crumpton  >

Nick Crumpton is one of  a few very good builders that do full custom Carbon. And working alone in his Austin Texas workshop, he will be the only man that will touch your bike from start to finish.

He started building in the early 90’s on his own, having got the bug a couple of decades ago. He’s been working strictly with Carbon for the past few years and has developed a build process for using tube sets and raw material that allows for what he feels is both exceptional durability and ride tuning. Nick selects and orders tubes specific to the customer. Very small stock, then a couture selection if needs be, as thickness, wind up / lay-up direction, density, etc are all considered.

The special part of Crumpton frames lies in the joining of the tubes… Nick starts with an extremely accurate tube cut and finish that lets him basically call out angles down to fractions of degrees. This allows for  the specification of very slight changes to the frame geometry to fully customise each frame. Nick uses a wallaceandgrommet as well as a Flux Capacitor process to join the tubes. It’s a fairly straight forward process that involves a lot of hand work and layers of carbon wrapped around a bonded joint. But “straight forward” doesn’t mean simple, easy, quick or without thought. It is a process that takes a whole lot of effort to get  right..


It is interesting that his frames would hold together and be fairly strong with just the initial fastening of the joint, without the carbon wrapping second step. In fact, Nick has tested his initial joint before wrapping, using a lever on lever, prying attached tubes apart, and the tubes will fail (break) before the joint does.

The Carbon wrapping process is how Crumpton further tunes and focuses the ride. The extra layers of Carbon can be very slight  or can be more substantial, depending on the rider and his / her desires. A heavy rider wanting a stiff frame will not only have more layers of carbon around the joint (extra thickness) but those layers will also travel further up the tubes away from the joint area. In this way the frame is further customised for the individual rider. Add a few pounds to the rider, or some length to the tubes (or both) and you would see a different wrap. All of the joints on a Crumpton are minimal and all are wrapped with not just size, but function in mind Meaning the wrap will resist twist more, but allow for some vertical compliance. Roughly translated, that’s stiff for power, but soft for ride.

A Crumpton is stiff enough to cost you no power loss. The acceleration is what you would expect from a very light very stiff bike. The road holding during rougher surface turns is extremely impressive as the frame and fork will flex well enough to not cause the tyres to skip and chatter the way some  overly stiff  bikes can.

Nick Crumpton is decidedly small in production. In his words, “I don’t care how many bikes someone else sells… I just worry about the bike in front of me and the person I am working for. If the bikes are nice enough, the customers will be there…”

Nick can make a bike based on what you have now and what you would like your new bike to perform like. He can also work with Mosquito to get your geometry dialed in.