Showing posts with label vintage frame. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vintage frame. Show all posts

06 January 2018

A Mercian I Can't Ride

If you've been reading this blog, one thing you know is that I'm a Mercian fan.  I generally like traditional-style lugged and fillet-brazed steel frames, and Mercian is making, in my opinion, some of the best iterations available today.  And, of course, their older frames are great examples of everything I (and, possibly, you) love about vintage bikes.

Still, there are a few Mercians I would never ride.  Actually, the ones I wouldn't ride are, mostly, the ones I could not ride.  Here is one:




Of course, the reason I never could ride such a frame is that it's waaay too big for me.  The seller says it's a 71cm frame.  All of my Mercians--as well as my Trek and Fuji--are in the 56 cm (center to center seat tube) range.  So were most of the bikes I've owned and ridden for nearly four decades.



If I were a collector, though, I would want that frame.  How many other people have a Mercian with lateral tube inside the "diamond"?  I know a few bike makers and marketers, such as Rivendell, make or offer bikes with similar designs.  And, I would imagine, Mercian and other builders would make such a frame for you as a special order.  I would guess, though, that they would want to build such a frame for you if you really needed it--say, if you were very tall (as the owner of that frame probably is/was) or were going on a world tour and carrying all of your worldly possessions along paths that make the Ho Chi Minh trail look like a Beverly Hills street.



If you've been reading this blog, you probably can tell that I like the colors on that frame, too!  Just sayin'....