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.
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.
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.
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.
Rob Vousten from Holland called in to see us today at the workshop. Rob rode the 65 mile Eroica ride around Derbyshire yesterday, but earlier he dropped in to see the original owner of the bike, Ken Orpe, in Allestree.
Both bikes are Vincitore Specials (purple: 2016, orange: 2018), set up as Audaxing bikes with 28mm tyres, Paul Components Medium Racer breaks, Shimano Ultegra 11sp with 11-40 Cassettes using Wolf Tooth Roadlink, Campagnolo Athena 34/50 cassette and Shimano bar end shifters.
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We recently renovated a lovely 1968 HR Morris frame for our customer, Mr Dawson, the frame is his pride and joy and we were looking forward to seeing this frame restored too.
The Paul Smith tandem is now on display in Singapore after it's initial unveiling at the Wallpaper Handmade X exhibition in Milan. This one-off build was commissioned by Paul Smith early in the year and was an honour to build.
We recently completed a couple of very nice frames for David and his son Oscar, so we asked for pictures once built into complete bikes and thought you'd like to see them.
Many thanks again for renovating my 1960 Viking Severn Valley 531 frame. I have now rebuilt the bike - see attached pics - the original components are long gone and I set up the current configuration in the early 1980's: Specialized/Super Champion 27' wheels; Campagnolo Super Record chainset (Mavic