Tunk Times #4

Hiker sends their greetings from the underworld. But fear not, we are very much alive. After a moment of clarity and legal consideration, followed by a few weeks worth of wordplay and a bouquet of mixed feelings, we are now happily and proudly announcing our new brand name: TUNK. To make Real World Bicycles is still our aim and ambition and we will strive to overcome any obstacles! Tunk will continue on this rugged path we have chosen.

We won’t maybe go into the details and various sidetracks of the naming process here except to open the meaning of Tunk. Tunkata, “to tunk”, is a Finnish verb, meaning the action(s) you need to do when you and your vehicle, for example a bicycle, are challenged due to the difficult terrain you encounter. Like deep snow, mud, roots, uphill, rocks, fallen trees and so on. You get off your bike and tunk your way ahead by any means necessary. The history of tunking in Finland probably goes back millenia, when sleds and pulks were getting stuck in some tricky patch of swamp or soft snow. 

We are not saying it’s the most fun type of biking you should look for, but it is often the reality for those who venture off the main roads and look for the alternatives in life. The road to paradise is not usually paved smooth and the easiest roads lead you to the busiest places and to find something new you need to blaze a trail. And so on. To embrace the difficulty is the only option.

To continue on this theme, our new prototype front forks had some more delays for the n-th time, but should be ready for testing any day now. Reynolds has bent some ‘631’ fork blades to our specs and heat treated them, making them into ‘853’ fork blades and they have been sent to Fort, where they were made into some more fork samples out of them for the stress & safety testing. After which we will possibly have a frameset that complies with both letter and spirit of the law if all goes well.

We still need to decide on the final colours of the frames and design new graphics for the new name. Otherwise most things are set for production, and the framesets should be available in early summer. But at this point we are not anymore surprised if there are a few more bends in the road.

As soon as production is really underway and all obstacles are cleared, we will open an official preorder system. But we can already make an unofficial invitation: if you are serious about pre-ordering and pre-paying a frameset or complete bicycle you can email us at hello@tunkbicycles.com Test rides can be arranged as we have one of each size of the frames built up. We could do some special deals at this point to get some much needed funds! 

Especially if you are interested in a complete bicycle with all the bells and whistles like custom stems and racks, lovingly installed fenders, internal dynamo routings etc, it would be wise to announce yourself in good time, as when the framesets come in we will be super busy and it will be hard to make time for assembling bikes.  

Until next time

Tunk crew