Nick’s S1 road frame

Nick was very happy with his first build, a superlight V3 road bike. When he approached me for a second build, he wanted to explore just how stiff a steel frame could be. Generally I lean on the side of tuned stiffness – where the tubes are carefully chosen to match the size and weight of the rider and their preferences, so that the frame will have just the right amount of flex to ride ‘right’. But it was an interesting project to just maximise the intrinsic high stiffness of steel, whilst keeping the frame fairly light. To this end the spine of the bike is oversized – Columbus Max chainstays, a T47 BB shell and an oversize, bi-ovalised Columbus Life downtube. Then the top of the bike has an ovalised toptube and oversize headtube.

Brake cable routing is internal through the toptube, with no routing needed for gears due to SRAM eTap. The paint is by Colorworks, with the Columbus carbon fork painted to match. I don’t really have any model names – just the V3 moniker as the third version of my lightweight road concept. But I thought this merited a new name, so going with S1 to keep it simple :-

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