Forty years of Marin. Ten years of Misspent Summers. One very, very over-engineered downhill bike.
Marin Bikes turns 40 this year. Four decades since a small crew in Marin County, California, the place modern mountain biking was born - started building bikes for the people who pointed them down hills for fun. We've marked the milestone in a few different ways already, but this one might be our favourite.
Meet the 10 x 40 Quake: a one-off custom downhill bike, hand-finished with cuttings taken from every book Misspent Summers has published in their 10 years of documenting the sport.
A friendship printed on paper
Long before this bike existed, there was a leap of faith. In 2016, a small print outfit called Misspent Summers told us they wanted to publish a yearbook for the downhill World Cup season. Proper paper. Proper photography. Proper writing. The kind of book that actually deserves a spot on the shelf.
It was the sort of idea you either back early or watch someone else back later. We backed it early - Marin became the very first brand to take an advert in what would become Hurly Burly, the book that launched the whole Misspent Summers project.
Ten years and 30+ books later, they're still printing. We're still riding. And somewhere along the way, "the brand that helped get the first book over the line" turned into a proper, decade-long friendship.
So when their tenth anniversary lined up with our fortieth, it felt like we owed each other something a bit special.
How do you celebrate ten years of print? Cut it up and stick it to a bike.
We sent Misspent Summers a Quake frame and asked them to do something they'd want to do.
Their answer was, frankly, slightly unhinged — and we mean that as a compliment.
Misspent Summers' Jon Gregory and Flat White Paintworks' John Parkin (a longtime contributor to their projects) sat down with the roughly 10,000 pages MS has published over the last decade and started cutting. Words. Patterns. Photos. Anything that told a story. Then they laid the cuttings onto the Quake's tubes like the world's most stubborn 3D jigsaw puzzle, taping each piece in place as they went.
The cutting and arranging session started at 8am and finished at midnight. One day. Sixteen hours. No sleep, no take-backs.
Then it got even more involved.
100 hours, 10 layers of clear coat, and one very patient painter
Once the frame had its papier-mâché outfit, Parkin took it back to his paint studio and got to work on the part that turns "cool art project" into "actual rideable bike."
He carefully deconstructed the cuttings, sealing each individual piece of paper so it wouldn't soak up the clear coat later. Then he stuck them all back down, every last one using an adhesive strong enough to hold but gentle enough not to destroy the paper. Everything had to sit perfectly flush.
Then came the clear coat. Ten layers of it. Each one sanded back and polished before the next went on.
By Parkin's own count, the whole job, from white base coat to final polish, took 100 hours.
The result
A Quake that doesn't look like any other Quake, or any other bike, really. Not a wrap. Not a typical custom paint job. Something a bit weird, in the best possible way.
Up close, you can pick out fragments of the last decade of mountain biking history: a corner of a World Cup photo here, a snippet of writing there, a pattern from a zine cover. Step back, and it all comes together as one piece.
We think it's beautiful. We hope you do too.
Why "10 x 40"?
Ten years of Misspent Summers. Forty years of Marin Bikes. Two companies who've been quietly getting along for a decade, both still trying to do the same thing we set out to do at the start: make stuff that makes people want to go ride.
Here's to the next 10. And the next 40.
Huge thanks to Jon Gregory, John Parkin, and the whole Misspent Summers crew. Pick up their books at misspentsummers.com.
