Joe’s lightweight road bike

Joe has some back issues and so worked with a local fitter to determine a position that would be sustainable for him. This requires the bars to be quite high, but he wanted to allow for the ability to lower them as his flexibility improves. We also wanted to have an elegant way to position the bars where they needed to be without an especially long headtube. After a few iterations, we settled on a custom stem with a slight rise and additional stack built into it. This combined with custom machined spacers to match achieves what was required.

The brief for the bike was then focused on making it as light as possible. Which lead to a component spec consisting of THM cranks and bar, Carbon-ti chainrings and EE brakes. The photos show the bike with my own set of AX-Lightness tubular wheels in place – I subsequently built him a 1050g set of Enve tubulars, which will reduce the weight a little more!

For the finish, Joe was really drawn to a frame that I had copper plated some years ago. Unfortunately this is not a process I am able to repeat at this time, so Eric at Colorworks was tasked with getting as close as he could with paint. The result of his hard work turned out great I think!

And the weight? It came in at 13.5lbs as pictured.

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