Serotta were at Eurobike with their usual crop of lovely looking custom-built bikes – Titanium, Carbon and a bit of both – but most interesting was their new Meivici AE time trial machine. Serotta have been wanting to make a monocoque TT bike for some time, but every bike is custom fitted and it’s just not viable to make a new mould for every customer. The solution they’ve come up with is to split the bike frame into sections, and create a number of moulds for each bit. When you’re measured for your frame Serotta will pic the bits you need and bond them into a frame – each section has male and female connectors that fit snugly together. You end up with a custom TT frame that looks like a monocoque, but fitted exactly for you. It’s a very interesting take on the TT frame and Serotta reckon the first finished frames will be shipped by the end of the year. The display frame showed that they’ve still got a little bit of work to do hiding the joins, but the initial impression is of a single piece carbon bike and you have to look pretty hard to see the junctions.
Where the jigsaw fits together. As you can see, the show bike has fairly visible joins in some places but we were assured that you’d barely be able to see the junctions on the production frames. Indeed, the junction above the bottom bracket was almost invisible, the fracture in the carbon weave being the only giveaway.