Malcolm Custom Bicycles

Ashley Malcolm

How and why did I get into frame building?
 

At the start of 2011 I was approached by a friend who wanted to start building bicycle frames. He came to me as I have vast experience with bicycles – building them, repairing them and racing them.

Throughout my career as a top bicycle mechanic I have regularly been asked if I wanted to build bicycle frames. By the time I was building bikes for international riders; who now include World Champions, Olympic Champions and Tour de France winners, the industry as a whole had moved away from steel as a material to aluminium and carbon fibre.

I wanted to help my friend out but as I started to do the research into frame building I realised that I had a yearning to do something special with my knowledge and skills. I found that not only was I striving to learn more about this master craft, but discovered I already possessed much of the understanding and skills required. I was on a quest to learn more and apply it to making bicycles people would love and enjoy for the rest of their cycling lives. Some might even just get hung on a wall once their days on the road were over.

Ashley Malcolm

What background do I have?

I started racing bicycles at the age of nine in outback Australia and was lucky enough at that time to be amongst some great talent, like Scott Sunderland in the Inverell Cycling Club. He would go on to be a Director de Sportive for CSC for four years before becoming the main developer of the BSkyB team. It would be many miles and five years of hard training and racing before I would really come to stardom.

At the age of fourteen I started to win some big races both on the track and the road to become New South Wales State Champion on the track and runner-up in the road State Championships.

I won countless track races and a good share of road races and at sixteen won a Gold medal in the Team Pursuit, a silver medal in the Scratch race and fourth place in the Match Sprint. My competition was Danny Day, who placed second in four World Track Championships, and the infamous 1km Time Trial legend, Shane Kelly, five times World Track Champion. In the same year I was placed third in the Australian Road Race for my age. This lead to me being ranked number one in Australian cycling for my age and I was awarded New South Wales cyclist of the year in 1986.

The following year, being a year younger than the competition I won gold in the New South Wales State Point Score Championship (a title I would win again the following year) and won silver in the Australian Point Score Championship to Brett Aitken. Brett went on to become World Point Score Champion that year and in the decade that followed would take a bag full of World Championship, Olympic and Commonwealth medals home.

The following summer I represented Australia on the track and the road at the Oceanic Games bringing home a silver medal. On the way, I would win the illustrious Bob Blair memorial holding off Olympic Gold medallist Brett Dutton.

Shortly after that I attended the Australian Institute of Sport where I lived and trained with world track cycling legends Martin Vinnicombe, Steve McGlede, Craig Chapman, Simon Calder, David Bink, and Simon Kersten. This was the development time of a country with a population smaller than some world cities becoming the number one track cycling nation for over a decade. I also had the privilege of being nurtured by Gary Sutton (brother of Shane Sutton), 1981 World Points Score Champion and silver medallist in the same after returning from retirement aged 38.

Frame detail from Malcolm Custom Bicycles

Malcolm Custom Bicycles Prototype scheme…

As far as my partner, Ian and I were concerned we had to get the product right before selling it. There is a huge difference between a custom bicycle frame and what can only be called a frame shaped object. Through my racing career and time as a mechanic I have always followed the rule of function over form. It doesn’t matter how good it looks if it rides like a mule.

The first thing we did was build a couple of prototypes to see if I could build a frame that was worthy of riding. The first one was pretty much on the money and so we built another one with some angle adjustments. This had to be an ongoing process and will always be as far as custom detailing goes. The second frame we built was actually for me to test and then came the double edged sword… returning from my first long ride I realised that I may not own all of the bikes I had hoped to own when I was a younger man. The second frame I made was better than my Colnago Master.

 
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