The go anywhere
Sven Cycles’ Darron Coppin can build just about anything, but his heart lies in making the classic, modern
‘Iraced mountain bikes in the mid-to-late 1980s and did the Grundig World Cup series. The prize for winning the dual slalom was a Grundig Betamax player. You needed a van to take it away! I’m from a sort of old-school background and that’s what the majority of bikes we build draw upon.’
Darron Coppin is speaking to Cyclist from his workshop in Dorset where he moved 12 years ago, selling up in London to finally make bike building his full-time occupation. It’s a dream to which many of us aspire but one Coppin has now realised in Technicolor, with Sven (his middle name) Cycles shipping all over the globe. Yet like all dreams, the road to reality wasn’t easy.
‘Any framebuilder who says this isn’t a tough business… it’s bollocks! It’s very, very hard work and one of the hardest parts is creating a name for yourself so someone is willing to spend money with you – four, five, six grand. That takes huge amounts of trust.’
And gaining that trust? You’ve got to know what you’re doing and be able to prove it. Just 10 minutes with Coppin and you’ll realise he does both.
They call me the seeker
How do you start to build frames?
It’s a common enough question and one that has myriad answers but gone are the days of apprenticing in bike factories like a teenage Ernesto Colnago. These days builders mostly cut their teeth welding sheet metal or fabricating custom furniture or studying sculpture. In Coppin’s case, his initial schooling came from his father and his subsequent cues came from his own cycling career and a keen appreciation of the sport’s history.
‘My dad was a sort of engineer jeweller. He always had garages that I used to make things in, and I decided I wanted to make a mountain bike. I built my first frame and fork in 1986. It’s still around somewhere.
‘In those days we raced fully rigid bikes, but even when suspension came along I preferred the feel of a rigid bike. Suspension made things boring. So when I was in a position to make bikes again I wanted to build expedition bikes – rugged, utilitarian. I’m too old to go downhill at 50mph but I do want to do the same descent at half the speed.’
Thus in that classic way of function driving form, the ‘style’ that marks a Sven bike out is very similar to the French randonneur, literally translated as ‘rambler’, known in the English cycling lexicon as ‘audax’ and bearing more than a passing resemblance to a gravel bike. Certainly the similarities are striking between this, Coppin’s very own Sven Pathfinder, a French randonneur bicycle of the 1940s, and a basic blueprint for a gravel bike of today.
‘The Pathfinder is built around 650b wheels, something we’ve been doing
since 2013 but the French were doing long ago – I’ve got a Rene Herse bike from 1946 and it’s not hugely different. They got it right back then. Of course tyre clearance is much larger now, we’ll go up to a 2.4in [61mm] although I don’t see much point in going beyond 48mm because the drag is too great.
‘Like the Herse, the Pathfinder’s trail is adjusted for better stability, especially when loaded, and it has a longer wheelbase. It’s designed to be nimble, not some wallowing lump, but also I have carpal tunnel in my hands from years of aggressive riding, so the Pathfinder is designed to be comfortable for long periods.’
With this in mind, and with utility at its heart, the Pathfinder is built from Reynolds 921 stainless steel, which Coppin explains is the best choice given its anti-corrosion and high stiffness-to-weight qualities. But isn’t Reynolds 953 even lighter and stronger? In a sense, yes, but 921 is cold-drawn, whereas 953 is heat-treated, which results in tubing so hard it is incredibly difficult to bend, and hence is not conducive to Coppin’s vision for the Pathfinder.
For starters, the stays needed custom shaping for tyre clearance, but moreover Coppin wanted to make his own forks too, and have them match the frame’s character.
‘The fork is a 921 stainless steel unicrown [the fork legs join directly to the bottom of the steerer tube rather than a crown]. Reynolds makes the parts especially for us. When people pick them up they say, “Cor, that’s heavy,” but when you ride them they’re really not, and the shock absorption is fantastic.
‘They work brilliantly with disc brakes – fully loaded the bike still stops in a nice straight line – and it also means we can build forks to suit the frame size, which you can’t if you’re buying in forks. I like the design. It’s strong and it works, like the frame.
‘We had a pair of bikes that were basically Pathfinders with Rohloff hubs that went out to New Zealand. These people cycled them back to the UK, through the ’Stans, all over the place. They ended up at the workshop for us to take a look at the bikes, and there was nothing wrong with them. So that’s the proof of sorts, I suppose.
‘A lot of people come to us and have had all sorts of bikes and what they really want now is a nice bicycle that will do most things well, and that will last.’
‘I have carpal tunnel in my hands from years of aggressive riding, so the Pathfinder is designed to be comfortable for long periods’