Custom Burls Ti fixed bro-pro

Your biggest problem with close-up pics will be depth of field, i.e. the closer you get, the shallower the area which will remain in focus. The more light you can get on the subject, the less pronounced the problem will be.

Top weenieism on pedals and stem, you're already 62g up on me (Exustar and Bontrager), but how are you doing on budget?

The stem does look great!

£28 for the stem and £43 for the pedals + cleats.

Plus a fiver postage from Deutschland.

Wiggle wanted £40 and £50-something I think so I'm well ahead.

None of it sounds dear in isolation but I still wake up in a cold sweat at the thought of the wife finding out I'm spending £2,200 on a bike with no gears.

I'm wangling £500 of the spend on cycle to work so it'll be a bit less in reality.

£20 for the pedals, I already had the stem, your new budget is about £2400 on the 3:1 ratio and I promise not to tell....

You could probably drop the weight some more with ti bolts

You could probably drop the weight some more with ti bolts

I'm going to do the sums for changing them + crank bolts + chainring bolts + brake nut for Ti but I suspect the £ will be a stretch too far, it's not a total WW build.

Stem's come up reet nice!

The forks arrived last week. I decided on Easton EC90 SLXs for their weight and found some on here in good used order. But for this build the logos are too lairy :

I'd hoped that acetone would take the graphics off, but it wouldn't touch them. So I had to paint them. Bit of a faff, but a good excuse to turn them from satin to gloss using a £6 tin of Halford's finest.

I masked off the dropouts as I figured the nuts would just chip the paint.

As a bonus, the forks weighed 295g before I painted them and 294g after.

Ritchey Pro Micro v4 spud pedals. Ritchey quote 208g, the kitchen scales agree :

Very interested to know how you get on with them (if you installed them on the other bikes), previous experience with a wellgo single sided SPD left me feeling dismayed and replaced it with a Shimano A600.

I've not used them before, my other bikes are all single-sided Shimano 2 bolt spuds which I get on with fine. I keep thinking about proper 3 bolt road cleats but all my shoes are 2 bolt.

I might try these new ones on my road bike on a big ride over Christmas, I'll let you know how it goes. I'm dubious about the fact there are no bearings.

Which single sided Shimano SPD? those?

I have one pair of those I think (A530) and I don't rate them as the platform side has very little grip so is next to useless. You may as well get a smaller pedal without the platform at all.

For a touring or MTB pedal I prefer the M324 : http://www.wiggle.co.uk/shimano-m324-combination-pedals/

which look quite classic, are cheap and have good grip on the platform side. Heavy though, so no good on this bike but I have them on my 90s MTB, road bike and fickswill.

That's exactly why I prefer them as it's similar to a road pedals, the lack of grip make it easier to detect that you're about to attempt clipping in on the wrong side.

Plus, the counterweight also make it easier.

I guess you're right, there will be more looking down to make sure they're the right way up as it wont be as obvious with feel alone.

Twiddling about with them is tougher on the move with a fixed wheel too and flipping them without a platform could be tricky.

I'll see how they go. Worst case I could always learn to trackstand.

Time ATACS or those fancy new Look ones....

Or Mavic's time atac based system.

Time to think about decals.

I don't like the standard Burls ones, they're a bit dull.

Justin is happy to supply the frame without decals, so that's what I'm getting, plain, but with his polished nickel headbadge, I figured he ought to get his name on there somewhere.

Since the build is a bit retro I thought about ripping off the style of classic MASI decal, or a 3RENSHO or similar, but with the BURLS text. But the idea grew a bit and since the frames are made in Russia I asked my sister-in-law, who speaks Russian, for a phonetic translation of Burls.

Apparently that's not quite possible as there is no Russian 'U' but the nearest she could give me was :

БYРЛС

Which sounds more like Boorls, but that will do.

I also liked the idea of the soviet star and world champ colours. Thus idea number 1 is something like :

for the down tube and maybe some little shooting stars on the fork shoulders and top tube.

I had a word with Roboto on here to see if he could help with design and printing, but his machine won't do multi colours so I'm going to talk to my local graphics company about it and see if they have any thoughts.

That look like a weird mash up of the word EPIC.

Specialized might sue you, just sayin'.

Bring it.

I* fought in the Falklands and will start a social media war.

• my uncle Barry
  

Are you getting the aero seattube or just round?

Round all round, inc the downtube, sized for a 27.2 seat post and 1&1/8" steerer.

That pic above was just to show the standard logos.

Glad to hear it!

I done got a delivery today.

1562g including 100g of King headset, so 1462g of shiny loveliness.

Ordered on the 27th of November and with Justin Burls by the 2nd of January, so even with the Christmas break it was 5 weeks.

It's lovely. Flawless as far as I can tell.

I won't get a chance to get any proper pics until the weekend.

That's fantastic turnaround on their part!

Any pics of the full frame?

Nah, he's just teasing.....

The few inches we can see look lovely, nice TIG!