Alistair's Stainless Adventure Bike
Alistair approached us wanting a very special bike indeed, an off-road road bike that could take 50mm tyres built in Columbus XCr stainless steel. Simple enough, but how about we make it with a matching Reynolds 921 stainless fork, three bottle mounts, rack mounts, carry anything mounts, full internal routing and thru-axles front and rear. No problem we said, you want full custom, you got it!
With the brief done we set about designing the frame. Most of the design issues revolved around the wide clearances and the limited availability of stainless tubing. In order to overcome these problems many parts of this bike were custom machined. As it stands there are no stainless thru-axle fork ends on the market so these were custom machined by Bear Frame Supplies. The rest of the fork was built using Reynolds 921 disc blades tied together with a brushed stainless MTB crown.
At the rear we custom machined some seat-stay caps so that we could move the stays further out to achieve our tyre clearance. These were then brazed onto a in-house machined seat-tube cap. You can see this in the photos where there is a little line of silver around the seat-tube just below the stays. The reason we did this was so we could drop the stays further down the tube and fit our seat-post without a shim.
Lastly we cut a custom twin-plate seat-stay bridge to carry a mudguard mount. The entire frame was brazed together using silver and finished all over by brushing. We opted for no clear coat over the metal so that it stays raw, this will allow the silver to discolour and patina with time. We dropped the frame off to Cole Coatings to get our logos painted on. The aim was to mimic anodising which turned out beautiful in gorgeous emerald green.
The build is finished with SRAM Force 1 Hydro with the ultimate in unfussy off-road riding. The wheels were handbill by DCR Wheels and these were mounted with Challenge tan-walled cross tyres, possibly the best tyres for when the going gets muddy. Without doubt a very special machine to adventure on!
Photos by Nikoo Hamzavi.