James' road racer

A new frame for James who is an old-school road-racer. Made of Columbus Spirit tubing with stainless-steel rear dropouts. This frame includes custom-machined 1-1/8" headset spacers to let James wring more life out of a near-new 1" carbon fork.

The ride report: "Rode the new bike for the first time Sunday. In to Lygon St for a coffee, then back through Ringwood and over Mt Dandenong. Just shy of 100km. The bike felt great! It felt light and stiff, responsive yet stable and predictable. It gives a feeling of confidence while cornering. It is certainly an improvement over the old frame. The weight difference is not that big but the ride feel is very different. It feels rock solid and wants to accelerate. There was no perceivable BB movement while stamping on the pedals. All up, a top ride! Won the mother of all sprints into Ringwood! The new bike feels great when you put the hammer down. With empty biddon cages and no accessories, the bike weighs 8.4kg on the digital bathroom scales. Brilliant! "

I'm pretty stoked: James has been riding for many years and told me the most notable bike he's ridden was one of his brother's Reynolds 753-tubing frames, which 'really leapt forward when accelerating'. The ride-feel of that frame was due to 753 frame-tubes having some of the thinnest tubing-walls of that era*. The tubes on my frames and on this frame in particular have even thinner walls and are much larger diameter so this frame has an even better combination: the liveliness of thin-wall steel tubing and the increased stiffness of the larger tubing diameters. James' older brother is Scott Steward, former Olympian (Cycling — Seoul 1988).

*Ride-feel is about 98% due to the frame-tubing wall thickness and diameter and so differences between the different high strength alloyed-steel tubing, e.g. 531, 753, Life etc. essentially CANNOT be detected. The high strength alloyed-steels are essentially 98% steel, so they all share the same stiffness (Young's Modulus to be all engineering about it). The alloying elements make up only around 1-2% of the material, so while the material strength goes up, the stiffness does not.

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