Rodriguez Bicycles
Builder Profile

Why buy a bike, when you can buy a whole bike shop?

"Buy a shop? Me?", you ask. Yes, you. That's the best advice that you can get when shopping for a bicycle. What it means is the difference between shops is greater than the difference in bike brands. So, what you are actually buying when you buy a bicycle is a relationship with that bike shop.

At a good shop, your bike fit, will receive lots of attention, and good advice from the staff who will listen to your concerns. You'll find educational seminars, informative materials, and long term, experienced staff members in every department.

These are just a few of the things that you'll find here at R+E Cycles. When you buy from us, you're buying the whole shop.

Who are our customers?

We love our customers and they love their Rodriguez Travel Bikes! We have road racers, die hard tandem riders, Triathletes, commuters, and mountain bike addicts. Some of us ride hard and set records, others of us ride for fun. But we are all enthusiastic about cycling and helping others to enjoy the sport as much as we do. Oh yeah, we do drink a lot of coffee in Seattlem(in fact we built a coffee shop right inside our store), but the rain stuff you've heard about is greatly exaggerated.

The 2006 staff with a triple that converts to a tandem using S&S couplings

What is our experience with S&S couplings?

Our history of building bicycle and tandem frames dates back to the early 1970's. S&S couplings came to our attention in the mid 1990's when world wide bicycle traveler/writer/journalist Willie Weir asked us to build an S&S coupled bike for a bicycle adventure in the Balkans. This led to a fantastic relationship with Willie, and travel bikes in general. When Willie married Kat, they had us build for them the world's first convertible single/tandem travel bike (the Rodriguez 8-ball) for their trip to Cuba. The Rodriguez 8-ball uses eight S&S couplings to make a totally unique travel bike. Since that first 8-ball, we've sold several more that have traveled all over the world.

As for Willie's original bike? It's been all over the world now. India, Southeast Asia, Turkey, United States...you name it an Willie's probably been there. In 2003, Willie and I sat down to design a bike that we could produce at a more reasonable price than a custom bike, and we came up with a model we call the Ultimate Travel Bike (UTB), or the Willie Weir Adventure. This bike has made Ultimate travelers out of all sorts of ordinary people!

For 2007, we are introducing a new line of light weight, sport travel bikes like the orange one pictured at the top of this page. This is the new Rodriguez Houdini line.

Here's a few letters from some of the folks with Rodriguez 8-balls and Rodriguez Travel bikes: