Andy Carr started spoon Customs in 2015 after he ‘ran away to the mountains to chase a dream and start a handmade bike company’. His self-commissioned brief was to ‘make rad bikes’, and judging by Spoon Custom’s latest offering, this IzoardRR Disc, Carr is doing just that.
Spoon is based in Brighton, operating out of Carr’s Orange Row Speed Shop in the North Laine. That area isn’t exactly famed for its mountains, so the IzoardRR Disc was design-tested in the French Alps, on and around – you guessed it – the Col D’Izoard, right near Spoon’s spiritual home, the town of Montgenevre.
‘We set out to make a custom bike for the Alps, with a precise custom fit and the best fabrication possible, says Carr. ‘And while we love the braking on the IzoardRR rim brake version, it can be brutal on carbon rims on the sorts of descents you find in the Alps. Plus more and more customers were asking for the confidence of disc brakes for all weather conditions.’
That’s a pretty standard argument for disc brakes – and rightly so – but there’s very little that’s usual about the execution here.
The IzoardRR Disc’s steel tubing is custom specced from Columbus and custom finished in the same black as used on the McLaren SLR supercar, and while Carr builds up the frames in Brighton, they hail from the Veneto region of northern Italy, where they’re made by a well-respected framebuilding dynasty that specialises in fabricating high-end steel.
It’s much like the current model for pretty much every bike brand out there – design bike at home, get bike made by a contractor overseas – only with Spoon Customs, every bike is bespoke to the rider, from the headtube angle to the material of the logo, which here happens to be 24-karat gold leaf.
If you fancy yourself some Spoon action, go to spooncustoms.com
Image Credit: Ben Hodson