2025 Sea Otter Finds (Part One)

By Logan Watts

Founding Editor & Routes Director

2,177 Posts

On the opening day of the 2025 Sea Otter Classic, Logan and Neil roamed the sprawling expo grounds, weaving through a labyrinth of brands, catching up with old friends, and uncovering interesting bikes and gear. This first roundup includes a first look at new bags from Restrap, a beautiful Haute/Cane Creek collaboration, Stinner’s stunning new hardtail, the Redshift Top Shelf Flat Bar, the latest grips and saddles from Ergon, a revamped Spurcycle Tool, and plenty more. Dive into the full photo gallery and field notes here…

The Sea Otter Classic expo is a whirlwind of gear, good vibes, and familiar faces. It’s a sprawling collision of commerce, creativity, and community. Though it has only been a year since the last edition, a long travel day and some serious sleep deprivation made the return feel a bit surreal. Fittingly, a thick marine layer hung over the Laguna Seca Speedway for much of the morning, adding to the hazy vibe of the first day. As always, the event served as a welcome reunion, offering the chance to reconnect with friends and familiar faces from across the cycling world. Neil and I stumbled upon some intriguing new gear and brands doing fresh things. You’ll find a roundup of some of those discoveries here, with many more updates on the way.

Stinner Tunnel Hardtail

Hailing from Santa Barbara, Stinner Frameworks drove up the California coast to Sea Otter with a couple of big announcements this year. As we mentioned in our Dispatch on Wednesday, Stinner is expanding its business to include domestic contract manufacturing for the bicycle industry under the name Stinner Manufacturing. Talking to the founder Aaron Stinner, this wasn’t something they whipped up based on the recent tariff issues. Stinner has been quietly doing contract framebuilding for a couple of years. Last year alone, their team of 10 made 2,000 frames in house, and they have a goal of building 3,000 in 2025.

The second big announcement was this beauty. The Stinner Tunnel is the brand’s new production hardtail based on a mainstay that’s been offered as in Stinner’s custom line for years. Fabricated from start to finish in Santa Barbara, the Tunnel is designed to be more affordable but with the same attention to detail and craftsmanship as its custom offering. The Tunnel comes in two versions, the steel Select and the titanium Podium.

The Tunnel Select and Podium are both designed around a 140mm fork and have the same geometry and ride quality, but according to Stinner, the steel Select offers a few unique details and is slightly more accessible. Built with the Stinner Select steel tubeset and power-coated to finish, Stinner made the Tunnel Select with a lively and compliant ride. It retains compatibility with both mechanical 1x drivetrains and SRAM AXS Eagle Transmission, thanks to UDH dropouts and a full-mount design. Other features include external brake routing for straightforward service, Boost 148 spacing, clearance for 29 x 2.5” tires, a 180mm max rotor, and room for a 34T chainring. It also has threaded BSA bottom bracket shell, internal dropper routing, and thoughtful mounting points, including two bottle mounts and a triple under the downtube.

With a 66° head tube angle and middle-of-the-road geometry, the Tunnel Select looks like a relatively versatile bike for riders seeking a no-nonsense hardtail built to last. The Select frame starts at $1,495, which isn’t bad for a beautiful gusset-less frame that’s made in the USA.

Stinner also had its Refugio gravel bike on display with some excellent minimal graphics.

The bead-blasted titanium Stinner Podium features straight-gauge titanium tubing and fully internal brake routing, with the hose entering discreetly behind the headtube and a T47 bottom bracket shell. The Podium frame starts at $2,695, and for both the select and Podium, Stinner offers a few complete builds. Learn more over at Stinner.com.

Redshift Topshelf Flat Bars

It’s always worth stopping by the Redshift tent at Sea Otter, not just for the gear but for the good company. The small but dedicated crew includes a couple of fellow Western Carolinians—always up for trading stories about the region’s recent bouts of wild weather. And true to form, Redshift brought out a compelling new component this year.

At the edge of their booth was the debut of their latest handlebar: the new Top Shelf Flat Bar. Designed with bikepacking and adventure in mind, this bar builds on the popularity of Redshift’s Top Shelf Drop Bar and carries over a similar clamp/bridge design. It features a wide 31.8mm clamp area that offers plenty of real estate for strap-on bags and accessories, plus a 22.2mm diameter crossbar—the standard grip width found on flat bars. That full-size crossbar is what earns the Top Shelf its name, setting it apart from typical BMX-style bars, which often use smaller-diameter tubing and don’t play as nicely with light, GPS units, or device mounts.

The Top Shelf Flat Bar comes at 800mm wide but can be trimmed down, and it has a 14mm backsweep and 50mm of rise. It isn’t available just yet, but stay tuned, and check out the Redshift website for more details.

New Spurcycle Tool

It’s aways the little things, right? I was excited to put my hands on the revamped Spurcycle Tool. The original has been one of my all-time favorite bit-driver tools, and it’s something I’ve used regularly and cherished since picking it up in 2017. Now, eight years later, Spurcycle has relaunched their tool with a new magnetic bit kit featuring 10 color-coded bits that are held in place with magnetic retention providing a “snap” in place experience that improves upon the previous rubber bit holder that just tightly held the bits in place. The new version also nests the titanium bit driver head to keep everything in place within the new case, which is made from a slightly different material than the previous iteration.

Haute/Cane Creek Gravel Bike

Last year, Will Hart set out in search of a new gravel bike. Wanting something meaningful and close to home, he turned to his friends at Haute Bicycle Co. in his home town of Richmond, Virginia, to commission a custom frame. As you can see in our past coverage of Haute at MADE and Philly Bike Expo, Haute has a knack for refined details such as hand-bent seatstays, custom 3D-printed chainstay yokes, and thoughtful cable routing solutions. For Hart’s build, they collaborated on some custom geometry changes to their standard gravel platform, the “Sauce,” tailoring it to accommodate the Cane Creek Invert fork and fine-tuning the fit and handling to match Hart’s riding style and body dimensions.

As Will described, “The most difficult part of putting together a custom bike is choosing the paint. I wanted this build to have real character and to tell a story standing on its own.” Will had always dreamed of owning an orange gravel bike, and while searching for the right inspiration, the iconic 1993 Bridgestone XO-1 came to mind with its distinctive “Construction Pumpkin” paint. Coincidentally, a close friend of his owns an XO-1—an ahead-of-its-time, do-it-all “all-country” bike that offered a versatile alternative for riders seeking a balance between road and trail. In today’s terms, it would be considered a gravel bike, making it a fitting reference point for a modern interpretation that aims to expand the definition of what a gravel bike can be. As a final personal touch, the number 804—Richmond, Virginia’s area code and the birthplace of both Will and the new build—became part of the bike’s identity, subtly tying together past and present while paying tribute to the original XO-1.

Cane Creek also used the opportunity to tease the forthcoming silver eeSilk post.

For more on the Haute Sauce/Cane Creek collaboration, check out the post over at CaneCreek.com.

Restrap Mini Panniers

After catching up with the Restrap crew at Eurobike last spring, it was a welcome surprise to see them make the trip Stateside this time around. Their booth was prominently positioned right at the entrance near the “Tire Bridge,” which they playfully dubbed “the only patch of true gravel in the whole compound.” The team brought their full lineup to the show and shared a few updates and upcoming releases.

Alex walked us through some thoughtful improvements to a couple of their existing bags. The updated handlebar bag now features Velcro on both the harness and dry bag, helping keep everything in place during loading. They’ve also added an elastic stash strap on top that looks perfect for tucking away a jacket or extra layer on the fly. In addition to refinements, Restrap had a few upcoming products on display.

Among them were a sleek new MTB endurance vest and a set of Mini Panniers featuring a smart mounting system developed in collaboration with Hiplock. This new release mechanism offers a quick, one-finger lever release, making it easy to swap the panniers out for water bottles or other gear. Like all of Restrap’s offerings, the Mini Panniers are built with a dual-layer waterproof construction and will be available in 5L and 10L sizes. Keep an eye on Restrap.com for more details.

Hudski Dualist Hardtail

The forthcoming Hudski Dualist was one of the more interesting pieces of new bike news at last year’s Sea Otter, which I covered in detail. At that point, the Dualist they had on hand was just a pre-production sample, but this year, Brian showed me the production-ready iteration. It was fairly consistent to the tan one I shot last year but a little more refined with a few tweaks.

The most meaningful changes to the frame were the addition of a gusset at the downtube/headtube junction and the internal cable ports that were save the addition of some final graphics, including the sharp Dualist font with a yin-yang symbol on the seat tube and the numbers for adjusting the dropout (see photo toward the bottom).

The two versions they had on hand included this hardtail build, featuring a Fox 32 Stepcast fork converted to 50mm of travel. It was a sharp build, for sure. It was also impressive to see some of the final forged frame parts, including a keyed two-piece bottom bracket shell and the adjustable dropout. We’re looking forward to trying this interesting and well-thought-out ATB in the near future. For now, find my more detailed writeup on it last year here, and learn more about the presale over at Hudski.com.

Luis’ Ultimate Machine

At some point in our day, we ran into Jarod Bourdeau, a local frame builder in Monterey. He and several buddies were rolling some unique bikes around the show, so we took the opportunity to get some footage. Ond of those people was Luis, who had this incredibly interesting bike from 1992.

As Luis explained, several years ago when attending Prescott College, he wandered into a local thrift store and found this bizarre titanium bike called Ultimate Machine. After doing some research, Luis discovered that Ultimate Machine was founded in Prescott by a gentleman who decided to start a company because he thought he could make mountain bikes better than what was available the early ’90s. That led to Ultimate Machine, a bike brand that began making all types o bike parts, from hubs to brakes, and eveything in in between. There’s not a ton of information about Ultimate Machine, a company represented by nothing more than an astronaut drawing as a logo, but we appreciate Luis sharing this interesting story and letting us shoot his bike. Be sure to watch Neil’s interview for more.

Ergon Saddle and Grips

Ergon also had a couple of interesting products on offer. The new Ergon SMS Men series introduces a shorter, more compact shape to reduce weight while improving freedom of movement—ideal for aggressive riding and quick body position shifts. I’ve become a convert to short saddles over the last few years, so it’s nice to see this move. Second, the revamped the GP2 Evo with new, rubberized three-finger bar-end design to improve hand feel and damping. The GP2 Evos are made in Europe and will be available in May or June for €59.95. Watch for more over at Ergonbike.com.

Stay tuned for more to come from the 2025 Sea Otter Classic. What new products intrigue or befuddle you most? Let us know in the conversation below!