Steve’s 953/carbon

I just unveiled Steve’s bike at Bespoked, and it promptly won two awards! So time to post the complete set of photos.
Steve asked me if I could do a stainless V3 (lightweight steel with carbon ISP and headtube insert). I did some tubing research, and concluded it could be done – just requiring a custom wound tube from Enve for the seatmast so that I could use Reynolds 953 headtube stock for the sockets. Tubing was duly ordered, and it took several months for Reynolds to produce the tubes and have them polished before they arrived with me. In the meantime, Steve and I went back and forth on the design and component spec. He requested a more level toptube than I normally build, but still wanted the seatstays dropped. To achieve this I made a longer seattube socket, with additional cutouts between the junctions.
For the fork we decided on an Enve 1.0. But having a matte black finish this didn’t really tie in with the other carbon tubes. Ruckus were able to wrap it with an appropriate layer of woven carbon to match, so that took care of the aesthetics. With this done, I suggested that we add carbon seatstays to continue the theme – and to save a few grams.
With the tubing in hand and the design finalised, I mitred all the tubes, brazed in the downtube bottle bosses and then took the downtube to have the logo laser-engraved. With that done, I brazed the frame up (with dummy steel tubes in place for the seatstays and seatmast) with silver. After alignment, cable stops and finishing work, the frame, seatmast cap and matching custom ahead stem went off to the metal polishers to bring the joint areas back up to the mirror polish finish of the tubes.
With the now-very-shiny frame in hand, I carefully prepared the carbon tubes and bonded them in place, with additional pins for security. Seattube bottle bosses were also installed into the carbon mast. The frame then went over to Colorworks to have an ‘E’ painted on the headtube and all the carbon finished with a matte clearcoat.
Finally it was time to assemble the complete bike. Steve’s spec has a host of light-weight parts – a Cannondale Hollowgram crankset (fitted into the T47 BB shell), EE cycleworks brakes (with the rear being direct mount under the chainstays), SRAM eTap shifting and Enve 2.2 clincher rims built onto Enve carbon hubs.
With matching matte carbon Arundel bottle cages, the complete bike weighs in at just under 14.0lbs.
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- 9th April 2017 | English Cycles - […] bikes were honored with four awards – Steve’s 953/carbon build received ‘best road bike’ awards from road.cc and The…
- saadl blog – Bespoked 2017 - […] English Cycles Steve’s 953 Carbon Bike […]
Fantastic execution of the stainless / carbon mix. Especially the polishing.
A criticism is that this seems to be too many frame styles in one (a design by committee). The dropped seatstays, horizontal TT, and non-horizontal stem makes this bike appears a bit of an awkward mishmash of modern compact frame and classic style.
I would contrast this with Zak’s V3 with matching TT and stem angle which looks designed as one bike (in my opinion).
Really great execution. The polished SS and the brazed joints are fantastic.
brilliant match of SS and carbon fibre.Love the brazing.Awsome man!