Andy who spotted our bikes on display at Bespoked. He contacted us a few months after the event asking us to build a lightweight stainless steel road bike for riding around Somerset and the Alps. He doesn’t race but is a very keen social rider and being a tall rider wanted the bike to be as light as it could be whilst maintaining a good level of stiffness. It also needed to handle the short sharp steep descents, with often poor road surfacing, around his hometown of Frome in the South West.

As this build was going to be his primary bike we decided that disc brakes would provide maximum control for all his riding needs. A Columbus XCR tube set was used with a T47 bottom bracket for added stiffness. The large frame was also made stiffer by increasing the diameter of the tubes wherever possible, as much as possible, whilst keeping it aesthetically proportionate all round. 

We allowed for internal routing for the Di2 groupset keeping the frame clean and simple. The Columbus Futura Road Disc forks give a maximum tyre clearance of 28mm though we ended up fitting the bike with 26mm Pirelli’s. These were mounted onto carbon rims to reduce rotational weight, which really helps when riding short sharp descents but they also provide extra acceleration when needed. The Pro Vibe bars were chosen with climbing in mind too as the aero shape gives a larger surface area for your hands to rest on.

Possibly the most interesting part of the build for us was Andy’s colour choice. He owns a small collection of paintings by Cornish based artist Roy Goodman, whose work is mainly influenced by the local landscape. The sky and sea were prominent features in the two paintings Andy shared with us which led us to create a beautiful blue and green fade in super-fine metallic paint. The metallic effect reacts almost like a mica which contains small reflective metal flakes. To give it contrast we added a geometric pattern in a true white through the down tube, top tube and fork. In our opinion the stripes tie everything together, from the tubes to all the components and the paint.

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