This bike is different in many ways from our other Bullitts. It is a Bullitt created out of frustration. Despite having at least 9 (yes, nine: neun, nueve, neuf, ni ) colors to choose from, we learned that some customers want their Bullitt to be a color we don’t offer. Which we respect. Making your Bullitt your own is one of the best parts of owning (or should we say adopting) a Bullitt.
Here’s the challenge though: when someone wants a different colored Bullitt and you’re starting with one of our standard painted Bullitts you first of all have to remove the original varnish, then remove that beautiful powder-coated paint job that we took so much trouble to apply. It always bothered us that after going to all that effort to apply the decals and the powder coat and the varnish it would all get stripped away even before the bike had hit the streets.
To us, it seemed like a Damn Shame. But we love our Bullitteers the same way we love our Bullitts. And we want our Bullitteers to be happy, the same way we want our Bullitts to have good homes.
So we delivered. The Raw was born. A Bullitt without any paint, decals or clear coating, basically ready to paint yourself.
This Bullitt instantly became a success, when it was introduced in 2014. But – and this was a bit of a surprise to us, maybe we should have anticipated it – it became a success not so much as a bike you could paint yourself, but as a bike that just looked cool as it was: Raw.
We should have thought of that ourselves. We credit our Bullitteers for showing us the way: The cool industrial look was and still is something that works really well with the design of the Bullitt. Bullitteers bought Raw and started to build up the bike without any kind of treatment to the surface of the frame. It surely ain’t all gold that shines!
Of course not every Bullitteer who bought a Raw frame kept it that way. Some other Bullitteers did some cool paintjobs on their bikes. One that definitely stands out in our eyes, as much for the glory as for the gorgeous paint job, was this Raw shown below, painted by artist Irina Feller and given to the winner of the main race of the CMWC 2024. For those that are not acquainted with the messenger culture, you can read all about CMWC here. For those that don’t care but want to see the paint job there you go:
Though these stories we write about the different Bullitt colors are mainly meant to be history lessons, we pause briefly in this particular story to add an important disclaimer about our beloved Raw model :
The Bullitt frame, despite being made from aluminum, will corrode when used without any kind of treatment. (Yes, aluminum will corrode if not protected! It won’t rust like iron will, but it will corrode over time.)
Oxygen, pollution, salt, and water will all do their best to slowly eat away at the frame. Depending on the conditions where you use and store your Raw Bullitt it might take years to do any kind of noticeable physical damage to the frame – but slowly and surely Mother Nature will wear away at the unprotected Raw frame over the years. That is why, as much as we too love the Raw look, we strongly recommend (our lawyer strongly recommends us to write like this, he seems to love the phrase “strongly recommend,” we are convinced he is compensating for something) that you treat your Raw frame in some way: by painting it, giving it a clear coat, polishing it or waxing it.
It is precisely because of our concerns about corrosion that we do not offer the Raw as an eBullitt.
As a fun fact, we can inform you that the lack of paint and clear coating makes the Raw 400 grams lighter than any other Bullitt model. Saving 400 grams on a bike is extremely expensive, when it comes to race bikes, here you get it for free. (Check it out for yourself: go on the Interwebs and look for bike stuff that is lighter than the bike stuff you currently have and 9 times out of 10 you’re gonna pay more money for less weight.)
But hey, this is the point where the smart consumer will ask (and if you’ve read this far, you are certainly a smart consumer), “Why oh why do I have to pay the same price for a raw unpainted Bullit, as I have to pay for a Bullitt with the best paint job in the business?” Fortunately, we have an answer for that question that does not involve us tap dancing.
The answer is, that though the Raw is unpainted, it is not untreated. All Bullitt frames receives a heat treatment that leaves the bike dirty and looking not so cool. If the frame is about to be painted, a chemical cleaning will do to remove the nasty-looking heat treat grime, but if you want to sell the bike as a Raw, you have to grind it. And no, we don’t mean THAT kind of grind, though what you do in the privacy of your own Bullitt garage is up to you, please do NOT send us pictures.
When we talk about grinding a Raw (okay that does sound kind of sketchy) what we mean is we use a machine to grind away the grime buildup. A Bullitt frame is rather complex, so the grinding has to be done separately by a worker with a machine. To do it right – the way we want it done of course – is a slow and time-consuming process. So that’s why you pay the same for a Raw as you do for a Clockwork, Lizzard King, or another one of our beautifully painted Bullitts.
And if you’ve made a cool paintjob out of your Raw Bullitt, send us some pictures, we always love it. And even though we can’t really call it a color, we’ve made a Raw Playlist.
Comments
wow, very cool