Richard’s stainless steel all-road bike

Richard’s stainless steel all-road bike

This might be the largest bike I have built so far! Richard is 6’4″, so definitely a good candidate for a custom bike. He asked me to build him a bike from stainless steel, for all-weather riding (so able to fit full fenders), long rides (plenty of bottle mounts) and varied terrain (very wide gear range).

I was able to use a full Columbus XCR tubeset, complimented with dropouts and BB shell from Paragon Machine Works. The frame is silver fillet brazed, then has a hand-brushed finish and beadblasted logos. There is internal cable routing for the gear cables and rear hydraulic hose.

Up front is an Enve AR fork, which has a dedicated fender. Sadly Enve don’t offer a matching rear fender, so I created one by modifying and joining two fronts, supported by customised hardware. The Enve theme continues with the stem, seatpost and SES 4.5AR rims, laced to Chris King hubs.

The experimental drivetrain uses the Ratio Technology upgrade kit with a SRAM Eagle rear derailleur and 11spd Red DoubleTap shifters to create a 12spd setup, shifting over an 11-52 cassette. This is then paired with 34/50 chainrings on the EEWings crank for a VERY wide range! There is a bit of compromise in the shifting to have everything work, but Richard can fine tune the optimization as he sees where he spends the most time.

With the large front triangle, there is room for three bottle cages, then the dropped seatstays allow for a fourth behind the seattube, and there is a fifth mount under the downtube if required.

The final weight as shown with cages and fenders, is 20.0lbs.

 

5 Comments

  1. Mircea Andrei Ghinea / December 27, 2022

    hi, Rob!

    everytime when i see such big frame i imagine the bike like those cars from the past with veeery long front and the driver’s cabin being almost over the rear wheels, so the drider very at the rear; and i question myself why such short chainstays?

    any idea why not a more proportional dimensions, similar ratio between front-center and rear-center for all the frame sizes?

    always a pleasure seeing your creations. thank you & have a good ending of the year & have a good 2023! 😉
    Mircea

    Reply
    • Rob / December 27, 2022

      Hi Mircea,

      For good bike handling the weight distribution is very important. So when I am designing I am considering the rider’s position and thinking about how the weight will be distributed between the wheels. The goal is to have the safest handling for descending, so aiming for 55/45 front/rear weight distribution when the bike is tilted downward. That way if the tires loose traction the rear wheel will break first, where there is the option to control it – much more unlikely with the front. In this case Richard has a fairly aggressive position, and with a 140mm stem his weight is out over the front wheel a bit more, so I could keep the chainstays short.

      thanks, Rob.

      Reply
      • Mircea Andrei Ghinea / December 29, 2022

        good words and logic.
        thank you,
        Mircea

        Reply
  2. Paul Palfreyman / March 12, 2023

    Another beautiful build. I’m guessing the rear derailleur doesn’t have the capacity to handle that range so you end up with a slack chain in 34/small cogs?

    Reply
    • Rob / March 12, 2023

      Correct – although I understand some modifications have been made to improve the setup. With great range comes some level of compromise!

      Reply

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