HOT BUNS Cyclocross Frameset

Price: $885 $785 clearance price
Availability: In stock, limited sizes.

Click to make huge.Also available as a complete bike.

At the end of 2010, when we decided to offer a cyclocross bike, we were dead to rights certain it would be either aluminum or scandium, or maybe titanium if we could find an outrageous deal. Anything but carbon fiber. We know that carbon fiber offers a ton of advantages over metallic materials, including lighter weight, noticeable chatter absorption and increased stiffness. But questions of durability lingered. Our customers are principally racers who are not in the habit of babying their equipment. Slapping a "handle with care" sticker on a piece of racing equipment about to be subject to 45-60 minutes of eye-bleeding torture isn't really in our wheelhouse.

What is in our wheelhouse is the Wheelhouse. We certainly didn't mean to, but we and our customers ended up crashing to daylights out of Wheelhouse frames all season long. Skin, helmets, collarbones, derailleur hangers, knuckles and even an acetabulum were all sacrificed in order to validate the durability of the Wheelhouse, and the frames endured, proving themselves worthy of anything frenetic racers deep in the throes of hypoxia could throw at them. If we could just find a carbon cyclocross frame as durable as our road frame, we might just have the ideal cross bike. 

We could, and we did. The HOT BUNS is made by the same supplier as our beefy and beloved Wheelhouse, and shares many of the same characteristics. Stout stays, flagrantly overbuilt head tube junctions, a reinforced bottom bracket, tapered 1.5" steerer tube and fork legs that make Herschel Walker's look kinda spindly all conspire for stiffness, precise tracking, power transfer and, yes, durability. This bike is no delicate flower. Frame weight is around 1150g in the medium size (plus or minus a bit with different frame sizes) and the fork is 480g with an uncut steerer.

What good would a durable bike be if it wasn't a rock star to ride?  It would just be agony that lasted too long.  No such, here.  The HOT BUNS has made fans and won races since the second we took it out of the oven.  It's a purpose-designed race setup, for sure.  Short (425mm) chainstays, deep BB drop, shortish wheelbase, steepish seat tube and slackish front end (-ish apparently being my current descriptor for things portraying but not necessarily epitomizing a trait) give it whip smart handling at speeds low and high, while cornering so surely that even I have a hard time screwing up off cambers on it.  Fork chatter?  HAH!  If you've got the legs for the hole shot prime, the HOT BUNS will take you right there, and keep you in the game all the way to the finish line.  Since you're allowed to in races, and you'll want to in training and on those long adventure rides you seem to wind up doing on cross bikes, it's got mounts for two water bottles.  Guides for full housing from top tube stop to rear derailleur help keep your rear shifts crisp and clean all season long.   

The HOT BUNS Frameset Includes:

• Full carbon fiber (Toray T-700) monocoque frame, equipped for cantilever brakes
• BB30
  
• Full carbon fiber fork: Carbon fiber blades, crown and steerer, tapered 1 1/8" to 1 1/2". 
• Integrated headset
• Compression plug (please stop pounding star nuts into carbon steerers)
• Seatpost clamp with integrated brake cable hanger 
• Front cable hanger
• Headset spacers: 2 @ 10mm and 2 @ 5mm

Sizes Available:

• 1 (50)Geometry chart: Click to enlarge.
• 2 (52)
• 3 (54)
• 4 (56)
• 5 (58)

See Geometry chart for full geometry including Stack and Reach. Ask us if you have questions about sizing.

Oh, the name? Read why we call it the HOT BUNS.