Indeed barely a day after the demise of The Phoenix and its corpse still warm where its been hung up in the garage, on my lunch break today I somewhat $keptically went online with no clear purpose other than t0 see what I could see in terms of potential new singlespeeders out there… and hopefully not come away to sticker shocked. I looked at various manufacturers: Windsor, Surly, Motobecane, Soma… everything looked great but conversely had prices far greater than I wanted to spend. See, I’m just not interested in spending $600-$800 to replace a bike that I spent a couple Saturdays and about $300 bringing back from the brink.

 

Then I rolled on in to bikesdirect.com and found this classic baby:

 

mercier.jpg

 

Beyond it nicely possessing a very similar geometry to The Phoenix, there were certain seemingly inconsequential old-school aspects of the frame had me practically gleeful — mainly the fact that it was conveniently drilled for the type of brakes The Phoenix sported, and that its frame is steel instead of aluminum (the latter being less forgiving of the bumps and thumps ones bound to encounter on the road). By far the biggest selling point was that it was available for well less than half of its MSRP. And bonus: free shipping.

 

But we’ll see how long it takes to get to me because there’s a bit of a discrepancy as to whether Bikesdirect has this one in stock or if it’ll be unavailable until March. If that resolves to be the sooner rather than the later then I’m ordering me up one o’deez right quick like.

UPDATE (01.23): It’s in stock and shipping via UPS today!