Life’s Magic Cycle….With Added Prestige.
With the physical analysis over, the data Dartfish accumulates is utilized to generate the blueprint of a frame whose dimensions and angles are seamlessly synchronised with the anatomy of its lucky owner.
Having thanked Steve and Toby for three fleeting hours of kindness and hospitality, not to mention a service as flawless as that of a Michelin star restaurant, I headed for the stairs and began to mentally prepare for what would be a salutatory period of waiting, Stephen hurriedly ushered me back with that he couldn’t let me leave until I had met my frame builder. Clearly I was wrong, this service was as flawless as the Savoy Grill’s when the Sultan of Brunei was its honoured guest “. Moments later Mark Reily greeted me with a hand as firm as the steel it forged.
Following a routine exchange of pedalling pleasantries. Prestige’s metal maestro explained that running a discreet, independent and scaled down operation, allowed him to specify and construct a frame set with greater precision than a factory could attain within a batch of a hundred clones.
Moreover, the term “hand built” is all too often misappropriated, with many duplicitous manufactures relying on machinery for significant portions of their builds, not least milling the tubes. Honest Manual Labour, was the essence of Mark’s motivation, and meant every surgical thrust of a hacksaw through shiny bones.
“You going tig or lug welded?” He asked, triggering a bemused stare followed by the ignorant response, “Whichever is quicker”.
“Those are lugs.” He gestured to a pair of delicately moulded holsters that housed the ends of two tubes on a wall mounted Mustard. “I like lugs, it’s all about style with lugs, the process is quite cumbersome, but you end up with a more traditional look.”
I peered closer, they were indeed remarkably easy on the eye. Elegant and intricate. A silvery testimony to fancy Georgian cuffs and I instantly recalled, one of my Pashley’s intrinsic and endearing features .
He went on to explain that tig welding is the contemporary method and the one he favours since the tubes are fused together without lugs, economizing on weight and the leaving joints exposed for a discerning eye to admire. “it’s cleaner and more rewarding.”
Stephen asked him if he could bore holes in the crossbar for the brake cables to be routed internally, as he had done on the frame we were observing. However, this crossbar belonged to an 853 assembly, standard steel as opposed to stainless. The former, a veritable wind assisted descent to manipulate, the latter, a stubborn, tiresome, hypersensitive creature and, somewhat fittingly, a far stiffer test of a welder’s virtuosity.
Mark sucked his teeth, mulling over how thin the tubes were but in the seconds it took for Stephen to goad him and for me to decide that lugs were a necessity, his spirits wire primed.