English Cycles | Custom Bicycles

Posted by Rob on Dec 4, 2024

Mark’s 650B road bike

Mark asked me to build him a road bike with his preferred 650Bx48 tires. I guess it could be called a gravel bike too; but it is mainly intended for road so we’ll call it that. The lines are blurry! The frame is built with clearance for those big tires, as well as a double crankset and front derailleur. All mechanical gears and brakes – external gear cables with headtube mounted adjusters, with...

Posted by Rob on Nov 24, 2024

Jae’s gravel frameset

Jae’s frame is designed to fit either 700×28 or 650×42, which have outside diameters close enough to preserve the handling in either setup. There is room for a 2x crank, with a T47 bottom bracket allowing for the rear brake hose to run inside the frame from the headtube to the chainstay. The integrated seatmast was custom machined with external butting to tune the ride and keep the weight...

Posted by Rob on Nov 8, 2024

Brian’s road bike

Brian wanted a new road bike to re-inspire his riding and give him a fast, comfortable machine for any length adventure. We reviewed his fit, which led to some small adjustments, then created a design to match the fit and meet the riding goals. The bike is built up with an Enve road fork, fitted to the frame via a custom English headset and secured with a custom stem to match. A Dura-ace Di2 groupset...

Posted by Rob on Oct 30, 2024

Justin’s 650B gravel bike

Justin came to me with a good idea of what he wanted, requesting a frame built around 650×48 tires, constructed from stainless steel tubing, with an eye on keeping the weight low. We had everything decided upon, using SRAM’s 12spd XPLR groupset, when the new 13spd version was released – which requires a UDH dropout. Which turned out to be in short supply for a stainless steel one! Justin...

Posted by Rob on Oct 17, 2024

Rahi’s Above Category road bike

Rahi is small of stature, at 5’0″ and 80lbs. She approached Above Category to see about having a custom bike commissioned – they worked with her to determine the best fit, and then suggested that I might be a good choice as her builder. I do enjoy building for small, light riders who are typically very under-served by production bikes. The design goal was to use 700C wheels if we could...

Posted by Rob on Oct 6, 2024

Scott’s all-weather road bike

Scott asked me to build him a durable, low maintenance road bike that could be ridden year round in a place that gets proper seasons! A belt drive bike with an internally geared hub was the obvious choice – we have a Gates Carbon Drive and a Shimano Alfine 11spd Di2 hub controlled from Ultegra Di2 shifters. This gives a wide range of gearing with a drivetrain that can be ridden in the rain or the dry...

Posted by Rob on Sep 26, 2024

Abraham’s puppy gravel bike

This was a fun project! Abraham asked me to build a bike for his wife that would allow her to ride with their four small puppies. We settled on a flat-bar 650B gravel bike with a custom front basket rack and a special bag made by Andy at Lords Luggage. The removable bag fastens securely to the rack, and has anchors for attaching the dog’s harnesses to. There is also an optional rain screen that can...

Posted by Rob on Sep 14, 2024

Folding Gravel Concept in stainless steel

The first folding frame I developed for ease of airline travel was a mountain bike. Which worked great as proof of concept. From there I added pivots at the seatstays for an easier pack which became the first FRC (Folding Road Concept). The first folding frames I did with disc brakes used a taller dropout to allow the pivots to be above the chainstay mounted caliper so that the seatstays could still fold...