Pedal Press

We doff a very large cycling cap to Greg James, who finished his 8-day pan-UK challenge in Edinburgh on Friday raising over £4.5mln.  What an incredible amount! 

After six decades Mercian Cycles workshop has moved.

Through the years there were a number of locations in Derby for the shop, the frame building workshop and sprayshop. But since about 1965 the frame building and painting was taking place at the Pontefract Street workshop.

Cara Grimwade is soon to take on one of the most extreme ‘triathlons’ we have heard of.

Mercian is proud to play its part in Greg James’ upcoming awesome challenge for Comic Relief. 

Framebuilder Tim took the chance to head out on the Ventura All-road bike to go and pick up some dropouts from Bear Frame Supplies. An ideal opportunity to capture some video of the custom steel Ventura out on the gravel trails of the Derbyshire Peak District.

The most personal and hardest choice when buying your custom built Mercian bike frame is choosing which colours to have it painted

Congrats to Dave Round (and the rest of the Paris2Nice crew!) who recently finished the Paris2Nice charity ride.

Launched to celebrate 80 years of Mercian, the Ventura Allroad is a sleek, steel all-rounder built for road and gravel. One bike. Endless adventures.

Mercian has been hand-building steel bikes in Derby since 1946. Staff-owned and proud of our 80-year legacy, we remain dedicated to crafting one-off bikes the traditional way – by hand, for life.

To celebrate Derby County’s 50th anniversary title win – and Mercian’s 80th – we built a one-off Superlight road bike, raising nearly £4,000 for the Derby County Community Trust. A true Derby icon, made in Derby.

To help mark our 80th year, we’re proudly supporting British para-cyclist Calum O’Neill on his journey to LA 2028 with a custom-built Mercian trike.

Dave’s custom Ventura Allroad – built for his Paris-to-Nice charity ride and dedicated to his son, Conor – has already raised over €21,000 for mental health charity Aware.

Update:

One of our popular 'vintage' frames has made a come back this year. The Superlight frame was introduced in the early 1960's with any excess metal cut away from the lugs to remove weight.

We've had our copy of The Rough-Stuff Fellowship Archive book for a few months now, we bought it in Hardback through the Kickstarter Campaign and the book is currently on it's second print run with a paperback option and it really is a great publication.

AN UPDATE TO THE STORY BELOW - SADLY DUE TO CORONAVIRUS, THE CHARITY RIDE HAS BEEN POSTPONED.

Over the years we've tried many ways of filling pitting, the only permanent solution is replacement of tubes or filling with brass or silver, but this is time consuming and therefore can be costly (and excess heat to the middle thin part of the tubes - isn't recommended).

We were pleased to hear from a customer about renovating a rare 1951 Super Bi Laminated Mercian, a frame that no one here at the workshop had ever seen in the flesh (and we've got a total of over 130 Mercian years between us all).

We recently renovated a couple of Raleigh Flyers for John, who worked with a subcontracted company at Raleigh in the late 1970's in their paint division. Raleigh were developing powder coating as a new technology brought over from the US and fine tuning it to suit their production.  John had been lo

Only a few details send in with these photographs

We Instagramed a picture of this 1952 Mercian bike, which was bought NEW from the original Mercian shop, a Whitemeadows Mercian frame. The original owner, Alan Gifford, decided recently to part with his dearly loved Mercian and found it a new owner who would look after it, as he had for the past 67

We recently had a 1960 Superlight for renovation for a customer, Tom, who was keen to have a very early 3D style Gothic transfer recreated that he'd found on various sites whilst researching early Mercians and their transfers.

We recently had a 1960 Mercian Superlight to renovate for Tom. The frame was in a little bit of a state, with surface rust and a badly done repair to the seat lug done somewhere / sometime, score marks on the track dropouts (plus any frame with chrome is generally worse for wear than a frame without