This was an experiment from a few years back - tried to put something together entirely from ebay and "junk bin" parts for under $1k (and succeeded).

I also tried to be as gimmicky as possible (Rotorcranks, BP Stealth knock-off the color of week-old urine, etc).

I actually had little to no idea what I was doing with fit/equipment (see helmet) and I never set the world on fire with it or anything but it made me go faster than I think I should've been going and it got me in the money on a couple of occasions.

All my teammates over 6 feet tall used it, too. I was constantly loaning it out. The prologue at the Millionaires Row stage race one year was a total Chinese fire drill - three of us used it for the same event - one of us would finish and fall over then the others would grab the bike and swap pedals and roll right back out with the same sweaty, stinky TT helmet. To my consternation, one of them beat my time on it that day, too (having never ridden it before hopping on to roll to the start).

I think this bike actually had some kind of soul to it. I was under the mistaken impression a couple of years ago that USAC was going to start enforcing UCI rules for all TT's (that's what the original announcement said) and I sold it on eBay. I made a couple of attempts to put together another sub-$1k TT bike to replace it but it just never had the same mojo that this one did.

Now that TTs are basically a big arms race, I think there should be a special sub-$1k category where you have to provide receipts.