Our friends Pete, Johnnie, and Mick got an early start to summer adventure with #MegaTour17, a three week bike tour/Megabus road trip they created. Their journey will take them from the Lone Star State to the Big Apple with a few pit stops in-between to visit with friends and family and explore new cities.  Along the way they'll be putting some of our gear to the test.  The first leg of their trip started in Austin. Johnnie and Mick flew in and scooped up Pete, who recently relocated to the Texas capital. After a couple days of exploring (and being treated to a five hour lightning show), it was time to break out of the Austin city limits and head...

There are three things that will lure me out of bed before dawn on a Sunday morning: the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, and a first ride on a new bike.  This year I’ll be getting all three out of the way on consecutive Sundays.  For the first ride on the new-to-me Colnago Tecnos, (you can catch up on its journey here, here, and here) I took it out for an early morning spin on what's become my go-to loop.  With the specialness of New Bike Day, I came to a new appreciation of how fortunate I am to have a perfect 22 mile ride that starts out the front door of swrve HQ.  Here’s how it shakes down.  It starts...

Hey there swrve family, Before we confront the reality of being back to the grindstone, we wanted to take a moment and share some of the highlights from our trip to Iceland. In a word, the experience was incredible. In a few more more words, we can’t recommend adding Iceland to your bucket list of travel destinations strongly enough. We’ve dreamed of visiting for years and we can’t wait to go back for a return visit. The scenery is so stunning and magnificent that you don’t realize how little words and pictures do it justice. Then you find yourself standing on a black sand beach in Sólheimasandur, in the shadow of a DC-3 that was left to decompose after it...

There is a profound difference between assembling a bike and building a bike. It is a level of nuance and perfection that goes completely unnoticed by the untrained eye but is deeply appreciated by those who know. To handle the rebirth of his new Colnago (parts 1 and 2 are here and here), Matt turned to Mike Kalenda of Golden Saddle Cyclery, located just across the Los Angeles River from swrve’s World Headquarters. If you ride a bike and have an Instagram account, there’s a good chance Golden Saddle Cyclery has appeared on your radar at one time or another. In only a few short years, Kyle and the gang have established GSC as a vital hub for the Los...

(See part one here.) The bicycle wheel and the pizza are two of the greatest round things ever invented. To break them down into simple terms, they both start with common ingredients and how they end up all depends on the wheelbuilder or chef.   After mulling enough wheel options to fill an Excel spreadsheet, Matt decided to stick to the familiar and try the new, while entering a deeper realm of bike geekery. “I enjoy comparative research, apparently,” says Matt. “I generally start with products (or companies) I’ve heard good things about, something I think looks really good, or someone that’s maybe pushing a new direction while leaning towards smaller companies. In the end, I try to strike the best...

Matt has a new bike project and it is going to be awesome. In an age when road bikes are all about light weight carbon fiber frames with thru-axles and hydraulic disc brakes, Matt decided to kick it old-school with a vintage steel Colnago Tecnos frameset manufactured in the mid-to-late 90s. (If you need to pause for a moment to come to terms with the fact that something from the 1990s is now considered vintage, take all the time you need. We went through the grieving process ourselves. The Pixies really helped.) We cornered Matt for some details about why he went for the Tencos, one of the rarer frames in Colnago’s storied history. Here’s what he had to say:“I think bike...

Check out the September 2016 issue of Popular Mechanics and see our shorts in their "The Life" section.  

what do you think? take it for a test drive and let us know! we've made a few improvements: finally! mobile friendly design! better navigation bigger & better photos more legible text new! filter products by season on the collections page we hope you like it!

Swrve sponsored rider Ben Weaver is back with a new post recapping his recent adventure into the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota. Ben is an incredibly gifted singer/songwriter who has put his talents to use by raising awareness for water issues around the country via his Salsa Cycles touring bikes. Ben’s essay is below in its entirety. It’s a great read. I loaded my banjo, guitar and other supplies onto my bike. The roads weren’t plowed yet. Snow was falling fast, heavy and wet. Nearly five inches had already accumulated. There was no sign of it letting up. My destination was Snowbank Lake, an entry point to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota, approximately 25 miles to the...