Thanks for all the input so far, keep it coming. Just wanted to address a couple of points while I’m here:

Question: I’m thinking that a large part of the cost, and therefore the “UK premium”, is related to the manpower. That being the case, how much more would it cost to use titanium for which folk are already prepared to pay extra?

You’re right, the majority of cost for us is labour. In theory, using Ti wouldn’t necessarily increase the cost by a huge amount but there are other costs to consider. Finish, increased wear on tooling etc. Having said that, the thing that puts me off Ti is the unpredictable availability of quality material in the specs we need. I looked at this a couple of years ago and it may be better now than it was. For a small company like us, we’re always treading a fine line between being able to get decent pricing on quantities of material while still having a sensible cashflow outlook. Buying a years worth of Ti tubing just so we can be sure of availability doesn’t make sense for us.

I would like a pick’n’mix choice of frame sizes and geometry, wheel sizes, drop-outs, and options from bottle bosses, full-length cable routing etc, colour. 853 steel with stickers. Happy to wait a month or three after hitting buy but don’t want to see a batch on CRC.

I think the key would be some sort of “custom for a fixed price” or at leas a shopping list? I.e. the basic frame is the same price and the client can pick and chose ruin the geomtery as much as they like. Then ontop of that there’s a list of extras.

This is pretty much what we do with our production ‘cross and allroad frames.

There are obvious competitors here – why not look into setting up a uk carbon frames production line.

Basically, because that’s not what we do. Our facility at the moment is to produce steel frames. There would little crossover in producing CF frames. We’d also need to bring in outside skills. But the main reason is that you need to believe in what you do. I’m not a huge CF basher but it doesn’t float my boat.

Fancy doing one half price for someone to take to B.C. and promote on the Vancouver CX scene?

Absolutely. You pay full price now and we’ll give you a posted dated cheque for half the total price. After 6 months, if we’ve sold 6 bikes off the back of your promotions you can cash the cheque, otherwise we’ll cancel it.

Sounds fair? You win, we win. I’ll await your CC details…..

:-)

shand can u buy the fork seperate

Yup, all our forks are custom so drop us an email….

MC, what you really want is this:

linky

this?

Can do up to 6 bottle cage mounts if you ask nicely (and your’re not teeny wee).

(EDIT : just realised posting this might be against forum rules? I’ll remove it if I’ve been naughty.)

I did some work with Muji (Japanese retailer) a loooong time ago on shaft drives. The system worked ok and satisfied a brief (no chain!). They cost a lot, were noisy and were a pain in the arse to build.

i would be tempted to ask a friendly local frame builder.

who will:

1) Wallop it
2) File it
or
3) Heat it and wallop it.

Seriously though, don’t heat it. Very gentle bending when it’s cold. If you need to heat it to bend it back then you’ll already have compromised it.

Bear in mind it *may* crack while bending it but if you get it too hot when trying to heat it, it’s going to be weaker and probably crack in the long term.

Al’s right, if you don’t have access to the right tools, an adjustable spanner works well.

S

@simoncycles, if you have any specific questions, please get in touch. If you can make it work in this climate then you’ve got it made. For what it’s worth, we’ve made some big changes in our business over the past few months in order to be able to not only survive, but to be stable in order to be confident we’ll still be around in a few years time.

Don’t underestimate the ‘selling part’ part of the business. You might be able to build 1 shit-hot frame a week but you also need to be able to sell everything you make. ‘Build it and they will come’ doesn’t always work.

Do your sums, then do them again, then do them based on only selling 1/4 what you thought you’d sell and see if it still works out. Don’t invest in lots of tooling. For on-off bespoke frames, setting up machines will take longer than working with your hands using files and hacksaws. Build ‘lots’ of frames and destroy them. See why they broke. Keep breaking them.

You will need liability insurance and that’ll cost you approx £1500 per year. If you sell 30 frames in a year that means each frame will have cost you £50 in insurance.

How are you going to paint them? How are you paying shipping to the painter? £15 each way will put another £30 onto each frame.

How many frames are you planning to build per year?

etc, etc, etc,

These are the questions you need to be asking yourself….

check yer email…

thread hijack alert..

just ask for alan in the shed

if I was looking for 3 or 4mm steel plate (500×500) would you be a man to talk to?

I can supply this stuff and the prices would be:

Gates Centre Track 50t 4 bolt front pulley £92
Gates Centre Track 28t 9 spline rear pulley £65
Gates Centre Track 20t pulley for Rohloff £57
Gates Centre Track 122t belt £78
Gates Centre Track 118t belt £78

I have most of it in stock. The biggest problem with this stuff is very expensive shipping options from Germany offered by CD. So unless you can find someone in the UK who wants to buy and hold a large amount of stock, it’s going to be costly.

Steven

Hey Omar,

we’re in a bit of a transition at the moment, we have some production frames due for launch in Feb next year and we’re still confirming exact pricing. As soon as we’ve got that nailed down, it’ll go onto the site.

Since most of our other work is all fully custom, it’s difficult to publish prices but you can expect to pay minimum of £1200 for a custom frame. If you want to, you can sign up to our mailing list (it’s on the site) and we’ll keep you up to date.

Steven

There’s some nice OTB pics doing the rounds on Flickr. I don’t think the burn was appreciated!

I didn’t make it, but it was cold and muddy by all accounts….

Why are you designing based on unsagged numbers? So it handles well while you’re looking at it? :wink:

I wear a heavily supportive shoe since I over pronate *a lot*. What are the implications for attempting a forefoot strike gait? Am I more/less likely to get injured? Should I attempt this with my regular shoe or switch to a more neutral shoe?

350mm! Really? What’s the frame? Give us a shout.

This is the best internet ever!!

Observations:

1) it did look a bit like a spoon
2) someone said Al was a good bloke in real life. He’s not, he’s a ****.
3) that was never going to work in a bazillion years
4) what you had on there the last time I saw it was much better
5) good on you for filming it!

Some of the Slamannan railway can be seen if you know where to look ( there’s a section about 200m from my house) but there’s not really anything ridable. Most of it has disappeared completely into the fields. You can see the odd little embankment here and there.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=slamannan&aq=&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=18.703427,40.869141&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Slamannan,+Falkirk,+United+Kingdom&ll=55.9464,-3.81865&spn=0.008627,0.019956&t=h&z=16

Some of it was converted to an official cycle path, loads of it now is back to being a railway!
airdriebathgateraillink[/url]

PhatSchtickel

Any chance you could drop mine off too MC? Haven’t had anything in 4 days. I’ll put the kettle on.

Where are you DBW? I have a 30.9 reamer here (central Scotland).

Disk brakes exert masses of force on the frame, adding a strut just transfers the force from one stay that wasn't designed to take it to another.

pish.

I can't believe how young Phil looks in that photo up there!

That would have been Spoons. Neil somefink I think. He was a bit of a wait weeny. Wasn't too impressed when we removed his valves and filled up his inner tubes with water. He actually worked at Yeti in Colorado for a while IIRC. No idea what he's up to now.

MC, Kev, MC, wee "Milk Folat" Adrian, moi.

I'd forgotten all about Adrian!

I that Kev in the 2nd from top pic?

That makes interesting reading.

When I spoke to Van Nicholas before ordering, I was told that Rohloff don't condone the belt drive at all and won't support it.

When I asked about the warranty of the hub they said you just remove the driven pulley and fit a sprocket before returning it. Nothing about modifying the hub.

Someone has the story wrong.

They've got it wrong.

linky

Rohloff are very concerned that anybody doing this are doing it properly. It only takes a few bodgers to **** things up and post horror stories al over t'interweb and the whole concept can be shafted. It's true that Rohloff only recently came onboard and I believe there were some early prototype pulleys designed to just replace the existing chaindrive sprocket. I'm not even sure these were Rohloff/CarbonDrive components.

Feel free to get in touch if you need more info.

Cheers

shand, i'm guessing you don't have the ability to put the couplings in an alu frame?

Nah sorry, you're on your own with that one!

My understanding from Rohloff was that they did support the belt drive but only on units they had supplied to manufactures and that you could buy the complete bike or frame and drive kit but not the individual components. In fact the carbon drive website has a link to a press release on the Rolhoff site IIRC. It does seem that there needs to be some clarity on this and I can understand your concern Rip if you find yourself in a position where you can't swap back to a chain drive.

Just to clarify. The pulley comes from Carbon Drive and the carrier comes from Rohloff. When I place an order with Carbon Drive for pulleys and belts, the front pulleys and belts comes to me directly, the rear pulley is sent by CD to Rohloff to be fitted to the hub. Rohloff build the hub with a compatible carrier for the belt drive pulley, they fit the pulley to the carrier on the hub and send it out to me. They'll only do this for manufacturers/builders that have passed their testing.

You can certainly send your beltdrive hub to them and they'll swap out the beltdrive carrier to a chaindrive one to enable you to switch back. I think they'll even send you the chaindrive carrier and you could do it yourself but that would void the warranty I believe.

At the moment Rohloff are saying you can't buy an after-market system and that it has to come as part of a complete bike but I think there are ways round that if your not worried by warranty issues.

The Rohloff pulley (sprocket) comes in 2 parts. The pulley itself and the carrier. The carrier fits to the hub and replaces the carrier that normally handles the chaindrive sprocket. The beltdrive pulley then fits to this. You need to get Rohloff to fit the carrier. One of the primary hub seals is also part of the carrier which is why Rohloff want to do it themselves.

Rohloff will only do this to hubs going on to frames that have passed a stiffness test. This is to make sure the frame doesn't shift around throwing the chainline off.

I make a steel ISCG mount that can be retrofitted to a steel frame and you can buy them here:

http://www.shand.cycles.com/store

cheers