Inker Gallery: Jason K's Rad Homemade Custom Bikes

Every month, CustomInk offers Inkers the opportunity to showcase any artwork they’ve created outside of work in the “Inker Gallery” featured in our Cafe. One of our recent features was by one of our Expert Production Artists, Jason K. He builds bikes.

Jason has always been into bikes. Once he learned to ride one, he was hooked, and has been riding them ever since. It wasn’t until a few years ago that the idea to build one turned into a reality.

It all started after some brainstorming that a dusty old champagne gold Ross Gran Tour got a rebirth. Since then, it has evolved into designing, sourcing parts, and building four bikes – each of them a single speed – and each one a work of art.

Jason is inspired by all sorts of design, art, and even movies. His first build came to be deemed “gorgoldozd”, both the name and the design inspired by the film “The Thief of Bagdad” where the coloring in the film is turquoise and gold technicolor. The name came to be by combining different words in English and Farsi.

One day Jason’s good friend was telling him of his favorite words in Farsi, which were “gorg” and “goldon”, meaning “wolf” and “flower” in English. Both words shared a common letter — the “f” in wolf & flower, and the “g” in gorg and goldon. It was quite interesting to him how both words in both languages were connected by this shared letter. So he used “gorg”, since it had a special meaning, and shortened “goldon” to “gold”, since it was in the color palette. The name was still missing something so he thought back on the film title and figured that a “thief” would steal gold, so the Farsi equivalent of “dozd” seemed to fit perfect; so gorg + gold + dozd became gorgoldozd — or as he likes to think, the gold thief.

Jason does everything by first brainstorming a concept, picking the colors, designing the look, sourcing all of the parts, and finally building up the bike entirely by himself. He tries to always use top quality parts for all of his bike builds and mainly sources parts from the following places: