NBD: Retirement Bike Completed.

I just finished this build. I'm going to retire in a few months and wanted something really different for my N+1 retirement bike.

• Carver Newsboy Frame (18")
• Carver XC fork
• Carver GXC wheels
• GRX Limited, except for brifters, which are GRX
• SDG Bel Aire saddle
• Cowchipper carbon bars
• Generic seatpost, rotors, and stem
• Race King 2.2s
• Candy 7 pedals

I had always loved Retrotec bikes going way back to the 90s. I found this similarly-styled Carver titanium frame going for cheap (NOS) on Ebay, so I decided to build a drop-bar mountain bike to fill the gap between my gravel bike and my MTB. I think the frame had been sitting in storage for years, as it is a 29er MTB, but from that strange era of early 29ers when they still hadn't quite figured out proper geometry for 29er MTBs. So it would be considered too steep and twitchy by modern MTB standards, which I figured would make it great for gravel. I had to get the shortest stem I could find with a zero seatback post so that it wouldn't be too stretched out with drop bars.

Along the way, I managed to damage a very rare GRX Limited brifter during the bleed process (don't do that!) so I replaced them with non-Limited. It was an expensive mistake. I am hoping the repair the beautiful Limited brifters at some point. Also, I ordered countless post-flat mount adaptors for the brakes before finally finding something that worked.

Without pedals and with Race King 2.2s, it comes in at about 21lbs.