Drew Guldalian, the builder at Engin Cycles, has been very busy. A few years ago, in addition to his extremely well-tooled shop of manual machinery and to up the game on his beautifully and cleanly welded titanium frames, he acquired a CNC mill and started going to town on custom, house-made dropouts. More recently, however, Drew has kicked his custom part operation into a higher gear, adding a proprietary machined yoke to the mix and acquiring a CNC lathe for head tubes and threaded bits.
What does it mean? At a time when there is low diversity in domestic sources for titanium frameparts, Engin continues to increase its internal machining capability in order to build unique custom titanium frames with impressive functionality.
Increased capability at Engin is probably no better shown than through this particular hardtail he displayed at the 2017 Philadelphia Bike Expo. It retains the truss-style proprietary dropouts the brand has been using for awhile now, the treats are in the details however.
This is the first show where we have seen, up close, the new Engin yoke. Machined in two halves (similar to other clamshell-style yokes), it’s hollow on the interior for a lightweight, stiff construction.
In practice, the yoke clears a 2.6in tire and a 32t chainring in a quite “tukt” rear triangle configuration.
Drew is also hard at work making other components in his mechanical laboratory. The seat collar shown at the top of the image is another example of this.
(Take a moment to appreciate the lines and welds of this particular frame).
What’s quietly the extremely exciting detail on this particular frame are these seat tube studs. Machined on Engin’s new CNC lathe for use in conjunction with a dropper post configuration, they allow riders to run a bottle cage without sacrificing clearance or proper thread-engagement for a post…because the threaded stud sticks out of the tube rather than threading a bolt into the tube.
In contrast to the titanium hardtail, we have this lovely plum colored road bike.
From this headtube, it is easy to see that Drew is having fun identifying new opportunities to use his new CNC lathe. On his show bikes, the logo was machined into the headtubes rather than applied as a separate headbadge.
The rear triangle featured fat, formed in-house, shapely seatstays welded into his proprietary flat mount dropout system.
With this continued momentum for internal machining capability and the creativity and problem-solving that accompanies it, we are excited to see what Drew decides to tackle next.
