Build Gallery: Mark's Artsy, All-Silver Prospector

Some customers come to us with a build in mind for a specific trip; others come to us looking for the proverbial quiver-killer, even if they end up with more than one of our bikes. Some customers come to us with a clear aesthetic vision, and that was the case for Mark. A recent transplant to the Boise area, Mark is a working artist with a living sense of color and texture, and one single commandment for his build that could prove tricky: no black. To the best extent we could, we would keep parts silver on his midnight blue Prospector.

Modern bikes, both road and mountain, have long been defined by predominantly black hardware, for handlebars, stems, rims, and outside of some splashier fonts and decals (generally on anodized black parts) or boutique parts, doing an all-silver build can present certain challenges which only in very recent years has opened up. This can be especially true if you need those parts to meet standards for loaded mountain riding, which a shiny aluminum trekking bar certainly does not. While this certainly wasn’t the case in previous decades, it’s still a relative rarity and can create creative challenges when sourcing components.

We dressed this build in silver Shimano 9120 XTR brakes in addition to silver accents from White Industries, silver hubs from Rohloff and SON, and polished USA made Velocity Dually rims. Tanwall tires complete the classic aesthetic on this build.

It was also good timing because we had just gotten a few of PNW’s first (and at the time, limited edition) silver Loam dropper posts and this was the perfect project for one of them. If you have ever tried matching different black clothes as a disgruntled teen, then you have a sense of what it can be like to match seemingly similar tones, like silver. Polished, or anodized? Is the silverish but champagne-tinted stanchion of the dropper silver enough? How will three different polished parts, each with varying degrees of mirrorlike perfection, look on the same bike? Will it make the rougher textured finish of anodized parts seem out of place? In this case, a little difference goes a long way to emphasizing an organic imperfection which to my mind exceeds overly-matched ‘perfection’ in appeal.

Mark ended up over the moon about a build that met his own aesthetic sensibility and which won’t soon be outdone by late summer nights out on the town in style or tastefully covered in dust from the many trails that surround Boise.

Mark's Build Spec'd Out