The quality and ingenuity of custom framebuilding has skyrocketed in the last five years, yet even then two outfits have stood out: Southampton based Demon Frameworks and Bastion, from Kensington, Australia.
On paper each company’s bikes and processes couldn’t be more different. Bastion 3D prints its lugs in titanium and bonds them to filament-wound carbon tubes; the man behind Demon Frameworks, Tom Warmerdam, makes his lugs by hand, from scratch, and brazes them to steel tubes.
In each case the results are stunning, taking the craft of framebuilding to a level few can even dream of. And now, after a lot of talk and rumour, the two builders have come together to create what you see before you.
Image 15 of 21
‘I was and am a massive fan of Tom's work and Tom and I had connected over Instagram and had been talking about how cool it would be to combine his artistic talents with our technology,’ says Bastion’s CEO Ben Schultz.
‘At Bespoked in 2016 we were discussing this project and were at the point where we said, "Now all we need is a customer!"
‘In parallel I had been talking to David [the customer] by email and he was interested in doing something even more unique and special than our standard lugs.
'He came down to meet me at Bespoked and as he described what he was after it sounded exactly like what Tom and I had been discussing. Fate!
‘So David and Tom agreed to work on a design and we would integrate it into our lugs and engineer it so the frame would still have the same strength and durability as our standard frames.
'There is extra material and supports engineered into the inside of the lugs behind the features Tom designed so we don't compromise the durability.’
While the lugs look solid, they are in fact hollow with an intricate internal mesh structure designed to optimise their mechanical characteristics and reduce weight.
The margins as so fine that, as Schultz says, doing any kind of pattern work on the surface, such as Demon has designed, meant tweaking what was going on inside the lug walls to preserve the strength and stiffness of each lug.
The designs themselves are unique to the lugs, although those familiar with Demon will recognise a certain style from Warmerdam’s ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Hermes’ lugsets, which he makes from scratch by fillet brazing steel tubes together and hand cutting and filing the patterns into the ends.
This process means a Demon frame takes around 150 hours to complete, and that’s before paint (to put that in context, you’ll hear a lot of builders quote anywhere from 10-30 hours per frame).
‘It has taken over a year to get here, but it is worth it. The result is incredible,’ says Schultz.
‘David has been kind enough to allow us to do a limited release of more so we are making them exclusively one per country. We want them to be a truly bespoke collector's edition.’
You heard it here first folks: one per country. So depending on where you’re reading this from there’s every chance your Demon-Bastion has yet to be allotted.
Image 21 of 21
As for this one, it’s yet to be fully built. The lugs are busy being painted candy red before the tube-lug assembly process begins.
We hope to have more photos as soon as it’s ready. In the meantime, see our review of the non-Demonised Bastion to whet your appetite.
Get in touch with bastion-cycles.com or demonframeworks.com for more information.
