Alex's urban get-around rig

Alex wanted to improve on his existing production fixie. He works in the bike industry, knew what he wanted, is tall at 1.98m/6'6" and has a lightweight build. Columbus Life tubing in "oversize-road" sizing (1-1/8" top-tube, 1-1/4" down-tube) was chosen for a racey machine: a 60.5cm frame with Paragon track-ends in stainless steel, clamping faces left free of paint, made to fit mudguards with standard road brake calipers. Rack eyelets were added to the fork-ends to run a Tubus Fly rear rack. The frame came in at 1833g painted (with 39 grams of paint folks), where his previous frame was around 2300g.

The stainless-steel rear fork-ends need extra attention to match the strength of the traditional steel joint brazed with brass. Plugs were lathed to size, slotted, brazed into the stay ends and the chisel-end filed, ready for silver-soldering! The chainstay and downtube are a nice tight fit to the BB shell! The abrasive belt machine I use to shape those mitres adds some heat shown by the rainbow colour of the steel, but that's nothing compared to the heat of brazing or welding that follows......

Alex wrote: "I approached Ewen with a plan for a frame and fork, for the most versatile city bike I could create. The pre-requisites were that had a twitchy geometry, provision for rack/fenders, bidon braze-ons and it could be set up with bullhorn or road bars as a singlespeed, perfectly mimicking my fitted road bike. The end result was exactly that. The biggest bonus of going custom for me was to get a bike that fitted best and had lots of extra details to satisfy my taste. I've ridden a lot of steel frames in my time, this one is stiffer than all of them. When I put the power into the pedals, it picks up speed quickly without any fuss. With 93 gear inches of love, this bike is set up to roll at the speed of cars, sometimes overtaking them at speed with a little smirk on my face."

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