I Like Orange

Orange is my favorite color.  I have orange tee-shirts, socks, baseball and cycling caps, dog (well she's kinda orange, ginger she might be called), and of course an orange bike.

I've had other orange bikes.  My first foray into the orange vibe was with a 2007 Orbea Orca:

I had been riding a 2003 Fuji Team.  It was a nice bike, Ultegra equipped aluminum frame with a CF fork.  However, the urge to upgrade into the orange overwhelmed me early on in 2007 and I ordered the orange Orca frame set you see above.  It was a complete frame redesign for the Orca and it came with a bold new color scheme.

The frame set arrived in mid-February 2007 and at first I was excited.  The frame was plenty stiff and super light.  I built it up the bike with 2003 Campy Record that I stripped from a LeMond Tete de Course.  The ride was nice but something wasn't quite right.

I thought about my situation for a while and it finally hit me that, not only was the ride a little dead to me, but the bike also just wasn't orange enough.  I mean, think of orange and what do you come up with?  I think of Creamsicles (mmmm!), my dog Squid (she's such a sweet old girl), and who could forget Molteni (and Eddy Merckx):

Now that's orange!

I now had to have an orange bike and it had to be made out of steel!!!  At this very moment in time, the stars aligned and Bicycling Magazine ran a profile piece on Dario Pegoretti.  That was all it took.  I had to have a Pegoretti made orange steel frame.

I drove 3 hours and got sized by Kyle at Cycles by Kyle.  My wife and I took the Imron paint samples outside and studied the orange samples carefully and settled on just the right shade of orange.  Under the advice from Kyle, I left the paint scheme and decal placement up to Dario.  The frame was ordered on 4/28/2007.

I did not know at that time that Dario had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing chemo-therapy.  Production slowed to a crawl ... tick, tick, tick ... My frame finally arrived 4/2/2008; almost 1 year after the order was placed:

At

At first I was disappointed with the paint job.  I think I was expecting a wild Pegoretti paint job.  The more I thought on it the better I liked the paint scheme and decal selection and placement.  It was perfect!  Now to build it up with a proper Italian gruppo.  I used the 2003 Campy Record group from the Orca and sold that frame set on eBay.

I now have a styling orange bike that rides like a dream and looks even better!