For a while the bike designer behind the titanium bikes of Jerónimo Cycles in the Canary Islands has been teasing a new, affordable steel mountain bike project they’ve been developing. The details are in and it turns out that they’ve spun off a separate bike brand that will focus on producing performance steel bikes – Nordest Cycles. A more complete bike line-up is planned for introduction at the end of the summer, but for now they are introducing the first bike that will go through a crowdfunding campaign starting in a about a week to get it out to riders faster. The Nordest Bardino is a 4130 steel 27.5+/29er hardtail designed in Tenerife for enduro riding, built around a 160mm fork, and available in reasonably priced frame, frameset, and complete bike options to hit a trail near you…
After several months of testing the final prototypes over the winter in Spain & Portugal the new Bardino is ready to head into production.
The double butted 4130 chromoly frame gets the most recent crop of contemporary trail bike tech and features. That means low, long & slack geometry optimized for short 40mm stems, plus the ability to run true plus-sized 27.5+ tires or wide 29er trail tires. That amounts to clearance up to 27.5×3″ or 29×2.5″ thanks to a plate style driveside chainstay yoke design.
With a 65° head angle and built for 160mm 27.5″ forks, the bikes get a 44mm gusseted headtube for tapered steerers.
The bottom bracket sticks with 73mm threaded, and gets ISCG05 tabs for whatever type of trouble you want to get into.
Out back a replaceable set of dropouts provide Boost 148 spacing, but also potential flexibility in the future for other builds (singlespeed maybe?) Routing is all external for easy setup, but does get a port in the seattube for stealth dropper routing.
Unlike their sister company’s made-in-Europe ti bikes, these all come out of a factory in Taiwan. And with that comes affordability. The Bardino is available as a frame-only for just 550€, including shipping through the EU.
All the frames then make their way to Spain where they get built up for each rider. So throw in a bit more scratch and from 1540€ you can get a frame kit with a Fox trail fork and a Cane Creek headset. Frame kit customization will even let you piece together a dropper seatpost, a complete Thomson cockpit kit, or a Chris King headset as your budget allows.
Complete bikes will be available in two builds: the 2500€ Bardino M2 with a Fox 36 Performance fork, an SLX 1×11 group, and Thomson covert dropper; or the 3300€ Bardino M1 with an XT build upgraded to a Fox 36 Factory FIT4 fork.
The Bardino is available in three stock sizes – M, M/L & L – with the middle one claiming a frame weight of 2650g. All of the new Nordest frames will come with a 5 year warranty, and we should expect to see more bikes available as Nordest fills out the line sometime this September.
