A picture’s worth a hundred words, so there’s not much to say about this post other than here are some frame graphics ideas we’ve been working on.

The intention is that these will be painted under a clear-coat lacquer rather than using decals. From an objective point of view, number 1 is probably the front-runner, but I personally like 4 as it’s gotta stripe – and as everyone knows, stripes make you go faster!

As ever, feel free to let us know what you think.

Alongside frame designs, we’ve been thinking about frame graphics and ideas for headtube badges. We’ll have frame graphics to share in the next week or so, but thought we’d show our preferred headtube badge design and would be keen to hear some feedback – good and bad!

The badge will be cast in pewter and although we’re in two minds about best method for attaching to the frame we think the no screw option is much cleaner. In the meantime we’ll be using this as our new Facebook and Twitter icons!

We’ve had a load of interest about what we’re doing with production frames for next year so I thought I’d do a quick update.

Brief history for those who’ve not been paying attention….

Shand Cycles have been hand building one-off custom frames since 2003. Custom building can be a slow process and with a lead time on orders of usually about 6 months, the ordering/building/receiving process could be frustrating for those wanting to get hold of a frame. So, for 2012 we’ve decided to introduce some ‘production’ frames.

These won’t be production frames in the normal sense of the word. Each frame will still be completely handbuilt by us in our workshop in Central Scotland but instead of offering an unlimited choice of geometry, tubing etc, we’ll have 3 models in 3 or 4 sizes. Planning up front like this allows us to make huge efficiencies in both buying our tubing and setting up tools to speed up the process. We will still offer ‘full custom’ frames as normal so please get in touch if you want/need something that isn’t covered by our production models.

We’re moving to a new much larger workshop and we’ll need to do an amount of retooling for this to work but we expect to be up and running, ready to start accepting orders in February 2012.

Here’s some more detail on what we’ll be offering.

Road frame: this is still at an very early stage in the design/planning process. We have some good ideas but the truth is we don’t want to get to crazy with a road race frame. Geometry has pretty much evolved to where it is right now for a reason, it works well, so our road frame will be steel with almost certainly an (optional?) steel fork.
Fairly standard geometry. Super lightweight steel tubeset (maybe Reynolds, maybe Columbus). Almost certainly with clearance for winter tyres and mudguards.

Cross frame: This will be an all-out, no compromise, cross racing frame. Reynolds 853 tubing, S-Bend stays for tyre/heel clearance. Steel straight blade fork. Agressive geometry. No bottle brazeons, no rack or mudguard mounts. Slightly sloping top tube for good standover without compromising the ability to shoulder the bike. Available with
cantis or disks.

AllRoad: This will be very similar to the Cross frame but with a *slightly* more relaxed geometry (slacker head-tube and slightly longer chainstays. Again, 853 tubeset with s-bend stays for clearance. Lots of room for big tyres, mudguards, racks, bottles etc. Disk brake only. Steel fork with brazeons for low rider front rack. This will still be a fast lightweight frame but more versatile than the Cross frame.

All frames available in a wide range of colours, either traditional ‘wet’ paint or powdercoat. Price will include any additional brazeons you want and any configuration of cable routing with internal cable routing optional but at an additional cost.

All frames are handbuilt, fillet brazed. Each frame is built to order and we anticipate something around a 21 day turnaround from order to delivery. Demand will be high for these and as a small operation our output will be relatively low.

Prices are still to be confirmed but we expect to be in the region of £1100-£1300 for frame and forks depending on the model.

We’re still working on a lot of these details and they’re subject to change. If you have any input you feel would be useful, let us know.

In the next few days, our site will be updated with detailed specs of each frame.

As part of our relaunch and building up to our first production frames, we have a survey up and running to find out a bit more about what our (potential) customers are looking for. It’s providing some useful information. This particular stat jumped out at me as being really useful data

Brilliant, that’s that sorted then.

You can click here if you want to take part in the survey.

There’s been lots of stuff happening in the background over the past couple of months here at Shand. One of the issues I’ve struggled with since I started Shand Cycles was the number of bikes I can build in a year and how I can get frames to people quicker without sacrificing quality.

Last year I did a quick trial where I built a number of frames (9 I think) that weren’t custom geometry but were as close as I could get to a production frame. The tubes were all the same, the components like dropouts and bb shells were all the same and I cut and mitered the tubes all at the same time. I assembled the frames in a modular system, I brazed all the front triangles at the same time, went on to the rear triangles then put them all together.

The plan was to see how much time I could save in the setup and configuration of my tooling in order to speed up the construction process. It turned out that I saved a ton of time and the frames that popped out at the end were built with the same care and attention as my custom one-off frames. Where am I going with this ramble??

Well, Shand Cycles is no longer just me and we’re no longer just offering bespoke on-off frames. I’m joined now by Russell Stout who’s coming on board to help move Shand onward and upwards. We’re currently deeply involved in speccing and designing our first production stock frames and it’s all very exciting.

Russell’s passionate about bicycles and bicycle building and we’re both keen to see if we can revisit some of Scotlands history and heritage by building production bicycle frames once again in Scotland.

We’re still in the fairly early stages of all this and in fact we’re looking for as much feedback from riders as possible. We’ve set up a survey that you can take part in (get to it from our contact page), so please take a look at this if you can and we’d really appreciate any input you can give.

Russell will be posting here (hopefully more regularly than I’ve managed to recently) and he’ll also be posting updates and news on our Facebook page and Twitter stream.

We’re also relaunching the website with a fresh new design and new branding for Shand. It would be great if you could let us know what you think about the changes and our plans for the future.

Cheers

A sneak preview of some of what’s to come.
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My web host is moving my server (joy) so there’ll be some website downtime today. Hopefully it’ll be back up and running without too much disruption. Email shouldn’t be affected.

Well,

it’s been about 6 months since the last blog post! Very busy time with all sorts of stuff happening. Lots of exciting bike stuff going on and a lot of non-bike stuff too. My order book has been closed for a few months but as of now, it’s open again.
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Jonathan just picked this up today. We had 2 main aims with this bike, firstly it had to fit right and secondly it had to look like a normal bike. While this wouldn’t normally be a problem, Jonathan is 6’9″ (> 206cm).

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