What do you think of Simon Smythe's restomod Chas Roberts?
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00:00 [Music]
00:10 I ride a lot of carbon bikes here in my day job at Cycling Weekly,
00:14 but on a Sunday morning you're more likely to find me heading out to some far-flung
00:18 chintzy cafe with my club mates on a steel bike.
00:22 Steel is real is a bit of a cliche now, but I just love the fact,
00:26 the thought, that my bike was made by a local frame builder in a small workshop
00:30 instead of popping out of 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
00:39 from the 1960s until 2015 when they closed their doors.
00:43 So when a club mate of mine said that he was wanting to get rid of his Roberts,
00:47 I could just hardly get round to his house fast enough.
00:49 I was knocking on the door virtually before he'd finished typing the WhatsApp message.
00:53 My club mate had the frame made to measure in 2001 out of Columbus Max tubing,
00:57 which was the stiffest tubing there was at the time.
01:00 It was his number one race bike, and when I first saw it, it was black,
01:04 but had a sort of a brown growth on it from sitting in his garage for years.
01:09 It really needed rescuing pretty badly.
01:12 So I took it to Colourtec in Dartford to be blasted and resprayed by Dave Crow,
01:16 who actually 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.
01:26 And here it is.
01:28 I'm really pleased with it.
01:30 I asked Dave to copy a Trek Project One paint scheme that I really liked,
01:38 and I think he's done such a good job of it, it's actually even nicer than the original Trek.
01:42 He used automotive two-pack acrylic enamel paint over a metallic base coat,
01:47 and it just 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.
02:07 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,
02:14 just making it lighter like carbon does, or making it stiffer like aluminium does.
02:19 But really, steel is the ride.
02:21 The workmanship is just such high quality.
02:24 The fillet brazing is just amazing.
02:27 One tube just flows into the other really seamlessly.
02:30 It's really lovely work.
02:32 It was a race frame, but it actually weighs just over 2 kilos, the frame itself, without the fork.
02:37 And that seems like a hell of a heavy weight these days.
02:40 It's like twice the weight of a carbon bike.
02:43 That was how it was at the time, and I think that really the weight with this type of bike,
02:47 it doesn't really matter so much.
02:49 And with what I'm going to be doing on it, which is club runs and fast-paced riding,
02:54 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 piece
03:03 out of retro components, NOS, that were painstakingly sourced on eBay or anything like that.
03:09 I wanted it to be a modern bike that I could ride, and that meant a modern groupset with modern ratios.
03:14 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.
03:37 But that's a whole £600 cheaper 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,
03:49 which really suits my purposes perfectly.
03:51 So I've got 52/36 up front, and I've gone for the 11/29 cassette,
03:56 which is the closest ratio cassette you can get with Chorus.
03:59 And I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get up any hill in Surrey on a bottom gear of 36/29,
04:04 which is a lot lower than this bike probably 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,
04:19 and they're just some of my favourite wheels at the moment.
04:21 They are lightweight at just under 1,500 grams, they're stiff, they're aerodynamic,
04:27 and they have an internal rim width of 19mm,
04:30 which is wider than the type of wheels that that bike was designed for.
04:34 But I'm pretty sure that they'll just about fit in.
04:37 The clearance is going to be pretty tight, but in those days tight clearance was what 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, they're the Vittoria Corsa Graphene 2.0s.
04:51 They're a really lovely, supple tyre, beautiful rolling, and Italian, which goes nicely with 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 pretty expensive too.
05:08 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, it's very expensive at 350 pounds,
05:20 and I think it's going to look great on this bike.
05:23 The stem is another Vision stem, 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 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 steerer,
05:40 so I've got this shim that I'm going to have to use in the stem to make sure it fits snugly around the head tube.
05:46 The Vision Metron seatpost is another component from Vision's top-level range,
05:51 and it's another 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 really expensive and showy,
06:01 and it's this Selle Italia SLR Superflow, which has a nice shape, suits me,
06:08 and just manganese rails, ordinary manganese rails. That's all I need. It works.
06:15 I'm going to be wrapping the bars in this Fizik Micro-Tex Classic bar tape,
06:19 which has 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,
06:28 but in this case, I don't want to distract away from the really beautiful frame.
06:33 Modern handmade steel bikes have to have a Criss King headset.
06:37 They're said to last a lifetime, and this one actually is already pretty old.
06:41 This Criss 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, and this was the first type of headset which replaced the quill stem
06:51 in the threaded headset, hence no-thread set.
06:54 You can still get them in lots of pretty colors as well, but black is nice for this,
07:01 and it's the only one that my friend had anyway.
07:04 So 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. I really like these.
07:14 I like the look of them. I like the feel of the free float.
07:17 I even like the sound of them clipping in and clipping out,
07:20 and 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 and hopefully it's going to be done in time for me to get a ride into the pub later.
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08:09 So here it is, the Roberts Cafe Racer, and I'm really pleased with the way it turned 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.
08:22 You do the run, they pop out the other side, there's no messing around,
08:25 and 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 just 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,
08:39 so in theory I knew what it was going to look like,
08:42 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. It's much lighter than I thought it was going to be.
08:52 Just under 8.2 kilos, which is just under 18 pounds in old money,
08:56 and I think that's pretty impressive for a bike with a steel frame,
08:59 especially a 20-year-old steel frame.
09:02 So 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.
09:09 You have to push in this little chain pin really carefully,
09:12 otherwise it snaps, which is, yeah, that's what happened.
09:16 So I haven't had time to go to a bike shop,
09:18 and I've had to just put in a SRAM Eagle 12-speed power link just here,
09:23 and you can see that it's there because it's rainbow-coloured,
09:26 so there's no hiding it. Just don't tell anybody.
09:29 The bar tape.
09:31 I went for this really nice, physic, perforated, retro-looking bar tape,
09:35 but what I didn't realise was that it had the Physic logo on one side of it,
09:38 and when you do the little clever loop, that means you don't have to use the adhesive strip,
09:43 the logo has popped out and you can see it.
09:46 So that's something I'm going to have to change, unfortunately.
09:49 So does it need any upgrades after this?
09:51 I mean, I don't think so, really. I'm really happy with the way it is.
09:54 I think probably the next thing I'm going to do is to put some little transparent stickers on the head tube here
10:00 to stop the cable from rubbing the paint, and also one on the chainstay here, too.
10:06 But other than that, if I win the lottery, I'll upgrade to Super Record,
10:10 but let's stick with Chorus.
10:13 I built this bike up as what we're calling a cafe racer,
10:16 which means it's perfect for the club run, it's not for racing, 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 pedal if it needs to.
10:28 So I'm really looking forward to Sunday when I'm going to ride this bike for the first time with my club.
10:32 The club run stopped for a long time during the pandemic.
10:35 I have to say I lost a little bit of motivation,
10:37 but something new and shiny like this is really going to get things together again for me,
10:42 and I'm just really looking forward to it.
10:45 So the overall cost of this build is somewhere around £4,500.
10:49 Half of that is in the wheels, and unfortunately they come off another bike that I tested,
10:55 and they've got to go back, so I'm going to have to put in a cheaper set of training wheels.
11:00 It looks like this Sunday could be the only opportunity I get to ride these really nice wheels,
11:05 but that's life.
11:07 If you want to ask me any questions about the frame or the build, leave me a comment and I'll answer.
11:12 I hope you've enjoyed this video. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
11:16 [Music]