Classic Steel Road Bikes
What do you think of Simon Smythe's restomod Chas Roberts?
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00:00 I ride a lot of carbon bikes here in my day job at Cycling Weekly, but on a Sunday morning
00:14 you're more likely to find me heading out to some far-flung chintzy cafe with my clubmates
00:20 on a steel bike.
00:22 Steel is real is a bit of a cliche now, but I just love the fact, the thought, that my
00:26 bike was made by a local frame builder in a small workshop instead of popping out of
00:31 a mould in a huge factory on the other side of the world.
00:35 In my opinion, some of the best steel frames were made by Roberts in Croydon from the 1960s
00:39 until 2015 when they closed their doors.
00:43 So when a clubmate of mine said that he was wanting to get rid of his Roberts, I could
00:46 just hardly get round to his house fast enough.
00:48 I was knocking on the door virtually before he'd finished typing the WhatsApp message.
00:52 My clubmate had the frame made to measure in 2001 out of Columbus Max tubing, which
00:57 was the stiffest tubing there was at the time.
00:59 It was his number one race bike, and when I first saw it, it was black but had a sort
01:05 of a brown growth on it from sitting in his garage for years.
01:08 It really needed rescuing pretty badly.
01:11 So I took it to Colourtec in Dartford to be blasted and resprayed by Dave Crow, who actually
01:16 used to spray Roberts frames for Roberts themselves before they closed.
01:20 So I knew the frame was in really good hands and he's a great sprayer.
01:24 I really rate his work.
01:25 And here it is.
01:28 I'm really pleased with it.
01:33 I asked Dave to copy a Trek Project One paint scheme that I really liked, and I think he's
01:39 done such a good job of it.
01:40 It's actually even nicer than the original Trek.
01:42 He used automotive two-pack acrylic enamel paint over a metallic base coat, and it just
01:47 looks really stunning, especially in the daylight.
01:50 And the cost to do the frame and the fork, which is a carbon Columbus fork, was £200.
01:56 And I think that's a pretty fair price for giving a bike like this a new lease of life.
02:01 There's nothing like the ride of a really good steel bike.
02:04 The feel of steel is how the saying goes.
02:06 I've heard it said that really steel is the benchmark for the way a bike should ride,
02:11 and every other bike is trying to copy the ride of steel, but just making it lighter
02:14 like carbon does, or making it stiffer like aluminium does.
02:18 But really, steel is the ride.
02:21 The workmanship is just such high quality.
02:24 The fillet brazing is just amazing.
02:26 One tube just flows into the other really seamlessly.
02:30 It's really lovely work.
02:31 It was a race frame, but it actually weighs just over two kilos, the frame itself, without
02:35 the fork.
02:36 And that seems like a hell of a heavy weight these days.
02:39 It's like twice the weight of a carbon bike.
02:42 But that was how it was at the time, and I think that really the weight with this type
02:46 of bike, it doesn't really matter so much.
02:48 And with what I'm going to be doing on it, which is club runs and fast-paced riding,
02:53 it's a cafe racer, it doesn't really matter that it's a bit heavier than a carbon bike.
02:58 Yes, the frame is 20 years old, but I didn't want to build it up into some kind of museum
03:02 piece out of retro components, NOS, that were painstakingly sourced on eBay or anything
03:07 like that.
03:08 I wanted it to be a modern bike that I could ride, and that meant a modern groupset with
03:12 modern ratios.
03:13 Okay, so Shimano, everybody knows that it's great functionally, it works brilliantly,
03:18 but a frame like this really needs Campagnolo.
03:22 So I've got a full rim brake mechanical Campagnolo Chorus groupset.
03:27 Chorus is high-end, but it's not ridiculously expensive.
03:30 It's a little bit more expensive than Shimano Ultegra.
03:33 You're looking at about £1,250 for the whole groupset, but that's a whole £600 cheaper
03:39 than record for about 100 grams extra weight, so it makes a lot of sense.
03:45 The other thing about Chorus is that it's aimed at keen amateurs rather than pros, which
03:48 really suits my purposes perfectly.
03:51 So I've got 52/36 up front, and I've gone for the 11/29 cassette, which is the closest
03:57 ratio cassette you can get with Chorus, and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get up any
04:01 hill in Surrey on a bottom gear of 36/29, which is a lot lower than this bike probably
04:07 had originally 20 years ago.
04:09 A Campagnolo groupset deserves Campagnolo wheels, and these are the Bora WTO45s.
04:15 I've ridden them a couple of times recently on a couple of different test bikes, and they're
04:19 just some of my favourite wheels at the moment.
04:21 They are lightweight at just under 1,500 grams.
04:24 They're stiff, they're aerodynamic, and they have an internal rim width of 19 millimetres,
04:29 which is wider than the type of wheels that that bike was designed for, but I'm pretty
04:35 sure that they'll just about fit in.
04:36 The clearance is going to be pretty tight, but in those days, tight clearance was what
04:41 racing bikes were all about.
04:43 The more fag paper the clearance, the faster your bike was.
04:47 I've already got the tyres on these.
04:48 They're the Vittoria Corsa Graphene 2.0s.
04:51 They're really lovely, supple tyre, beautiful rolling, and Italian, which goes nicely with
04:57 Campagnolo.
04:58 So, these are going to be my tyres.
05:01 The finishing kit is by Vision, and it's all carbon, and it's very statement-y, and it's
05:06 pretty expensive too, but this is a dream build after all.
05:10 This is the handlebar I'm going to be using.
05:12 This is the Vision Metron bar.
05:14 It's very lightweight at 250 grams.
05:17 It's very expensive at 350 pounds, and I think it's going to look great on this bike.
05:22 The stem is another Vision stem.
05:24 It's the TriMax Carbon.
05:26 It's actually aluminium with a carbon skin.
05:28 What I really like about it is it's got this little faceplate cover, which has a kind of
05:32 a look of alien about it.
05:35 So, this stem is for an inch and an eighth steerer, but an old bike like this has a one-inch
05:40 steerer, so I've got this shim that I'm going to have to use in the stem to make sure it
05:44 fits snugly around the head tube.
05:46 The Vision Metron seatpost is another component from Vision's top-level range, and it's another
05:51 money-no-objects component, which costs over 200 pounds.
05:55 As for the saddle, I've gone for really what works for me, rather than something that's
05:59 really expensive and showy, and it's this Selle Italia SLR Superflow, which has a nice
06:06 shape, suits me, and just manganese rails, ordinary manganese rails.
06:12 That's all I need.
06:13 It just works.
06:15 I'm going to be wrapping the bars in this Fizik Micro-Tex Classic bar tape, which has
06:20 these nice little perforations that look quite authentic.
06:23 I used to insist on white bar tape and a white saddle for all my race bikes, but in this
06:28 case I don't want to distract away from the really beautiful frame.
06:33 Modern handmade steel bikes have to have a Kris King headset.
06:37 They're said to last a lifetime, and this one actually is already pretty old.
06:41 This Kris King one-inch no-thread set is probably about the same age as the bike.
06:45 It's got to be 20 years old.
06:47 This was the first type of headset which replaced the quill stem in the threaded headset, hence
06:52 no-thread set.
06:54 You can still get them in lots of pretty colors as well, but black is nice for this, and it's
07:01 the only one that my friend had anyway.
07:04 This is the only old part on the bike, apart from the rider.
07:09 I'm going to use the new Wahoo Speedplay Zero pedals.
07:12 I really like these.
07:13 I like the look of them.
07:14 I like the feel of the free float.
07:16 I even like the sound of them clipping in and clipping out.
07:20 I think these are going to really get me off to a good start with this bike.
07:24 Now we're going to head to the workshop and start building it up.
07:26 Hopefully it's going to be done in time for me to get a ride into the pub later.
07:30 [music]
07:32 [music]
07:35 [music]
07:37 [music]
07:47 [music]
08:03 [music]
08:05 So here it is, the Roberts Cafe Racer, and I'm really pleased with the way it turned
08:15 out.
08:16 It was just really nice to build.
08:18 The good thing about external cabling is that it's just easy to get them in.
08:21 You do the run, they pop out the other side, and there's no messing around.
08:25 I actually really like the look of the cables.
08:27 There's something about the curve of the cable that really goes so nicely.
08:31 It actually sets off a steel frame really nicely.
08:35 Why would you want to hide that?
08:37 I know I chose every component for this bike for myself, so in theory I knew what it was
08:40 going to look like, but it really has surpassed all my expectations.
08:44 I think it just looks amazing, and I literally can't stop staring at it.
08:48 The other thing is it's really light.
08:50 It's much lighter than I thought it was going to be, just under 8.2 kilos, which is just
08:53 under 18 pounds in old money.
08:56 I think that's pretty impressive for a bike with a steel frame, especially a 20-year-old
09:00 steel frame.
09:01 Although the cables went in really nicely, we did have a couple of little snags.
09:06 One of them was with the Campagnolo chain.
09:08 You have to push in this little chain pin really carefully, otherwise it snaps, which
09:13 is ... Yeah, that's what happened.
09:16 I haven't had time to go to a bike shop, and I've had to just put in a SRAM Eagle 12-speed
09:21 power link just here.
09:23 You can see that it's there because it's rainbow colored, so there's no hiding it.
09:27 Just don't tell anybody.
09:29 The bar tape.
09:30 I went for this really nice, physic, perforated, retro-looking bar tape, but what I didn't
09:35 realize was that it had the physic logo on one side of it.
09:38 When you do the little clever loop, that means you don't have to use the adhesive strip.
09:42 The logo has popped out, and you can see it.
09:45 That's something I'm going to have to change, unfortunately.
09:49 Does it need any upgrades after this?
09:51 I don't think so, really.
09:52 I'm really happy with the way it is.
09:53 I think probably the next thing I'm going to do is to put some little transparent stickers
09:58 on the head tube here to stop the cable from rubbing the paint, and also one on the chain
10:03 stay here, too.
10:06 Other than that, if I win the lottery, I'll upgrade to Super Record, but let's stick with
10:11 chorus.
10:12 I built this bike up as what we're calling a cafe racer, which means it's perfect for
10:17 the club run.
10:18 It's not for racing.
10:19 That's what carbon bikes are for.
10:21 It's just for enjoying the ride, but it's light and fast enough that it can turn a nifty
10:26 pedal if it needs to.
10:28 I'm really looking forward to Sunday when I'm going to ride this bike for the first
10:30 time with my club.
10:31 The club run stopped for a long time during the pandemic.
10:34 I have to say I lost a little bit of motivation, but something new and shiny like this is really
10:39 going to get things together again for me, and I'm just really looking forward to it.
10:45 The overall cost of this build is somewhere around £4,500.
10:50 Half of that is in the wheels.
10:52 Unfortunately, they come off another bike that I tested, and they've got to go back,
10:56 so I'm going to have to put in a cheaper set of training wheels.
11:01 It looks like this Sunday could be the only opportunity I get to ride these really nice
11:05 wheels, but that's life.
11:07 If you want to ask me any questions about the frame or the build, leave me a comment,
11:11 and I'll answer.
11:12 I hope you've enjoyed this video.
11:14 Don't forget to like and subscribe.
11:16 See you next time.
11:34 (whooshing)