You’ve just made a custom carbon bike for UFC fighter Conor McGregor, so where next? You just wait for the call from unified world heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua, of course.
‘Anthony Joshua saw the McGregor bike and that opened up his eyes to the world of custom,’ says FiftyOne’s owner, Aidan Duff. ‘We were contacted by his management team back in October, they had questions about actually getting a bike that fitted and if carbon was a suitable material.’
The answer was a resounding yes, carbon fibre being eminently tuneable as a material, so too the tube-to-tube construction method used by the Dublin-based custom framebuilders. And it needs to be, because Joshua is quite a big chap at 6’5”.
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Not quite as big as pro-cyclist Conor Dunne (Israel Cycling Academy), mid you, who stands at 6’9”, but to put Joshua in perspective: while the peloton’s tallest cyclist weighs 88kg, Joshua weighs 113kg.
‘It’s the biggest bike we’ve built to date, so we’ve used a few tricks to keep the bike looking graceful and not like a garden gate – head and seat tube extensions, changing where the down tube meets the head tube etc,’ says Duff. ‘The bike has our XL carbon reinforcement carbon fibre wrap, and the naked tubes have also undergone our new plasma ablation system.’
Those few tweaks really work aesthetically – this bike doesn’t overtly look like it has a 240mm head tube or 835mm seat height. But it’s the construction details and paint underpinning this build that makes it suitable for Joshua.
‘Plasma ablation’ (or CPA – ‘controlled polymer ablation’ to give it the technical name) is a system FiftyOne has begun using in conjunction with its developers, University College Dublin.
CPA effectively strips cured carbon fibres of their epoxy resin without damaging the fibres themselves, thus providing a larger, cleaner surface area for carbon-to-carbon fibre bonds such as in a bike frame’s joints. Said joints then exhibit up to 21% increased shear strength, says Duff*. In short, a CPA-built bike is stronger and uses marginally less material.
The bottom line is this FiftyOne should serve an athlete the size of Joshua just fine. But as ever with FiftyOne, that isn’t enough. The paint had to be not just custom but personal, so the bike’s paint was designed in consultation with the boxer and is adorned with a hand painted lion head on the headtube and slogans such as ‘25:7’ (Joshua’s work ethic) and ‘2-2-0-1’, meaning ‘second to no one’.
‘I’m told cycling plays a relatively minor role in Joshua’s fight preparation, but it’s a key one in that it’s time away from the gym, the intensity of the bags and the impact that goes with them.
His management team all cycle so I think the plan is to use the bike to help maintain a high level of aerobic fitness. But combat sports, fighters and FiftyOne? Don’t ask. Why we can’t make a bike for Greg Van Avermaet or someone like that I have no idea. One day!’
How does a FiftyOne bike ride? Read Cyclist’s review here.
For more details see fiftyonebikes.com.
*The ‘ablation’, eg the removal of resin, is done by a concentrated plasma beam, which in Layman’s terms operates a bit like a miniature bolt of lighting – sort of – and in Wikipedia sciency terms is created by ‘heating or subjecting a neutral gas to an electromagnetic field to the point where an ionized gaseous substance becomes increasingly electrically conductive’.
