 Welcome back to the Friday vlog series where it's a day We've got a problem with the elves phallus aero frame And I kind of think it's a good problem to have some of you will disagree no doubt But you can decide at the end of this video once I've presented everything to you But if you've just landed on this channel or this series you might be wondering what the bloody hell is an elves now out of the Box according to experts Was that the color that it arrived at? What about the quality? Well my profession, my professional opinion No, I don't know. You've got no idea. What's the right answer? Are you into forks? I love a good fork. I don't have any idea. To be saying this is it's almost too nice, you know for a mass-produced type thing The gloss area is very nice paint job And then it's got the nice little fade from gloss to matte which well Yeah, it takes a little bit of thinking about and all that but that's why I said did they know this was for you because it looks good So and then you look at this one. Yeah, very very clean in here Yeah, a beautiful surface there for the bearings to seat in top and bottom It's nice and clean in the frame very clean bottom bracket area But if you want to be fully brought up to speed you can watch this video over there Which had over 200,000 views in the first week and you could say the cat is now out of the bag And as a result of that Peter who runs a local distribution for elves frames reached out to me and said can we have a chat? I said yes, and then during the discussion. He threw me a curveball I said can we record part of the discussion? He said no worries, which is what I'm going to share with you right now Now the falloff the frame that I purchased is being upgraded as we speak. Why is that? We're going for UCI approval will be for the both the falloff and the Vanja Which I think just more the European riders just use that as a nice Affirmation that it's a good quality frame because there's actually a cost associated with getting the UCI approvals The frames have to meet certain standards. I just think it brings a really good quality assurance to the brand And where are you at from a falloff perspective in the UCI approval process now being UCI approved As a recreational and amateur road cyclist who does a little bit of racing from time to time Does it really matter? Do I need a frame to be UCI approved external to peace of mind to answer this question? I reached out to the ex-president of one of the biggest Cycling clubs in Australia Corfield Carnegie Cycling Club to pose this question to him So look during my time as president and when we were governed by Cycling Australia, and then we switched over to us cycling There was never a directive to the club to scrutinize bikes for UCI regulations Well, the other thing that clubs want to achieve is a level of inclusiveness and accessibility So to achieve that the sport needs to be affordable So if you could only race a UCI approved bike and other equipment It may make the sport For a lot of people especially the juniors and even those that are just getting into cycling that maybe don't want to invest The money that's required to buy that spec of bike, but want to get out there and start riding So with the UCI regs they really ink on frames in particular really only came into play January of 2011. So does that mean that bike behind you is not UCI approved? Yeah, oh I love it So being a non-UCI frame it doesn't really matter for my local riding bunch riding even a little bit of local club Racing external to of course peace of mind, but as a youtuber does it matter? Let's quickly hear back from Peter first in terms of time frames. We've submitted all of the documentation So it's past all its tests. So now we're sort of hopefully in a paper work process So we're expecting that approval can take a long time may even take up to three months to actually get the Approval but we know what standards we need to meet to actually get those approvals before we even submit the paperwork So we've we're ready to go. Okay, that's good So this this frame that you've created that will most likely be approved now Is it possible that I can gain access to it in the short term? So as a youtuber you should appreciate why I'm asking that question. Let me paint a little picture for you here I build this bike up. I do my first impressions. I ride it for a long period of time I spend hours on content creation emotional time and energy we get to the long-term review and then New frame on the market and your content is less Relevant that is why I asked Peter if I could get my hands on a prototype I might be able to get you a price a prototype to test with I should probably be able to get that to you within a month To be honest the frame has had all its on-road testing So they've done all their you know factory testing has done on-road testing by their local riders One of the small holding back points is we've got to build a new aero bar to fit it So it's got a slightly different integration at the front. So we're just building the new Aero bar probably won't be able to get you the new aero bar for you to test But you will be able to use the old one It just won't look as pretty as the new one will be so ultimately I feel this is a good problem to have yes We're gonna have to wait a little bit longer for the build for the first impressions for the long-term review But we're talking weeks not months and as a result I feel this series is gonna be a whole lot better for it albeit it is unplanned Let me know your thoughts below and while you're down there if you give the video a like helps the channel out I would greatly appreciate it and while I had Peter I thought I'd ask him a few questions about elves why he's invested his emotional time and energy into it and a little bit About their history because the more I now investigate into this brand Which I knew nothing about before this series started. I'm becoming quite intrigued myself I bring elves into Australia, so I'm the local distributor for the brand why elves There's like a thousand different Chinese frames you can bring in why did you decide to partner with elves? One of the things I saw is that frame prices are just getting Outrageously expensive if you try and buy a frame locally as you know from a known brand a really expensive So I was looking for different options to actually make them a bit more economical I found the elves guys and what I really like about them is that they've actually got their own factory and Manufacturing process. So it's actually their factory that actually produces the frame They do also do frames for other brands as well research and developments all out of Taiwan But the manufacturing is out of China. Is it often the case where the Chinese bike? Brand isn't manufacturing their own bike. They don't own the manufacturing process Yeah, a lot of frames utilize open source molds Whereas elves actually produce their molds themselves. So how long have they been around for? What's their history? So the history is basically the factory was set up in about 2006 and then they so they were producing frames for OEM brands overseas So they did that for about 10 years and then in 2016 They launched the Elves brand and then I've been bringing them into Australia since You