1946 was a special year: Paul Smith was born in Nottingham, Mercian Cycles was founded in Derby. Paul was a very good cyclist in his youth and rode Mercian bikes - his fondness for Mercian has remained, and the feeling is mutual. To help celebrate our 80th anniversaries, Paul has designed two special limited edition bikes, which were launched at Selfridges in early September.
After many months of effort, and a tremendous grant to help us on our way from Erewash Council, we launched three new eBike models at the end of August.
A great crowd attended our Festival of Steel ride out in August, to help celebrate the 80th anniversary of Mercian. Many thanks to Belper Cycling Club, and Andre Toczek in particular, for helping organise the event and doing a great job on the 4 rides. And a big thankyou to all those who attended the event - we estimate approx 300 people turned up to help us mark the day, but give it a few months and the estimate will have grown to 3000!
Congratulations to Jill Scott for completing her epic 388 mile "Coming Home" challenge, raising almost £500k for Sport Relief! Mercian were proud to help.
We doff a very large cycling cap to Greg James, who finished his 8-day pan-UK challenge in Edinburgh on Friday raising over £4.5mln. What an incredible amount!
After six decades Mercian Cycles workshop has moved.
Through the years there were a number of locations in Derby for the shop, the frame building workshop and sprayshop. But since about 1965 the frame building and painting was taking place at the Pontefract Street workshop.
Framebuilder Tim took the chance to head out on the Ventura All-road bike to go and pick up some dropouts from Bear Frame Supplies. An ideal opportunity to capture some video of the custom steel Ventura out on the gravel trails of the Derbyshire Peak District.
A day at the workshop/office for me today doing a lot of small jobs which have mounted up and just need to be done. In the picture you can see some of the taps which are used to clean up the threads before the frames go to the shop. In the background you can just see a alloy frame which is being han
This is a photo of a small part of our clothing room which is upstairs at our shop. I have only put this on because we are amazed how many people do not know its there. We have a large stock of Campagnolo , Altura, Oakley and Specialized to name a but a few lines in stock.
Please remember when you want your rear wheel rebuilt you take the freewheel off Before you cut the spokes out. It makes the wheel builders job very difficult to say the least. We have no way of holding the hub to remove the freewheel to get the spokes into the spoke holes. This one belongs to one
First of all sorry about the lack of a post last night I had to go out almost direct from work so had very little time on my hands. Anyway enough of the excuses lets get on with it. Ok not the best picture in the world but it does the job. As you see its one of our Velocita frames which come with De
For me it was a short day at the shop today. I had to take a couple of our bikes down to London for a photo shoot for leading mens style magazine. They will be at London for a few days while the photos are taken then I will go and pick them up and hopefully a few very nice photos.
This is John our main shop man and the surfer dude. The picture was sent in by Mercians biggest fan Chris from one of his many visits to our shop from Ireland. Chris has a great flickr site and definitely worth a look which I will try and link elsewhere on this site. (by the way Chris I have had
Just before I waffle on about the picture we have a vacancy in our shop details can be found at http://www.bikebiz.com/jobs/1094/retail-sales-person John wants to retire so he can go surfing all day but we will not let him go until we have a replacement to fill his boots. He is a tough act to follo
Meet Jeff The Ergo Man, if there is anything you need to know about ergos Jeff is the man. He is also our tandem man and has held 6 National Competition tandem Records. One of them lasted for 28 years - the mens 50 which he did with Richard. He was also in the first mixed team to break 50 minutes
Well this frame left us today on its way up to Scotland and I think it looks the business ( lucky Peter ). It has the new vinyl transfers which to my eyes look really nice. On a different tack we ( not me but our web builders) are working on a new web site which will soon be released to the unsuspec
First of all thank you Fred for your comment I will try and sort it. The email address is in my profile by the way. Today with help from Carl ( in the picture) was a frame checking day. We check all the custom/ stock frames before paint. I built another Rohloff wheel today (700c) I do like them they
Well at last we know what the new 11spd equipment is all about. As you can see the rear gears look very nice especially the super record rear gear. The Ergo lever looks very nice but dare I say it look,s a bit like S-Ram to me ! Well the total super record group should be about £1600.00 when it land
Just a picture today of a Vincitore track bike ( yet another track bike) being put together by Gav the shop manager. Jeff the ergo man has been looking at the Mercian blog today and I think he is about to put one together himself about the South Pennine Road Club if he does I will link it . I was ov
