When you buy your custom-built Mercian frame there are some decisions you’ll need to make to get your bike riding and looking exactly how you want it. Probably the most personal and hardest choice is which colours you want your frame painted.
To help make this decision easier we have launched the Mercian Configurator to let you see your own bike come to life and experiment with different designs and colours.
Here at Mercian Cycles we don’t just spray our new frames we renovate, refurbish and respray well-travelled Mercians and frames from other manufacturers. You can use the configurator to help plan your new paint scheme whether it’s for your 1960’s 531 steel Holdsworth Tourer, your 80s Peugeot road bike, your 90s cromo Kona mountain bike or anything else that's lurking in your shed waiting for a new lease of life.
Head to merciancycles.co.uk/configurator it works best on your laptop or desk top and when you click “Start Configurator” a 3-dimensional model of our latest Gravel bike, the Mercian Ventura will load. Clicking and dragging with your mouse or touch pad will spin and rotate the bike to let you see your design from different angles.
To change the colour of your new ride click the “Whole Bike” tab, this will bring up the four paint families you’ll find for each of the customisable parts:
Enamel – deep gloss colours
Pearl – slightly sparkly metallic colours
Polychromatic – flatter metallic colours
Flamboyant – deep lustrous “Candy” colours
You can find more explanations of the colours at Our Craft | Mercian , picking the family will open a menu of the colours, hovering over the colour will pop-up its name and clicking to select will re-spray your bike in one of the 62 standard colours.
Clicking the small Back Arrow beneath the colours will take you back to the paint family menu, and back again to the main menu. Don’t click the Browser back button as it will navigate your out of the Configurator, though Clicking Forward should take you back to your bike.
It is very hard to truly convey the appearance of these colours, particularly the Pearls and Flamboyants whose appearances will change even with a passing cloud. But we hope the configurator will give you a good sense of how the colours combine. If you are lucky enough to live near Derbyshire we have sample tube sprayed in each colour to view. The sprayshop are also working on a way to more easily produce samples of each colour that will be available from our online shop soon.
We can now fully personalise your paint job, you can separately choose the colour of your fork, chainstays, seatstays, bridge and dropouts by clicking the frame component tab and through the paint family menu to pick you individual colour.
You can also choose a bespoke deign for your bike’s seat tube:
No Contrast – the whole seat tube the same as the frame
Single Band – a single wide band on the seat tube
Three Bands – A central wide band with two matching narrow bands
Barbers Pole – the signature Mercain design of a brabers pole spiralling round the seat tube
Again, you can pick the colour from the colour family and also an outline colour to separate the contrast and main paint finishes.
The last thing we can customise is the decals, both the Mercian Gothic Logo and the Gothic “M” Headcrest. We can choose the main colour and outline colour. Here though we can choose any colour as we can individually print any colour decal, defined by its RGB value. Or you can use the Dropper Tool to select a colour already on your frame.
Once you have had a play and found your dream combination you can download a png file of your design with the paint details on using the download button, or you can hit the Share button which will copy a link to your bike to your clipboard that you can then send to friends, riding buddies or us here at Mercian for a quote. Contact | Mercian
So there’s quite a few possible combinations to play with (14 trillion without allowing for decals if my maths is correct) but don’t let that hinder you if there’s something special you want on your new frame that we haven’t modelled in the configurator: fades, left/right split, more panels, more barber’s poles, stars, to match your favourite album cover or football team, anything - just contact us and we can start getting your idea on the road. Contact | Mercian
The configurator shows our new All Road bike, the Ventura, but these paint schemes will transfer seamlessly to our other fillet brazed bikes, the Pro Lugless road bike and the Pro Lugless 44 Gravel bike. We are working on a lugged model for the Configurator. With the lugs separating out each steel tube the lugged frames lend themselves to slightly different designs particularly contrast head tubes, so these will be available to experiment with soon.
The Configurator models the Gothic Mercian Downtube logo, we have other standard decals available in different fonts: Block Mercian; 50s and Fairground. Similarly the configurator doesn’t have our other head crest options of the World Over, Decal, the 50s head crest or even the enamel head-badge versions of these two designs.
In reality there aren’t quite 14 trillion combinations, as there are some combinations that we aren’t able to do due to the various under-layers of paint that make up some colours, especially if there are many different colours in your design. But have a play and share it with us and we’ll see what we can do.
The price of each new Mercian frame includes finishing in one colour for your frame, a separate fork colour (if wanted) and a set of Mercian Decals. The extra time taken to prepare and mask the tubes for each extra colours will increase the price. Once you have your design share it with us for a quote and to check it’s going to work exactly how you want. Contact | Mercian