Calfee Luna Pro
This American framebuilder is famed for custom bikes, but this new stock offering is rather astonishing
There are few bigger milestones in bicycle manufacture than the discovery of Creslan 61. The name may sound like that of a galaxy far, far away, but in fact it’s a semi-crystalline organic polymer resin synthesised in 1930 by doctors Hans Fikentscher and Claus Heuck, and has become the building block for bikes as we know them. Comprising processed fibres bundled into tows then woven into sheets and impregnated with epoxy resin, Creslan 61, or polyacrylonitrile, or PAN, is the very fabric our carbon fibre racing machines are made from.
The material took a while to catch on though, says Craig Calfee, the creator of the Luna Pro that I’ve been testing this month. ‘People would laugh at my “plastic” bikes, but I told them back in 1991 that eventually every bike in the Tour de France would be carbon fibre.’
Calfee wasn’t the first to dabble in the dark material arts. Companies such as Aegis, Kestrel, TVT and Look all produced bikes in the mid-80s made at least in part from carbon fibre, and Assos founder Tony Meier was instrumental in designing a carbon fibre track bike as far back as 1976. However, it was Calfee who arguably delivered the breakthrough moment when his rebranded ‘Carbonframe’ was ridden to the yellow jersey in the 1991 Tour de France by Greg Lemond. To the best of the history books’ knowledge, this was the first time an all-carbon bike had led the GC (albeit only briefly – Lemond would go on to finish seventh in what would be the last time he’d complete a Tour).
The bike garnered a lot of press, and while it would be over a decade before Calfee’s prediction came true, the carbon fibre wheels had been set in motion.
To cite Calfee as both carbon pioneer and master, then, is no stretch of the imagination, and so while a good reviewer should approach a subject impartially and without bias, I have to confess I had very high expectations of the Luna Pro long before it had even been delivered for testing.