trailer 12 so we're here with uh daniel from 1007 tell me about this new bike yes this is our new unicorn 20 it's a city bike mainly and uh for people who don't have that much space and they still want to have fun and they want to carry stuff we choose 24 20 inch and 24 for some reason mainly design wise when you have a 20 inch on the back the bike the design of the frame it's tilting too much on the back so we want to bring it a little bit more elegant yeah and the options for rear derailleur which majority of customers they will use it yeah it's going to be quite limited in 20 inch yeah so that was the reason we decided to do 24 and I think together 20 and 24 they they look quite good and yeah and on a compact bike like this it's uh it's quite nice it's from central to central it's one meter yeah I think everything is one 1.4 meter uh tell me what else tell me about the rack does it fold yeah so the rack it's uh it do a lot of things it will we will have an update an option for a removable platform like our previous bikes yeah you already have everything in place but we're going to create another rack with the removable system and we make it now available with the damn good bikes okay system yeah yeah uh so we collaborate with them and we're gonna make them available in our website so we're gonna be able to choose the removable platform or the tiltable one right and um yeah cool uh so we were talking about sizing you only offer one size how does it work so we decide to do one size fits all uh from a few reasons production wise and the dealers is more easy to manage and because we have a bit of experience with one size fits all we know how the sizing and the geometry works and basically the head tube and the they are different angles yeah so when they go up okay they go four from each other okay and um there are a few other things for example on this one we don't have an offset saddle yeah but if you are very tall you can put an offset yeah and because our platform is not starting from the head tube yeah and you have an extra space here okay you can put the longer stem yeah and you don't compromise this area in this case you have the roll-off they all have a lot of cables but if a normal one you can bring these cables quite small so you you still have a lot of space the price the frame set only start at 9.99 euro and now till 7 of june we have actually an offer yeah free shipping in europe and 100 euro 100 euro credit for around the world right on shipping yeah yeah and the production already starts they're gonna be ready end of august the production the first production we already almost go over over half of the production we already pre-sold right and uh after that it will take around a month and a half to arrive to us and we start to distribute them to yeah our customers it starts with the this part here and and i create a bike around it yeah and the first bike here was just in front the wheel from this um the wheelbarrow yeah yeah yeah and it was heavy to ride yeah then i um i bought an old e-bike okay so i have the motor and yeah then i build this one and rebuild it last year i put the new engine inside and yeah um cleaned it so i have no gears um and this side is um clean and i just want to have a city bike with no not too much parts on it yes one brake and one um break in the back and yeah i love it it looks like a an old piece of like farm equipment yeah like the it's got like the nice patina and everything yeah yeah i also um put here uh rust on pedals yeah so it fits but it's um kind of um contrast between um the technique and yeah from this shiny wheel and yeah and high performance uh tire yeah and in the back there's just this um rusty nice old wheel yeah is that a coaster break or yeah yeah this is uh yeah it's kind of a strange bike it is a bike from uh from a friend of mine and it had yeah we learned to know each other with this bike initially because it was um like a twisted so it crap walked and so he came to me at my workshop and we fixed it and two years later or so he said no it was 27 inch i want it in 20 inch and i want a foldable so we just also did that and this is how what came out because we just thought it must be possible just to fold the bike in this in this case yeah yeah he's he's uh traveling by um uh ha by train very often and in germany this is a foldable bike although it's it's really really big yeah it's allowed yeah my name is sebastian and this is my la phrase bicycle that i made in a frame building it has a roll of herb it has a belt drive uh inside since the very beginning and two years after it was built by me in the frame building course i crashed it during a ride and so we had to repair the front triangle and andreas from the face i guess was so kind to actually replace the head tube and the top tube you see there's an outer sleeve here and the top tube carries an inner sleeve to be yeah a solution for that kind of repair to to avoid uh replacing top tube and down tube entirely and then last year to for the 10 years anniversary of la phrase cycles we decided to put in a 20 inch conversion fork to make it capable to carry stuff and the stuff that i like to carry the most is my vinyl records when i go for playing a dj set together with friends yeah the idea for this bike was to build like a modular design cargo bike with like the standard truss aluminum truss from like for event buildings and stuff yeah and yeah the main aspect about the bike is that you can change the the lengths and you they are also the option that you change the whole front to maybe a two wheel version as well we didn't build it yet but we have to plan for it so when you when you make it longer how do you adjust how does the steering arm adjust um yeah it's like there are two two tubes stuck in together okay and we are just um yeah we just spread it apart and bolted together in the longer version yeah so yeah just really simple yeah but it's limited to uh yeah the the exact uh length of these two parts yeah what's the what's the longest you think you could make it i don't know we didn't make it longer than this one so but yeah maybe maybe two meters don't know try to keep everything really low like the center of mass is really low and the whole profile should be just like the height of the truss and then only the steering and the seat came up yeah so this was yeah basic idea and i hear a little handle okay and and also it supports the c-tube and yeah adjustable dropouts right my name is benny um yeah that was a originally it was a long tail bike an omnion prototype but it had its flaws let's put it this way um so i decided to cut off the top of the rear part and put the short rear triangle on it so that's the background of the story um i added some bottle bosses here i added routing for a cable for a tropical seat post yes it has a split for belt use i designed the dropouts myself i got the milk so i can choose whatever setup i want to use like fixed gear with brakes without brakes um through axle a quick release whatever i can adjust accordingly which uh which wheel size is this this is the old or kind of like the yeah it's the 451 so it's not four or six so it's a little hard getting proper tires for it yeah but i can switch i i've designed it the way that i have enough clearance for big tires as well so i could put those big ones in there as well okay uh so it was a long tail before it was a long tail before yes real long wheelbase was it always a kind of a swooping yes basically everything that's red is the original bike everything that's silver is the new bike interesting uh that is all original i think omnium rated it up to 40 kilograms but yesterday i put my girlfriend in the front and we rode through the critical mass together so that's cool tell me about the chain ring that was actually the original one they had on here when i bought it from omnium so it's 56 teeth oh the the original seat stays were connected here so when i chopped them off i had two holes in here and so i tried to come up with a little design it should be a flash basically a thunder hi i'm jörg from null negative cycles and that's my bike that's a taichen beschleuniger it's a particle accelerator and it was from the it was a competition bike for the high velocity research race last year in dresden and i built this bike from three trash bicycles that's actually made out of trash and yeah i think it's pretty decent bike fork is like also the fork plates are from an old bike and i've converted them to like shorter ones 20 inch ones and added some nice brass things there and i actually like the rack it's came up also pretty nice with these press mounts and this is actually a cocktail shaker the particle accelerator and you can also after the race it's actually just made for the race yeah you can add the box there and use it as a city bike hey i'm i'm martin i'm from garage 66 and the bike is my stainless mini velo it's a it's a 16 inch brompton size wheels nine gears stainless frame half lugs tick braced braised and welded somewhere i'm sure the drivetrain that's uh 56 up front and uh 11 25 i think or no 11 11 32 with a nine speed old altegra used to have master bars like drops but i switched them around because i finally liked the more relaxed position so uh it also gave gave me some space to mount a front rack for a single side bag so it's it's it's also uh silver braised hi my name is jan i'm from this is our family cargo project yes the idea was a short wheel space a wheelbase and suitable for the most people in our family so we can adjust the seat high and the hub is just an old mountain bike front hub so they go axle through and the chain goes from the chain blade to a bosch e-bike motor from there to a gear hub from three by three and from the hub goes the chain to the rear hub and drives the bike yeah on the steering will be a hydraulic steering so the the end points are fixed by the hydraulic cylinder and that's it yeah uh at the moment it's not finished so you see it but here we got the children's seat and this is the space for a euro box in 60 by 40 for shopping whatever we need or for the dog we have a large dog so we can transport the main things we need yeah it's just to adjust the seat height so every family member is able the bike to drive can you do it through the lever yeah just that hi i'm from i have a cycling block and since one year i also sew my own cycling caps and uh so there are five different sizes from extra small to extra large and uh usually i sew on demand so if you order via my online shop you can choose the design of the fabric you can choose um which is what is printed on it yeah so i have different uh kinds of uh yeah wordings yeah so that's basically it i am yeah i'm really rooted into the bicycle scene in germany so yeah what's what's your most popular print uh it has been this one actually because but today the cats they are also quite uh yeah famous today so yeah hi my name is marcelo i'm from brazil but i live in cologne germany and this is carcara cycling goods it's the newest thing since two weeks i've been building some straps for myself with special colors and a nicer clamping mechanism so why keep the cool parts only on your bike when you can put them on your rack and you can travel with stuff and make it versatile and also look nice the braided ones are just for aesthetics just for for making nicer for you to sell to keep to keep my my dna here in the hands and the straps and i also have like this this is a cargo strap so eight millimeter uh very very strong so we can carry anything with it all the camera equipment and everything else i'm isabel and i'm here with 1400 so 1400 kilometers because it comes from bikepacking i do custom-made bags frame bags but also like small little stuffed bags that goes inside the frame bags and they are lightweight dyneema fabric so the tape seam to keep all your belongings dry but also some wallets um they also go for bikepacking and some upcycle pouches yeah 1400 was my first uh ultra bikepacking distance i've done so i started making my own frame bags and then i got a new bike i made new frame bags and this is how the whole brand evolved yeah so this one is actually nice for touring but i also used it for racing so i have usually my waterproof here so it's quickly with access on the other side i have maybe an extra bottle of water then the back is instead of a saddlebag having a back for the rear backpack so i have my sleeping stuff in here and yeah so going on adventures like this here so this is this one uh this setup is actually from my atlas mountain race and that's how it looks assembled on a bike yeah hi i'm jorrit and this is uh a custom-built omnium nano so it's uh yeah the new mini cargo from omnium i built it up the last two three weeks completely polished velocity blunts 35s with rochi hubs um pow clampers the drive chain oh yeah yeah i was struggling a bit to to find something of course so in the end i was like okay i need something short gauge and if i wanted silver i need something second hand so in the end i just started uh scrolling through the second hand website here and i ended up with this shimano 105 nine speed derailleur the shifter uh the grand comp um yeah a friction shifter you love it i know um yeah it was in the end it was also like it fits completely with the idea i had with the bike but also to make it easy and it fits with the with the silver idea i had and we have a nice richie cockpit on here um i really like this handlebar the kyota we have with omni we have a handlebar that's almost the same it just has like two degrees difference which we call the wunderbar yeah and we got the nice uh paw clampers for a second year event the venue was really nice probably my favorite thing about the whole event however is that it was just about pure bike fun but i know what you're wondering why make minivellas in the first place i asked that question to a lot of the builders at the show and that's gonna be the subject of the next video so if you're curious about their answers and what they think of the 32 inch wheel size be sure to hit subscribe and stay tuned for more minibike fest coverage