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Welcome to Robert Beckman Designs, Advanced Touring Systems and the custom-built Hybrid Performance and Fully Integrated Touring Bicycles of Robert Beckman.  This is the source of the most innovative and technically advanced bicycle touring gear in the world, executed to the very highest standards of craftsmanship and creative expression. It is also the source of some of the world's most artfully crafted lugged bicycle frames for high-performance cycling and touring.

Within these pages you'll find my extensive and most recent contributions to bicycle touring equipment, including the gear that has traveled furthest down the evolutionary track of performance and quality, the ultra-lightweight Hummingbird IFT and RP Rack/Pannier Systems and Hummingbird XC 700 Touring Bicycles.  You'll also discover information on the most elegantly crafted, and most versatile of all high-performance road bikes, my four Hybrid Performance models.

This site, in part, is a presentation of the wide range of unique gear that I design and custom build, but more importantly it is dedicated to information and ideas that relate to new dimensions in cycling and in bicycle travel.  It is all about discovering new ways to make bicycle touring more pleasurable, vastly easier, and more flexible through an Advanced Touring Method and the Advanced Touring Systems that set the method into motion.

It has been my constant goal to define high-performance bicycle touring through the evolution in the design and execution of its gear, and through refining the methods of bicycle travel.  The fruits of that purpose are shared within this site.  I hope that you have fun traveling through the following pages, which reflect the culmination of a 40-year journey of my own.

Using this site-  As I was writing the text for this website, at one point before I began editing I saw the page count reach page 183.  It's a big site that covers a lot of ground, and consequently its navigation has been set up to make browsing each area of the site as easy as possible.  Each section, or heading listed in the horizontal menu bar, contains a complete index for all of the topics and information within that menu heading.  As you browse within a section and away from the index, there is a vertical menu bar on the left to aid in navigating within each section as well, from primary topic to topic.

I am not exactly computer literate myself, so one of the things that I've missed as I've gone through the site is that single items of text may be closed (hidden) as you move from one text item to the next, by simply clicking on the text heading (if it is underlined).  The navigation is set up in this way so that long sections of text may be read, item by item, instead of by scrolling through many pages of continuous text.