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A Pilgrims Progress

Our second, and soon to be launched frame - the Pilgrims - is a bike that has taken a little longer in gestation that we thad hoped but, the day is now upon us. We have begun production and we wanted to share some details of its journey so far.

The disc braked road bike is still a relatively new idea but one we, at Bowman Cycles, feel has its place. That place isn’t currently on the race circuit, rather it is somewhere that allows the benefits of all condition braking reliability come to the fore: on a road less travelled. For the more adventurous cycling soul, there is often a point (or many) on a ride where small tracks, trails and rough roads are passed and you are left wondering, “where does that go?”. If you’re riding a bike like the Pilgrims, you no longer have to wonder.

It’s true that for years you could have done rides like this on a cyclo cross bike, but, in our opinion, a cross bike is not so much fun on the black top as a more dedicated machine. We have designed the Pilgrims to sit between the long, stable geometry of a cross bike, and the more agile true road machine. The detail of the differences are: fork offset, head angle and the corresponding trail measurement; bottom bracket height, tyre clearance and chainstay length. All these small variations combine to offer the rider the option to head away from the tarmac without having to balance on the edge of control, whilst maintaining the ability to enjoy the flow and poise on good surfaces. Fundamentally, this is the purpose of the Pilgrims: to make a journey you haven’t yet made.

We feel had the geometry dialled pretty early on in the process but, as ever, the devil was in the details. From our test mule prototype (in these images) we fettled the cable routing to get a cleaner look that we were happy would be easy to maintain. We searched and tweaked fork design to maintain the road friendly handling we required to tally with the clearances we wanted to offer. We tuned wall thickness and seatpost exposure to gain a little comfort without ruining the great chassis stiffness. Small stuff, but ultimately its these evolutions that we hope will make the bike into the machine we wanted to ride.

Within the next week or so, we will get a confirmed date for delivery on the Pilgrims, and at that point we plan to offer ten frames for pre order. A great price with the frames arriving 4-6 weeks ahead of those available to the public (we’ll air ship your frames, rather than sitting on the container ship with the remainder). Watch the Facebook and Twitter pages for details of the offer, or mail us on info@bowman-cycles.com with ‘Pilgrims Progress’ as the title to register your interest. The offer will be a strictly ‘first come first served’ affair.

We’ll see you out there.