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Tom Sturdy is the owner and only employee of Sturdy cycles. Based in Frome, Somerset in leafy southwest England, not far from where I’m sat right now, he’s been busy setting some quiet corners of the internet alight with his blend of hard engineering nouse and his artisanal metallurgical skills. He’s designed and built his own road bike, using methods that the bike industry has largely ignored and some which he’s developed on the fly, to make his dream vision a hard pedal-able reality. David doesn’t shy away from challenges. His chosen material is titanium. Famous as much for its ride quality as it is for its difficulty to cut, bend, forge, machine, and finish. Nevertheless, Tom persists and, in the process, has created aesthetics that force you to take notice of every square centimeter of the bike – the more you look, the closer you get, the more you realize you’re witness to a cycling ‘Statue of David’.
When Tom wants the finest machine-worked titanium parts to fit his Sturdy frames, he reaches out – only a matter of a few miles, to another artisanal master of his art, Ed Mason at DWARD DESIGN. When Ed isn’t making proverbial cycling jewelry from titanium, he’s making parts for the automotive and nuclear industries. Clearly, Ed knows his potatoes when it comes to CNC machining this most magical of metals.
Frame, fork, headset, bottom bracket, cranks, chainrings, seatpost, stem, bar – everything short of the gears, brakes wheels, and tires come out of his tiny workshop and from the palms of his two hands.
Tom and Ed both take on one-off projects, if you’re interested in commissioning yourself your very own pieces of rolling art, hit them up to discuss your ideas. I have crazy dreams of a Sturdy hardtail mountain bike dripping in DWARD DESIGN components, maybe once my kid is through university…
