Tunk Times #9 September 2025

Hello and greetings from our actual, physical, permanent-for-now office! This is still being written on the couch though as we don’t have much furniture yet. We will try and have an opening party one day, but for now there is no time to arrange that.

Again everything is running late, now mostly due to us being very busy trying to prepare for the Bespoked exhibition in Dresden in a few weeks. Though it is mostly a custom-handmade bike show, we got permission to exhibit as we do our own prototyping along with handmade components. We asked twice whether it’s really ok for us to go, and we are now convinced enough. 

Of all things that are late, Aki did manage to finish the “How to load up a Tunk Hike-Use article” and it is now up on the blog at tunkbicycles.com/blog. 

Next Fort is sending us two fully painted final framesets, so we can show the production colours and then build them into show bikes for Bespoked. 

The production run is delayed once again due to a problem with fork material, (pre-orderers have already been informed) and we now expect delivery of the frames in late October. For anyone wanting to make sure they get their size of Hike-Use frameset, but missed the preorder, we can take unofficial reservations via email. 

Aleksi is making the stems and front racks for the show bikes, which will also function as new prototypes for the production models. We already got two handlebar bags made by Tim-Tas-Rek to our specifications, and are trying to get a color matched framebag+handlebar bag set for the show as well.

Getting close to finally selling the product, in small details it is once again seen how the well established bicycle manufacturing in Taiwan probably makes stuff easier for brands. We need to source our own fork protectors, our own carton boxes, order the decals and paint powders separately et cetera. We are guessing the factory or the agent-in-between usually sorts all this small stuff out for the manufacturers, but this is only guessing of course. Maybe it’s just as many puzzle pieces for everyone.

We are slowly stocking up on small must-have items like under-bb-cable-guides and seat-clamp bolts while also getting some rims, headsets, cable stops, canti hangers and so on, to make it a bit easier for the customer to find these. It is still a bit open how large of a selection of components we can offer, our amount of cash being very limited at this point.

Until next time

Tunk Crew