I Built a Bike From Every Weird Product

Video: Seth // Edit: Curtis // Words: Daniel

Seth is standing next to a 43-pound bicycle covered in every reviewable product he could physically bolt to it, explaining why certain things didn’t make the cut. Some of it got thrown away. Some got lost. Some got given to friends. Some of it went onto bikes he restored. What you’re looking at, in other words, isn’t necessarily all of the greatest products. It’s what he could still find.

That’s one of the more honest product reviews anyone in this industry could give, and it takes years to get to it.

When I was at Pinkbike, we had a column called ‘Check Out’, which was exactly what it sounds like: a look at whatever had crossed our desks in the last few weeks that may not make it into a full-on review. Valve stems and axles and hydration packs. Magnetic flat repair solutions. Fiber-enhanced sealant. Gloves, shoes, packs, books, frame protection. I wrote a “10 Products I Loved in 2020” piece. Those were products that I didn’t think I would ever get rid of; however, now in 2026, the number of products on that list that I still own is not ten. It’s six. And of those six, only one of them, the 7Mesh jersey, is even in regular rotation. The Honda Ridgeline got passed on to someone else. The others have been replaced with something newer, like the latest version of Specialized’s Ambush, which they changed the fit on and, in my opinion, made worse. Helmet fit is about as personal as it gets, and I know plenty of people who get along fine with the new one, but the old shape worked on my head, and this one doesn’t.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about gear and product testing, and I say this as someone who did a lot of it and would do it again: the review is not the ultimate test. The review is a snapshot of a first impression, written by someone who has had the product for what’s usually a limited amount of time, in limited conditions, and who is, structurally, more excited about it than they will ever be again. That’s not dishonesty, and it’s not a poor reflection on whoever is reviewing the product. Most everybody involved is doing their best to juggle a limited time on a product with a vast experience and knowledge of different products, and this usually paints a very accurate picture. It’s just that the actual test, the one that matters, takes eighteen months to a few years and produces little to no content whatsoever.

The real result in my mind is the reviewer’s gear closet. It’s a bin in the garage. It’s the pile I sorted through when I moved, holding each object for a second and going “huh.” And then either putting it in a box to go to donations, or a box to hold onto. Nobody reads that. It’s the verdict with the most weight behind it.

Those two piles or boxes are the part I find clarifying. There’s the stuff I couldn’t give away. Offered it to friends, offered it to the shop, put it on the free table at a group ride, and it just sat there. Then there’s the stuff I wouldn’t dare give away even though I maybe haven’t really used it all that much, or at all. Everything in between is noise. Those two piles are the actual review, and neither one of them got written at the time.

Watch what Seth grabs when he’s loading up the bag on the luggage rack. Not the $400 stem. Not the $500 bamboo bars. He reaches for a retractable kid’s tow strap and says, more or less in passing, that it’s one of his favorite products and gets heavy use.

A tow strap. The least photogenic object in the entire episode. No app, no battery, no proprietary interface, roughly the technological sophistication of a shoelace. It survived because it’s useful, enoughso to keep in three places at once, and it never asked anything of him.

That’s the pattern, and once you see it you can’t stop seeing it. The stuff that lasts is boring. It’s a tow strap for kids, a multi-tool, a pair of shorts that fit right, one specific pump. What pump do I get the most use out of? It’s the 12-year-old Specialized Air Tool Comp that I’ve replaced the head on multiple times using parts from brand new pumps. What multi-tool? The Topeak Alien. And as far as bikes go, I have put more miles in the past six years on a Revel Rascal and Specialized Epic Evo than 12 other bikes combined. (I would still give both of those bikes, despite their age, great reviews.) I will say that at this point I’ve been riding newer bikes over the last year, but I still can’t bring myself to part with either of them.

The nice thing about getting out of the churn of day-to-day product testing is that I ride a bike I actually like now. For a long stretch there, my setup was whatever showed up. Not bad gear, mostly good gear, but it turned over every few months whether or not anything was wrong with the thing it replaced. There’s a version of gear testing that quietly trains you out of ever being satisfied, because satisfaction is the end of the content. These days almost everything on my bike is there because I chose it twice, once when I got it and again every time I didn’t replace it. That’s a different relationship with equipment than I had for most of a decade, and I’d take it over a bin full of first impressions every single day.