Bike Check: Loris Fibre's 'Project Klin' Bikepacking Concept Bike

Each year, the Association des Artisans du Cycle - a French bike builder association - holds a bike building competition to encourage ingenuity and innovation in bike design. "Our underlying hope is to tweak the bicycle, to trigger creative thinking at the fringes of the bicycle industry by making small significant deviations to the existing designs," the association's website says, translated from French.

Every Concours de Machines has a new theme, and this year's was about bikepacking. Builders had to create new, imaginative bikes that met a set of rigid criteria: each bike had to support a 2-3 day bikepacking trip in the high Pyrenees, and therefore had to fit all the essentials for navigating, generating electricity, boiling water, setting up camp, sleeping, communicating with the outside world, and documenting the trip. The bike also had to, of course, function as a bike that would be rideable for multiple days and nights on all kinds of terrain.

Laurent Lamouric, known as his bike building name, Loris Fibre, is a mechanical engineer who built his first bike in 2016. While he now builds a variety of bikes, they are personal projects for himself, not for profit. His process is ideal for building wild one-off designs, not production models, so he focuses on creating crazy builds for the love of it.

For this year's Concours de Machines, Loris decided to make a full carbon fiber bike that could function with or without the gear compartments, which are made of flax fiber. While a bikepacking bike needs to have ample storage, it also needs to ride well, and Loris made sure that the compartments could be removed so that the bike could be ridden as simply a bike whenever it wasn't overlanding. As for the compartments themselves? Loris tested the concept of rigid storage spaces in the 2018 competition, in which he placed second. The rigidity, he says, helps protect the contents, while the integration with the frame eliminates the need for racks and helps keep the overall system weight down.

In designing the bike itself, Loris decided to go with a fully rigid setup and internal routing for the sake of simplicity, to reduce the possible mechanical problems that could take place. He chose 27.5"+ tires for comfort.

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