Scottish steel
Shand Cycles has gone from man in a shed to being one of the UK’S most respected bike marques
Television, penicillin, the toaster, the refrigerator… the list of Scottish inventions is vast. Ever taken a colour photograph? Yep, the first one was made by Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell – a picture of a tartan ribbon. Ever mixed a gin and tonic? The idea of ingesting quinine, which gave rise to the mixer, can be traced back to Scottish doctor George Cleghorn. Ever cloned an animal? Probably not, although the world’s first, Dolly the Sheep, was born at the University of Edinburgh in 1996.
And bikes? Well, two-wheelers as we know them started in Scotland too, and more than 150 years on there’s at least one brand still at the cutting edge of Scottish bike building: Shand Cycles.
Innovators and punkers
The first pedal-powered bicycle was made by Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan in 1839. Before then bikes were ‘hobby-horses’, but Macmillan saw advantage in pedalling instead of striding, and in 1842 completed a 68mile trip from his home in Dumfriesshire to Glasgow on his new-fangled machine.
Things have come a long way since then, but when it comes to championing handmade, home-grown bicycles, Livingstone-based Shand Cycles is still proudly flying the Scottish flag and innovating modern trends long before many much larger companies caught on.
‘Shand was set up by Steven Shand in 2003. There’s five of us now in our wee workshop, but back then it was just Steven working in a shed, mainly making bikes that handled like road bikes but could take luggage, wider tyres, could go off-road…’ says Shand’s head painter, Euan Lindsay, trailing off with a wry smile. ‘So we’ve been doing that kind of thing since the beginning. This Rizello Disc here is a return to pure road riding, but with a modern twist.’
The Rizello features all the modern accoutrements a handmade bike enthusiast could wish for: oversized Columbus HSS and Life steel tubing mated to a 44mm Reynolds head tube; a T47 bottom bracket (the latest and greatest BB standard, threaded to stop creaks but large enough to take 30mm spindles); thru-axles, clearance for 28mm tyres and, of course, some seriously eye-catching paint.
‘We’ll do pretty much anything paintwise: fancy jobs, tartan paint if you want. But we like to have our colours reflect our environment, so this candy purple is like your nice late-evening purple,’ says Lindsay. ‘The name is a bit out there, though. I came up with Rizello, a kind of play on the name of a band from Fife called The Rezillos that I’m into. Some people might be riding around
on a Rizello thinking it’s named after some hidden Italian climb. It’s not, it’s after a bunch of miscreants who formed a Scottish punk band in the 1970s.’
Passion projects
Whoever’s riding around on a Rizello, one thing they will understand is just how classic this bike looks, despite its modern credentials. The tubes are rounded and the top tube is nearhorizontal (unless a customer opts for full custom geometry – a service Shand offers at no extra charge). However, it’s the disc brake integration that arguably helps the most. Hoses are internal
– nothing new there – but unlike the majority of the industry, Shand has built the Rizello Disc around 140mm rotors, not 160mm. And of course they are flat mount, which makes their integration even more unobtrusive, although it does take a fair bit of effort to get there.
‘Flat mount is a bit of a pain,’ says Lindsay. ‘It’s great for carbon bikes but with steel bikes, unless you have a cast part or 3D printed part, you have to chop out so much of the chainstay to fit the mounting points. It’s why we customCNC our own dropouts.’
Even that is not without expense, but happily for the future of Shand, financial assistance is helping the business to grow. In October 2017, Shand gained investment from Liberty House Group, headed up by a gentleman named Sanjeev Gupta. In another world that kind of news could mean swift changes of tack for a company – contracting out manufacture overseas, for example – but in Shand’s case, it meant the opposite.
‘It injected extra capital into the business, investment in additional staff and equipment,’ says Shand’s Fraser Glass. And if Gupta’s reputation is anything to go by, that trajectory should continue. His father’s manufacturing firm made Victor bikes, and it’s these that a young Gupta cut his teeth selling. Now heading up a multi-million pound group, Gupta has already invested in Uk-based Trillion mountain bikes and resurrected Accles & Pollock, one of the UK’S original bike tubing companies.
Today A&P makes steel tubing for aerospace and other industrial applications, but long ago it supplied the likes of Rattrays in Glasgow, which built the iconic ‘Flying Scot’ bike. This isn’t to imply that A&P is about to jump back into the tubeset-making game, or that Shand is about to start building replica Flying Scots but, nonetheless, there seems to be a wonderful thread running through the Shand business, and a very promising future.