IT WAS AN OPPORTUNITY TO INNOVATE.

The Slim Chance project combined Chris’ background in designing and building one-off road bikes with everything he and his crew learned building world-class mountain bikes. “We were leaders in the mountain bike market,” Chris said. “I was very excited to get back into the road market. I was excited to use all that expertise from the years before (building road bikes).” And the Slim Chance they released in 1991 was so simple, so understated, that a cyclist could be forgiven for walking right past. It didn’t have lugs. It didn’t have fancy cutouts.

The beauty of the Slim wasn’t in the number of hours spent filing brass or cleaning up the frame. The Slim Chance was TIG welded.

Though its joints were as lovely as any other high-end frame, that wasn’t the point. Its beauty was in the way it rode and handled. “We knew we had a good argument,” for ditching lugs, Chris explained. “The argument for doing TIG welding was that we only used 30 grams of steel to join tubes,” Chris continued. “We were saving a lot of weight.” That doesn’t mean it was weak.

The design had already been proven on thousands of miles of singletrack across the United States and around the world. “We were making something we completely believed in, as far as durability and performance were concerned,” Chris said. “We used a road downtube in our mountain bikes for years and years.” But Chris did much more than to simply drop the lugs. “I had a lot of experience designing how I wanted the bike to feel,” Chris said. “I invested a lot in how I dial in the ride quality and performance.” This meant focusing just on what matters: the ride.

“I like to build the chassis —the bottom bracket, downtube, chainstays — for stability, predictability and feedback of what the wheels are doing and energy transfer into what you’re doing,”

“Other tubes build in some compliance or rigidity.” What Chris designed was a bike that inspires confidence, channels the riders’ efforts into the climbs and allows them to descend faster and to push deeper into the corners. “One of its main features is that you can trust it,” Chris continued. “We call it telepathic handling. You don’t want the rider to think about it. You have a thought and the bike just does it.” And that’s exactly what the 2016 Slim Chance does. “It’s a medium-to-short wheelbase length and relatively quick handling but also pretty comfortable,” Chris said. It’s a modern version of the original.

“Part of what made Fat City and Slim Chance great back in the day was down to things like handling and comfort and a racy-feeling bike,” Alex Palmer said. “And part of going through this Slim Chance design process to get to the new one — it made us realize we don’t need to copy what everyone else is doing, and do it like a super-stiff modern steel frame. We still want to have those elements of the original, like a 36mm head tube, and that’s what made it great in the first place.”

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