Due to my lifelong obsession with small tubing, dark workshops and opinionated characters, I have been a witness to the steel legacy, steel revival and now, what I think, is going to be cycling’s third age of steel emerging from Hackney in northeast London. During the last 15 years, I’ve visited steel builders, ridden steel bikes rand written dozens of articles about steel brands. While all of them shared a common passion and narrative about steel vibrance under pedaling, none of them made me realize that steel could also be the most cutting-edge material.
Ironically, I have to discuss with Rob, a trained artist deep into the nerdiest engineering details of 3D printing, the latest steel alloys advancement and how they’ll affect frame building. In other words, 2026 steel technology is nothing compared to technology from even five years ago and, yes, a custom steel frame is probably more than the romantic midlife milestone for passionate cyclists.
Rob’s story could have stayed more or less the same as dozens of other enthusiastic young builders from the (former) London Bicycle Academy, to learn how to cut, file and weld pieces of steel that would eventually become a rideable frame.
Believe it or not, most of the new generation of British frame builders learned the ropes of the craft in one or two weeks at the LBA. Of course, it takes years after that to become a capable and respected master builder, but the initial jump was not that steep for people with some manual dexterity.
Rob took this path in 2015, but quickly realized that as fun as it was, especially at the time of the rise of gravel and experimentation, there would be a very limiting factor to this market: With so many frame builders in the arena and so few tubes and part makers in the world, more or less every steel frame would quickly look and ride the same. That was the belief.
In the meantime, 3D printing was growing, but mostly as a way to prototype small composite parts. Solid and metal parts took more time to emerge and Rob patiently observed the phenomena and imagined what it could bring to steel frame building. He began his first experiment in 2018, going through a few iterations before the current form arrived three years ago. He integrates them to his production in various iterations: only the dropouts at first, then dropouts and cluster, and finally the current version that came to fruition in 2023–24 with the headtube development. It was an incremental process that is still developing but, starting now, the 3D-printed lugs are no longer experimental or optional but the only technology available from Quirk Cycles.
THE FULL STORY IN PRINT
