Unveiled at the 2000 Las Vegas Interbike trade show, the Ibis Single Malt prototype was there to elicit feedback. And feedback we got.
It was a pretty cool looking bike, we admit. But we have a feeling that the reason for its overwhelming popularity might not have been the look of bike, but how we accessorized it.
First, we went down to our local purveyor of single malts, and got ourselves a bottle of 16-year old Lagavulin. Then we sent the bottle to our good buddy Ron Andrews at King Cage and he made us a custom water bottle cage that fit the bottle of single malt just fine and dandy. The cage came back, but not the bottle.
We soon learned that this would always happen when we showed the bike with a bottle in the cage. At the show single speeders flocked to the alcohol like "pigs to mud." Probably even some non-single speeders were drawn to the alcohol.
A little bit about it.
Think of this beauty as a single speed MojoĈ. Beautiful craftsmanship, light weight, nimble, smart spec of Ibis Moron Steel tubing.
The geometry is similar to the Mojo, but with the added bonus of having adjustable bottom bracket height, depending on whether you adjust the eccentric to the top or bottom of the two positions.
We like our standard Ibis dropouts, but we weren't able to use them on the previous few dozen singles we've built. On a single speed, you need to provide riders with a way to adjust chain tension. Typically, the answer is to use horizontal dropouts so that you can slide the wheel forward or backward. But this time, we borrowed a bit of our tandem technology, and welded the frame with an eccentric bottom bracket and eccentric. This way, we adjust chain tension at the BB, not at the rear wheel or with a tensioner. And we can fit a disc mount on there without having the rotor adjustment get out of whack.
The color was shamelessly borrowed from the box that the Lagavulin resides in a beautiful smoky olive green box with gold lettering. That was the frame color/component scheme on the bike.
