Sometimes it’s easy to find your next bike that will take your further, faster, and climb higher effortlessly, but as we shopped around over the course of 3 years (we’re overly analytical) we just weren’t finding what we wanted. We wanted our travel bike to be our favorite bike AND our fast bike. We wanted to ride in tire eating mud AND fast tarmac. We wanted our bike to fit us perfectly AND accommodate our growing family. We looked at our options and we just weren’t satisfied, so we built our bike from scratch. We loved it so much, we built this company to offer the same experience to others. 

adventure cycling MT Source: Adventure Cycling, 2010. Our honeymoon through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast on our old tandem.

We’d had our previous tandem for 10 years. A steel ‘97 Trek T100 that had been rebuilt several times over the past decade. We raced, toured, and trained on that tandem long enough to be relatively satisfied with its performance. However, we dreamed of a tandem that was lighter, coupled for travel, accepting of wider tires and functionally diverse enough for our growing family. When we tallied up our wish list, we just weren’t satisfied with stock options that suited all of our needs, and a fully-custom tandem seemed out of our budget.

 

 With a mechanical engineering degree from MIT and years of building bikes as a passionate hobbyist, David set out to build our dream tandem. He developed CAD drawings and renderings and found a reliable titanium frame manufacturer to produce the frame. We sourced each part on the bike to reflect our goals and maximize the value. The result was our dream bike, built specifically for our family, our planned adventures, and our diverse set of requirements.

 

After a summer of riding, we noticed there was a considerable amount of interest around our new tandem. We felt that offering our experience to others would be worthwhile, so we created Granite Tandem Design (now Cycles Chinook).

We’re a small, custom titanium tandem designer and retailer located in Epping, New Hampshire. We build tandems tailored to riders’ individual goals, aiming to optimize the bike’s performance for the adventures they dream about, while maximizing the value. We strive to make each tandem elegant, functional, and fun.

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To learn more about Chinook, visit our “about” page or follow us on Facebook. If you’re interested in learning more about building YOUR dream bike, contact us.