100 years of Columbus tubing X Fern Bicycle number 100! This is a quite a special bike we build for our very special friend Stephan, who himself is a former bike racer, avid cyclist and enthusiatic bicycle collector.
When he found out that I was going to get close to the frame number 100, Stephan remembered his amazing Cento tube set which he bought in 2019 to make it into a bicycle one day.
Now Stephan was one fire and I knew I would have to build a really outstanding bicycle in order to keep up with all those other wonderful bikes from his collection, such as there are Cinelli Laser's, Sablière, Routens and so many others.
While in the process of designing the bike we found out to be both big fans of Dieter Rams, the iconic architect and product designer, who is probably best known for his amazing work for Braun electronic products from the sixties until the mid 90's.
With his simple and clean design language in mind we decided to make an absolute minimalistic road/offroad hybrid bike with some very subtle but amazing design features.
Airfoil profile shaped bridges, complete internal cablerouting inside the BB, nicely sculpted cableports and most exciting, an adjustable slingshot stem with integrated handlebars. The new and super clean designed Campagnolo Ekar groupset with it's simple but super efficient 1x13 drivetrain was just the perfect match for this bike. The Campagnolo Shamal wheelset is the icing on the cake...
Velociao made as usal a great job painting that beauty in a wonderful white tone with some coloured details, quoting design elements from old Braun devices.
It was quite an adventure to make this bike become reality and I hope it will be ridden as much as possible and not just be another piece in your collection Stephan ;) !
Photography: Florian Haeussler / FERN Bicycles.