The 6th Bespoked Hand Built Bicycle Show was on last weekend. Andy made the long drive down to see some of the most beautiful bikes the UK has to offer.
Most people arrived by bicycle – the parking spaces outside had a huge variety of interesting machines.
But enough of Bespoked 2016 Reader's Wives! We're here for the real bike porn! Once inside even the poshest of normal bikes looks distinctly ordinary in comparison.
The level of attention to detail in this build by Meteor was amazing. The fully polished chrome frame makes my fingers hurt just thinking about the number of hours spent getting that perfect mirror shine.
Custom fabricated hub shells holding Sturmey Archer internals, polished and copper plated. Lush! Lots of small details, such as the torque reaction arm from the brake being bolted directly to the dropout and extremely bonnie brake lever arm.
Quite a lot of builders were showing off bikes loaded with bike-packing gear.
I liked the way that this Restrap bag attatched to this Quirk frame – water bottle bosses on the underside of the frame had buttons bolted onto them that fit into keyhole sockets on the bag. The pic doesn’t show this very well sadly!
Shand had a very decent sized stand displaying their excellent range of bikes. I didn’t get any good photos of their bikes sadly, but I did spend a good amount of time ogling them! One thing that interested me greatly was the prototype Cotic Rocket that they made. Steel full suspension MTBs are a rare thing but I bet this Cotic/Shand kicks ass!
Probably my favourite bike of the show was a road singlespeed bike by Winter Bicycles of Oregon.
The paint, the handcrafted lugs, the handcrafted stem that echoes the lugs, old school parts build contrasting the deep section ENVE rims. Fantastic!
Winter also had a singlespeed 26+ mountain bike at the show. The paint reminded me of 90s Kleins and the cover of Ride the Lightning. Ace little bike.
I was very impressed with the quality of paint work throughout the show.
Overall, very inspiring and well worth the journey, even though I missed then Q and A with Keth Bontrager….
