‘It has never been about selling millions of bikes,’ says Andy Parsons during a mid-ride coffee stop. ‘Eastwood Cycle Works started off as a vanity project, a flight of fancy.
‘I wanted to build something out of a load of metal, something that pleases me and that I can ride and feel safe on. When I lean it up at the coffee shop, I can sit back, look at it and say, “I made that”.’
Parsons is just two years and three finished bikes into his fledgling framebuilding venture, having previously been a police officer, and before that a helicopter engineer. His time at Westland Helicopters in Yeovil, Somerset, gave him a grounding in engineering and fabrication and it was there that the first seeds of his future interest in framebuilding were sown.
‘It was eight miles down the road, so it naturally sucked in anyone from the local college who wanted to be an engineer, like me,’ he says. ‘I worked there for a couple of years, but Westland lost a big contract and laid lots of us off. That’s when I saw an advert in the newspaper saying that the local police force was looking for new officers.’
From having worked on Lynx and Puma helicopters, becoming a police officer was certainly a tangential career route, but it paid the mortgage and put food on the table. Yet Parsons’ itch to make things went largely unscratched for the near 30 years he was in the job.
‘I’ve always had an interest in tinkering with things,’ says Parsons, who has since retired from the police force. ‘I’ve had cars, motorbikes and bicycles all my life. I’ve pulled them apart and rebuilt them, but you’re not actually producing something.
‘The thing with fabrication is how a few bits of raw material can be cut relatively simply and easily, filed and turned into something so massively useful.’
Two become one
Useful is a good word to describe the bikes Eastwood Cycle Works makes. The signature model, which Parsons recently exhibited at the Bespoked Handmade Bicycle Show in London, is essentially two bikes rolled into one.
Dubbed the Omni, it’s a road/gravel hybrid, created from a mix of Columbus Zona and Life tubes, designed to take the rough or the smooth depending on how it’s configured.
The frame will take up to 38mm tyres, and the geometry sits somewhere between the sharpness of a road bike and the stability of a gravel bike. The one pictured belongs to Parsons’ son. It’s built around a 2x Shimano GRX Di2 groupset and finished with Zipp components.
‘It goes against the whole n+1 thing,’ says Parsons. ‘It works great off-road, but equally, my son who races up in London will choose it over his carbon road bike when he goes out with the chaingang on a weekend.
‘I love steel bikes. Carbon is great, but I know every steel bike I’ve built will outlast me, and that’s what I like.There’s that feeling of comfort that comes with
it too. My carbon road bike is brilliant, but it’s rock hard and handles like an F1 car.
‘Then I get on the Omni and it’s such a different experience in terms of comfort and feel. That for me is where this has come from. I want to share my passion for steel bikes with other people, but it has to be done properly.’
For Parsons, doing it properly means attention to detail and taking time over the finer points of each frame, including hours spent filing his fillets to perfection.
‘It’s all about getting that lovely transition between the tubes,’ he says. ‘It’s a really zen thing. I put on a bit of jazz, sit there with my tools and file away. I can normally last about three hours before I’ve got to go and do something else. But then I’ll come back to it. I enjoy it so much. It’s like a good book – I just don’t want it to end.’
Go ahead, punk, make my frame
And where did the Eastwood name come from? ‘It was while I was watching Dirty Harry, my favourite movie, with Clint Eastwood. He’s a police officer and I was a police officer, so I thought, right, let’s call it Eastwood. It’s as simple as that.
‘I could have gone for a name that was really esoteric or evoked the history of where I live near Glastonbury, but I decided that it doesn’t have to evoke anything. It’s just a name on a bike.’
For now, the Omni is the only bike in the Eastwood fleet, but Parsons hints that there could be a flat-bar messenger bike joining it soon. It’s called the Aptus, and with any luck it might be making an appearance at Bespoked in the future.
‘It’s still a bit of a project at the moment,’ says Parsons. ‘But I definitely want to have it as an additional model. What I don’t want to do is spread myself too thin by doing too much too soon. I appreciate that I’m very much in the early stages, and anybody who tells you they know everything there is to know about everything is a bullshitter.
‘I did 28 years in the police and I was still learning the day I left. In that sense, building bikes is no different.’
Photography: Mike Massaro