Core77

"We re-thought everything two-wheeled, with simplicity in mind," says Joey Ruiter of jruiter + studio, a Michigan-based design firm. "This is as stripped as you can get."

Ruiter's referring to their as-yet-unnammed inner city bike prototype, conceived of as a Spartan two-wheeler designed specifically for short-range urban travel and manufactured with the absolute bare minimum amount of materials.

Our project, "Simplicity in inner city bicycling," was at first glance a fun aesthetic opportunity in new trends, color, and materials. Our target lived / worked in an inner city environment with minimal space. Bicycling at this level can be more about fashion and culture than speed and performance.

The project ended up rethinking what a "frame" meant, getting ride of basic key components, and creating a new type of compact bicycling. [We were] inspired first by the "hobby horse" for it's simplicity and secondly by the cafe racer scene. Each is an exercise in stripping something down to its core.

The final design came down to a frame system and a really difficult rear hub. Everything else is rider preference.

Before all of the bike fanatics get all fired up, we know this bike doesn't solve everyone's personal transportation dreams. Performance-wise, the bike is on the slow side, quirky, and fatiguing over longer distances. Consider it a cafe racer with the performance of a beach cruiser. The positives are easy quick turns, huge power to the rear wheel to go over curbs and other city scape structures, and great start / stopping / sitting situations.

The bike components can vary but overall it would be made up of 29" rims, huge big apple tires, a rear hub (planetary internal freewheeling, unicycle through axle) and a single front disc brake.