Pimp My Orange Bike

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Orange Bikes is well known for making its suspension bikes in Halifax UK and for assembling much of everything on site. There are often up to six mechanics working flat out to assemble bikes from the bare bones. Suspension frames come from Orange’s fabrication facility as bare main frames and separate rear triangles and everything is fitted up, from the shocks to the pivot bolts to the wheel building, in its assembly workshop. Even the powdercoating is done in house.

As you’d imagine, Orange employees all usually ride pretty up to date bikes with the latest gear on them. But when it comes to Vaughan Evans, the frame painter, he always likes to have something different to everyone else. And given that he paints the bikes, he has a certain amount of leeway there. (Vaughan is the guy that Guy Martin chats to in Orange Bikes’ video ‘It is what it is’

Vaughan is building himself a new Orange 324 for next year and to say that he’s a little obsessive about it is probably a bit of an understatement. It’s still being assembled with the finest bits and pieces he can get his hands on and Vaughn says that he’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t “weigh 30-point something pounds”. Every bolt (except for the important stem bolts) is titanium and every lightening trick in the book is being used to make this as light as possible while still retaining durability and ride quality.

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This is what Vaughan has been up to every lunchtime this month.
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He has carbon rims on order. In the meantime these top-end RaceFace ones will have to do.
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The one-off paint is super sparkly, even in the weak Yorkshire sunshine
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SRAM’s DH seven speed cassette is paired with Hope hubs
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Custom graphics in a Vegas style, with a glimpse of that sparkly paint on the head tube.
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Carbon SRAM X0 cranks of course

The gold sparkly paint is a one-off that Orange doesn’t offer. And in fact there suspiciously only seems to have been enough of the sparkly stuff for just the one bike. How convenient…

It is worth mentioning, though, that Orange offers a Deluxe Respray option where you can return your frame to Orange, where it gets stripped of paint and checked, its bearings are replaced and it’s resprayed in one of ten colours, before getting new decals and a new head badge. This costs £250. Or £200 for Orange hardtails. So if you’ve tired of that ‘It seemed cool at the time’ fluro yellow with a brown swingarm paintjob, you might want to give them a call.

There were a few other choice bikes sitting around the factory too. Some we can show you, some we can’t (yet). But this little ripper caught our eye. It’s being built up for Chris Whitfield’s daughter. Chris has raced successfully in the past for Orange and was after a special bike for his daughter. So here’s what happens if you take an extra small, 26in Orange Diva and put a shorter shock on from a Segment, reduce the travel in the forks and fit 24in wheels. Forget your carbon enduro machines, we reckon this is one of the most badass bikes we’ve seen the year…

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More interested in older Oranges? While the company doesn’t have one of every model its ever produced, it’s fair to say that there’s a pretty droolsome archive there. Reckon it needs its own feature?

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We know riders who could name all of these

And, finally, if you’ve not seen Stu Thomson’s great documentary about Orange bikes featuring a certain Guy Martin, it’s well worth a lunchbreak. We hear there are no plans for the desperately-needed ‘Subtitles’ version though. Sorry.

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Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 23 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

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