Nick Crumpton, who took a year off from exhibiting at NAHBS, is back and he says he’s starting to move away from trying to be every weight weenie’s dream. Not that things are getting heavy, but the absolute gram counting we’ve seen in the past isn’t the focus.
Now, it’s a new disc brake option for his Type 5 carbon road bike. It’ll use flat mount calipers and 135mm rear spacing, but what sets it apart is its ability to run massive tires while retaining a very tight rear end.
Crumpton’s normal road bikes typically don’t go shorter than 412mm on the chainstays. Here, he only had to extend it to 415mm, which is the minimum recommended by Shimano when running disc brakes and the wider rear axle spacing. But, it can run full size gearing on the cranks and a massive 32mm tire on wide rims with no problems…
To do that, he has to make the driveside chainstay very thin, which is made up for adjusting the amount of material and the wall thickness.
Retail will be $6,500 for frame, fork and Cane Creek headset, and he should start shipping them mid summer. Nick says there’s still a bit more testing to do. As in, real world testing. Tooling has just been finished based on virtual, computer generated testing. All that’s left to do is build rideable prototypes (this one’s plastic) and fine tune the actual layup. He’s also going to build a test jig to hammer the rear brake’s flat mount to see what the real forces are there. That’ll inform the dropout’s layup beyond just the ride testing and what’s discernible from FEA. In other words, they’re gonna beat the heck out of their own test bikes before selling a single one. But they’re coming.
All that’s left is to decide if you want an ENVE road or gravel fork.
Expect frame weights around 850g for a 55cm in their standard layup. Once that’s dialed, there might be an SL front end offered.
In other news, he’s moving from his current 480 sq. ft. facility in Austin, TX, to a new 2,250 sq. ft. place that’ll let them move paint back in house and continue to develop more new stuff on site.
That said, we can’t see why anyone would want to cover his carbon handiwork with paint. Maybe racing stripes are OK, though, shown here on the rim brake Type 5.
