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.
We recently had a 1960 Superlight for renovation for a customer, Tom, who was keen to have a very early 3D style Gothic transfer recreated that he'd found on various sites whilst researching early Mercians and their transfers.
We recently had a 1960 Mercian Superlight to renovate for Tom. The frame was in a little bit of a state, with surface rust and a badly done repair to the seat lug done somewhere / sometime, score marks on the track dropouts (plus any frame with chrome is generally worse for wear than a frame without
Rob Vousten from Holland called in to see us today at the workshop. Rob rode the 65 mile Eroica ride around Derbyshire yesterday, but earlier he dropped in to see the original owner of the bike, Ken Orpe, in Allestree.
Both bikes are Vincitore Specials (purple: 2016, orange: 2018), set up as Audaxing bikes with 28mm tyres, Paul Components Medium Racer breaks, Shimano Ultegra 11sp with 11-40 Cassettes using Wolf Tooth Roadlink, Campagnolo Athena 34/50 cassette and Shimano bar end shifters.
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We recently renovated a lovely 1968 HR Morris frame for our customer, Mr Dawson, the frame is his pride and joy and we were looking forward to seeing this frame restored too.
The Paul Smith tandem is now on display in Singapore after it's initial unveiling at the Wallpaper Handmade X exhibition in Milan. This one-off build was commissioned by Paul Smith early in the year and was an honour to build.
We recently completed a couple of very nice frames for David and his son Oscar, so we asked for pictures once built into complete bikes and thought you'd like to see them.
