Tunk Times #8
August 2025
It looks like we will soon have an actual physical location for our office, workshop and showroom in north-central Helsinki. This feels like a major step forward again in making Tunk a “real company” and not just our own weird and long bicycle design project.
All the articles we promised in the last edition of the Times are still unfinished, as more random stuff to do pops up every day. A press release, ‘How to load up a Hike-Use’, ‘Choosing parts for your H-U’, ‘Front fork design process’, etc are in the works.
Aki has been riding an unpainted production spec frame & fork for a few days now, and everything fits correctly and the slightly modified tubing spec works like intended.
In the size 59, compared to the prototypes, the top tube is 5mm shorter, 0,1mm thicker in the middle with a shorter “belly” section, chainstays are 0,2mm thicker, and the head tube is 0,1mm thicker. And the front fork is a few mm larger in diameter in its lower half than on the prototype.
All this makes the frameset a tiny bit stiffer (and about 150 grams heavier), and whereas the prototype was very flexy, bordering on too flexy, the new one seems a bit more “normal”. So the frame is a bit less extreme, and riders weighing more than the 63 kilograms of said test pilot will probably feel more at home on it, while still maintaining a lively feel. Also all the larger sizes have been fed a little extra steel, but smaller than the 59 remain largely as they were before.
We are preparing now to receive the actual framesets, which should be done in the next few weeks, though we do not have the final word from Fort yet. For this, we ordered a bunch of shipping boxes and 90 pieces of Shimano BB-shell cable guides and we still need to get dummy axles, seat clamp bolts, front canti hangers and such miscellaneous little things.
The preorder is still open for a week, after which we will start contacting people to finalize their orders and hopefully soon after start to ship out the frames! Locals can also start looking forward to the opening party of the Tunk headquarters!
Until next time
Tunk crew
