Tunk Times #13

January 2026

New year, same Tunk business. We are having some extremely cold and beautiful weather here: soft snowy roads and clear skies for a few weeks now. 

Along with the temperatures, business has cooled down as well and with the office now mostly built up and all the preorders and other orders sorted, we have some time to work on the basis again, that is renewing the website, finishing up articles, taking pictures, editing videos and so on. And building up our personal production frames into bikes! We are still all on the prototypes.

We have been looking into components to sell in the webshop and to kit out the test bikes and possible custom and semi-custom complete bikes. Our goal is to have a tightly packed catalogue of interesting quality parts to go with Tunk frames, not to try and compete in the general online bicycle retail. Many good products are already easily available and we don’t consider it necessary to offer those.

It would be especially interesting and pleasing to offer European made components, as there are lots of both traditional and new interesting companies here that we feel are not getting the attention they deserve.

Our dream is to stock Nitto and Honjo from Japan, as they are the ‘gold standard’ in their respective categories, but ordering from there seems to be more complicated. We are actively looking into ways to get them. 

We will be stocking SON dynamos and lights, and once we get our hands on some rims also hand-built wheelsets around said hubs. The options for dynamo equipped, rim-brake wheelsets seem to be very limited and it would be nice to offer those. 

Some Middleburn and TA Carmina cranks are already on their way here and we will be evaluating them to see if we should start offering either or both to customers. Both are available with the neat 94bcd spider which allows 44-29 front chainrings, great for touring.

We would be also happy to hear your comments and suggestions for parts and accessories to stock! Most things might not be realistic or possible to get but you never know.

Oh, and we had a small new year’s party at the office which now feels all warmed up and cozier than ever. We still have quite a lot of beer left over, so in case you want to drop by we’ll be happy to pour you one!

ps. The “Hike-Use front fork design process” article is finally done and has just been added to the blog!

Until next time

Tunk Crew