Mercian brand of bikes?

[froze]

Can anyone tell me more about Mercian bikes? I was considering an Atlantis and now this Mercian brand popped up and I got very interested. http://www.merciancycles.com/index.asp

[Grant McLean]

website says is all...

Mercian - The world renowned specialists in custom handbuilt frames and cycles where craftsmanship and quality count


Cheeky.

G

[Tony Prioli]

I think Ben Serotta used to work at Mercian. I could be wrong, but he surely mentioned Bob Jackson in england, and I think Mercian.

Tony

[Climb01742]

i believe good doctor doof had his sites set on a mercian as his ideal race bike...maybe about four ideal race bikes ago, if memory serves. :D perhaps PM the good doc.

[Dr. Doofus]

it wasn't the ideal race bike

it was going to be the cool cheap race bike

(and yeah, there are lots of good bikes out there...and doof looks at too much bike pron..."I want them all...I want them all...I want them all...")

anyway

they do really nice work -- seen two new King of Mercia ones in the last year ridden by one really wobbly dude with a mirror on his helmet and his pal the dude with an eagle feather on his helmet who holds wicked pissa track stands at stoplights and ate a burrito on a monday-night ride no hands for about ten minutes in a pack (doof loves that guy). brazing is good, and doof's pal with the alignment table in his workshop slapped one on after it was unwrapped and it was as straight as you could want, within reason...the build quality seems pretty good....

dofo sort of worries about the geo, because British Bikes Are Crap (74 STA, 74 HA and 38mm of rake? Ok....the trail is 56mm...but wha?????)

however, check out www.bikelugs.com in the gallery section...there's some kind of big leather bag bike that KP designed, was built by Mercian, and sold by some cats in a bike shop someplace...

so doof would say yeah, you want an old-school lugged bike with a weirdo factor of 9/10, get a mercian, but have somebody else who knows what they're doing design it, cause they're british, and British Bikes Are Crap

if fdoo was a real SOB, he might send KP's "doof's absolute amazing booty-stomping race bike" double-secret blueprints to Derby and have 'em make one, but then Paul at RL would have to hunt dofo down and kill him after being nice and answering a half-dozen emails this last week

so there

so Rock Lobsters are cool, Mercians are really good big leather bag bikes, except maybe see if some randonneur guru should design yours before sending the numbers to the UK because British Bikes and British Food Suck but some British Chicks are Hot in a Helen Mirren or Olivia De Havilland Kind of Way so maybe it evens out

[dbrk]

Heck, I got a basement full of Mercians. The last one was made from 531 Professional which was pretty rare even in the day---40 years ago?---when it was last made. And Mercian did everything I asked and then baked the bike (you should read about their baking process if you haven't...). I've another old 531 Mercian that I got for cheap and then spent a bloody fortune on to have JB paint a beautiful barbershop pole on the seat tube. I could have sent it back to Mercian and paid the shipping both ways for less, I am sure, but some things deserve excess. You can have a custom Mercian delivered to your door for under $1000, all said and done. The bikes are made just as they have been forever and that was plenty good enough from the beginning. When you ask Mercian for things like over the bb cable routing, which hasn't been routinely done since the 80s, they don't even flinch. All sorts of lug styles...oh, and you want, say, Campag 1010A dropouts, sure, no problem. These guys are just great, happy and reasonably prosperous in their time warp, they'll also filet braze you a modern looking steel bike with OS tubing but how would that look like a Mercian?

Two of my Mercians are stock geos, the last one to my design, and they all ride great. In general---and this comes from seeing lots of bikes now without paint and many sawn in pieces---it is fair to say that the British bikes of the boom era and even before are generally better made than their Italian and French counterparts. I mean that in terms of brazing and overall construction rather than design or ride. It is downright amazing how a bike can be made and still ride fine. But Mercians are just always nicely made and always ride fine. I can never pass one up and am in the midst of converting a middle 80s frame to 650B wheels, just for fun.

Oh, one more thing...say "Dar-bee" when you read Derby.

the world over,

dbrk

[Vancouverdave]

Don't buy a new one; there are plenty of US custom builders who aren't stratospherically expensive by the custom steel standard--Rodriguez, Lyon, Della Santa, Landshark. Buy domestic!

[vaxn8r]

Love those barbershop pole seat tubes. Classic!

[Vancouverdave]

The barbershop pole seat tube can exist on other bikes--I saw a very English-looking Davidson with that treatment.