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  • Bespoked Gravel Bike

    In the rush to prepare for Bespoked, I finished up Sam’s Gravel race bike frame and built up with a fairly standard set of components, i.e. Shimano GRX. Most of the parts are what I had available and won’t be the final build but it gives an idea. I was super please that it got voted 2nd best Gravel Bike there especially considering the other bikes there.

    The frame is built from Columbus Spirit, Life and Max tubing. It’s designed for racing so has cables in places making the bike easy and comfortable to shoulder (flat profile top tube, hoses/cables on top of the downtime), easy to maintain (no internal routing) and take the current popular standards (T47 bottom bracket, flat mount brakes) and efficient (double ovalised downtube).

    The colour is transparent copper powder coat that should provide some toughness and also shows off the fillets:-)

    The tyres in these pictures Schwalbe Racing Ralphs in 29×2.25. Although they fit, it’s snug so a more realistic 2.1 or less would work in places that have mud. Can’t wait to see this out on the trail!

  • Battle on the beach race Fat Bike

    To those that know this race it’s brilliant. The largest XC race in the country with about 1000 people in it. This was my second time going. First was on a tandem with Mrs Tomo (her first ever race!). This time I had done some modifications to my fat bike so thought it would be perfect to take. The weather and headwind were kind. It was a great day out.

    Super happy with how the frame modifications worked out, the bars and setup changes. It rode much better and wasted less energy.

  • Custom Beach Race Handlebars

    For various reasons I ended up entered into the Battle on the Beach race this year. It gave me the opportunity to sort out a few issues on the fat bike – slacker head angle, straighten the rear end, a bunch of nice Hope Technology components and a lighter tyre/tube combination (that saved 880g per wheel:-).

    I had also wanted to build some bike packing bars that might also work for a minimum bit of aero on the 3 mile beach straight. I had an old set of narrow bars I had made so cut bits off and added bits on to create these:

  • Cyclist Film Festival

    What a great fun day with a visit to The Woods Cyclery, some tall bike demo rides before riding an untested route to Eastleigh for the film festival evening with Joel and Alex the producers of the Frankenbiking film. Local James came too which helped greatly with the navigation.

    The weather wasn’t that friendly and some of the off-road was pretty greasy. We had a decent amount of jeapody for a mini adventure, with some off-road dark downhilling, forrest bog trudge and closed road challenge.

    The organisers were kind enough to let us host a quick Q&A. We did have to clean our selves and the bikes to get them into the cinema though:)

    There’s 2 last shows in Piccadilly on Friday 7th and Westfield on Saturday the 8th for a really great programme of bike films. Checkout the Cyclistfilmfestival.co.uk website for the location and get tickets.

  • Frankenbiking @ Cyclist Film festival

    We were involved in the Award Winning Tall Bike film Frankenbiking last year since when it has won a number of awards. It is now included in the Cyclist Film Festival that is showing across the UK in Jan and Feb 2025 together with a great set of other independent and award winning films. The programme is over two hours long so if you want to see and support some independent bike films check their website for your nearest showing https://www.cyclistfilmfestival.co.uk

  • New Website is here!

    New Website is here!

    It’s always work in progress but the basics are here and we will start adding posts and more info. These will cover current and previous work and hopefully, eventually, include an online shop. Checkout through the menu above.