U Can't C Me

(Not that there's anything inherently wrong with it, I suppose, but Terrible One making 11-butted bars makes me feel like the folkies must have felt when Dylan went electric. I suppose it's the right thing to do, but it still feels like the end of an era.)

Sort of lost in the shuffle lately was the Sunday Model-C.
Cruisers have always been the proverbial red-headed stepchild of the BMX world—most people either go 20" or urban MTB—mostly because there's never been a real effort to produce a true street cruiser. There was the Nyquist Backtrail, I suppose, and Standard technically offered a 24" TRLS-250, although I've never seen one. Bontrager offered a pretty tough chromoly cruiser as well. And both Standard and S&M have always made race cruisers that could serve double duty. (If you want deeper cruiser history, try this from 2001.)

But the Sunday is something different. Different angles and what I assume to be a very different feel. Judging from the photos and words on the Sunday site (except this one which is obviously faked), the Model-C is intended to just be a bigger BMX brother. And with Odyssey making 24" Hazard Lites and Sunday making cruiser forks (and taller-than-most cruiser bars), there are finally legit options for the big-but-not-quite-that-big-wheel crowd.

The funny thing is, I recently sold my cruiser. I had an old S&M Widowmaker that was mostly gathering dust—so little time, so many bikes. But it wasn't just that. The geometry was just plain wrong. Switching from the 20" to the 24" meant leaning way further back for manuals and pulling up that much harder to hop. Low bars and a low bottom bracket and long chainstays made for comfortable cruising and stable sprinting, but that was about it. (I won't even get into the shafted stem and crookedly welded rear triangle.)

Long story short is, I'm pretty excited about the Model-C. It makes a lot more sense to me than something like the Deuce-Deuce for the height-unchallenged set. Now all Sunday has to do is assemble a mighty team of sky-scraping riders (Neil Harrington? Gary Ellis? Catfish?) to put them through their paces. Or I guess they could just send me one.* I may only be six feet, but I ride much, much taller.**

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* Just kidding. Unless you really want to, in which case I won't stop you.

** I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.