My Audax

Now and again I make myself a new bike. It’s not the most profitable thing to be doing with my time, but I guess I’m clear that building bikes isn’t going to make me rich so I may as well get to have nice bikes. Building for myself is also a good time to try out new things, rather than testing them out on customer builds. So this bike has a few touches here and there that I’ve not done before: scalloped top eyes, clamping brass bosses for the seat post and stem, and a straight blade twin plate fork.

The brass barrel clamps were a detail I’d seen on a few of Robin Mather’s bikes back in the day, and I wanted to reference those, while taking them a step further than he did by integrating them into the stem extension and the top tube. They are, let’s say… time consuming… to fabricate, but I really like the result.

The bike is really designed for the kind of road riding I do: steady audaxes, winter hacking on the back lanes, or summer day rides with a picnic. The Wizard Works bag up front can accommodate the extra layers, camera and sandwiches/flapjack I need for a ride, while the mudguards and lighting is standard Clandestine issue. The dynamo cabling is neatly internal everywhere, popping out through the seat post, a detail I first saw on a Chapman (thanks Brian!). The gearing is appropriately low for me, with an ultracompact 29/42 Middleburn chainset.

It turns out that the colour is impossible for me to photograph/edit accurately, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s a teal kind sea green rather than the blue it looks like here…

It was built to display at Bespoked 2022. It ended up being photographed by the Radavist which is a real privilege for me. A long life of thousands of kilometres lies ahead for this one.