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.
So while the lockdown continues... we do hope everyone is keeping safe and well.. we've found a couple of posts that were posted to the wrong section of the website and rather than delete them we've posted them here... While we are in lockdown why not send in your pictures and we will get them on th
One of our popular 'vintage' frames has made a come back this year. The Superlight frame was introduced in the early 1960's with any excess metal cut away from the lugs to remove weight.
We've had our copy of The Rough-Stuff Fellowship Archive book for a few months now, we bought it in Hardback through the Kickstarter Campaign and the book is currently on it's second print run with a paperback option and it really is a great publication.
Over the years we've tried many ways of filling pitting, the only permanent solution is replacement of tubes or filling with brass or silver, but this is time consuming and therefore can be costly (and excess heat to the middle thin part of the tubes - isn't recommended).
We were pleased to hear from a customer about renovating a rare 1951 Super Bi Laminated Mercian, a frame that no one here at the workshop had ever seen in the flesh (and we've got a total of over 130 Mercian years between us all).
We recently renovated a couple of Raleigh Flyers for John, who worked with a subcontracted company at Raleigh in the late 1970's in their paint division. Raleigh were developing powder coating as a new technology brought over from the US and fine tuning it to suit their production. John had been lo
We Instagramed a picture of this 1952 Mercian bike, which was bought NEW from the original Mercian shop, a Whitemeadows Mercian frame. The original owner, Alan Gifford, decided recently to part with his dearly loved Mercian and found it a new owner who would look after it, as he had for the past 67
