 I've done up custom frame geometries for a lot of people over the years and most of the time they're relatively straightforward. The bike is a little bit outside of the norm or it's a fairly normal geometry but the rider wants a custom titanium frame or something for some reason. But this one really stood out to me as being bizarre. So welcome back to the 27th edition of the RCA training tip show where today, the expert bike fitter Neil Stambry is gonna share with us by far the most unusual bike setup he's ever been involved with during his 10 plus years of fitting road cyclists. Now this frame build was actually put together by Mark at Prova Cycles. Prova Cycles are an Australian based custom steel and titanium bicycle frame manufacturer using the highest quality materials from Columbus and Reynolds. This video today just goes to show that generic off the shelf bike frames often don't match the unique riders physiological requirements and as a result, custom frames need to be made. But in this case, the custom frame dimensions went well beyond Mark and Neil's wildest expectations. Which Neil is gonna share with us all shortly but quickly I wanted to thank Mark from Prova Cycles and Chris who owns the bike for sending me through some pics and video for this piece and of course Neil for his excellent rundown of the bike. Lastly, before we get into it, I wanted to personally thank Jason and Michelle Watkins from JackRoo Australia who are the Aussie agents for JackRoo, the custom sports apparel wear company for cycling gear. After personally searching for close to 12 months for a apparel supplier, a kit supplier for the RCA, JackRoo have finally and recently helped me put together the Road Cycling Academy kit which I am super impressed with customer service, delivery time and above all else, the quality is exceptional. JackRoo haven't sponsored this video today however moving forward, I will be earning a small commission on any referrals that come through the channel. So if you've got a club or a team and you're looking to get some kit made up, I'll put Jason's contact details below and if you do go through my referral, be sure to know that I will feature your club or your team kit on the channel once they're made up. So let's get into this video. I don't know how many people I've fitted over the years. Let's say it's two or 3,000 but in that sample size of two or 3,000 people this guy is a freak among freaks. So when you look at the frame from the side on the frame is built by a company in Melbourne called Provo and they do beautiful steel frame bikes very high quality and they're known for having like 3D printed bottom bracket sections and stuff and it's really, really neat systems built with exceptional engineering and they're really good bikes. When you look at the frame from the side you think at first glance you think well that's just a regular kind of bike and then you take a close look and you have a look at the wheel base, have a look at how far apart the wheels are and then you go okay that's a bit unusual and then it gets even weirder and weirder from there. So the frame geometry for Chris here, Chris is a Tasmanian, don't hold that against him, he's a pretty good guy, he's a pretty good guy. He's a very cluey guy too, he's an architect and he had figured out a lot of the geometry before he got to me, this is quite a few years ago but he wanted me to- Why is that? Had he been experiencing issues on his, whatever bike he was riding before, cluey? I think so, I think he had trouble with neck and shoulder and hand issues but he was always looking at ways of getting longer and lower because he just gravitated that way because that's the way his body functioned and to function the way that Chris functions you need to have three main ingredients. He's got an incredible ability to roll his pelvis forward and as you see from the photos that he sent me, he rides with a really flat back and an incredible reach to the bars which is just off the charts. I'll give you some figures later on. So you need to be hyper flexible, Chris can put his hands flat on the floor, he's amazing in a forward's plane. He's only six foot two so he's not terribly, terribly tall but he's hyper flexible, he has no hip impingement so he can roll his pelvis forward and reach these very extreme thigh to torso angles without his neck of his femur from running into the edge of his hip socket and even with regular length cranks, I think he's just running 172s or 172.5s on this thing and so even with regular length cranks, he can still ride with an extremely low torso position so you need to have hyper flexibility, no hip impingement and then the one that really, I guess dictates the craziness of what we've been able to do with this frame is that you've got to have some sort of particular geometry of your gentleman's regions and I won't say that we examined this in Chris but it's a prerequisite so it must have been in place but you have to have the ability to roll your pelvis forward, a huge amount onto the saddle without getting pressure on your gentleman's regions. And so the particular anatomy of the pelvis of for riders like this becomes quite critical because for most mere mortals, as you roll your pelvis forward this far, you're gonna start getting pressure. As what happened with me when I changed to the cranks, you had to put me on a different seat which is very functional but very ugly. Absolutely, that's a matter of personal preference and I think they, I think SNPs look all right. But a lot of people don't like them but you need to have the ability to roll your pelvis forward and not crush your gentleman's regions. So Chris has got all three of these things to an extreme extent. So to give you an idea, when we specced up this frame, he went over to the guys at Prova because they didn't believe him that he wanted these numbers on the frame and they set him up on an adjustable fit bike which has got huge ability to be adjusted into custom position. And the actual top tube that they reach out to the bars, they couldn't get it long enough. The frame, the adjustable frame but I believe it was a Serota fit frame or one of the custom adjustable frame setups that they use and they actually couldn't get it long enough so they had to then take an educated guess as to what his top tube should be as well as, you know, taking information from myself and Chris as well. And this thing was off the charts. So he's ended up with a frame which has a 661 millimeter effective top tube. Now, to give you an idea that the largest giant TCA you can buy just to reference it in numbers that people will be able to sort of, you know, understand, relate to, yeah. The largest TCA you can buy has got a 600 millimeter effective top tube. That's the biggest possible one, right? This thing's 661 millimeters. And he's only six twos, not like he's six eight or something like that. He's not that tall. He's tall, but he's not crazy tall. He's not six eight or six 10. Yeah, so he's got a 61 millimeter longer effective top tube on this thing. And I think he's running a 120 mil stem on it as well which is, you know, something pretty crazy like that. The head tube, the height of the front end, 125 millimeters tall. So that is a rough, if you're looking at a race-orientated frame with a pretty low front end, 125 mil head tube would more commonly be found on a 52 centimeter frame or something like that, right? So the top tube is incredibly long. The head tube is incredibly short. He's got a fair bit of drop to the bars, a pretty steep seat tube angle of, you know, 74 and a half degrees or so and he uses a zero offset post. So the general picture is of one who's a rider who's forward and over the bottom bracket a long way with an incredible reach and drop. And when you look at him riding, you can understand why? Cause he rides with his beautiful flat back. His torso is effectively very long because his pelvis has rolled forward so far. His shoulders and head get pushed forward as his spine straightens out. So he's really flat in the back. And this is a pretty envious thing to be able to do because the aerodynamic advantages of riding a bike in that way, if you can, are off the charts. When you're sitting producing big wattages at the front of a bunch or in a break or solo off the front, being able to sit out of the wind as much as someone like Chris can and produce big wattages seated can be, you know, it can be a real killer for other people that are trying to draft behind you or chase you down at high speed. So the wheelbase of the bike ended up really big. I don't know exactly what it is, but I think it's over 1.2 meters, which is really, really big. It's like a huge, it's similar wheelbase to what you'd find on a very large dual suspension mountain bike or something unheard of in a road bike. And an interesting point about this is the guys at Provert, they couldn't get a Columbus steel top tube long enough for this bike. You can't buy them in lengths that would suit this, whatever the length was. So they had to use a down tube made out of a different type of steel as the top tube. So his bike is kind of a Frankenstein of two different machines. And he said that was actually ended up okay because the triangle of the frame is so long. One of the problems then becomes rigidity, torsional rigidity of the frame. And so being able to use a down tube and an ovalized down tube on the top tube reduces the twisting moments in the frame and makes it stiffer. And so Chris said it rides brilliantly and he's really, really happy with it. But it's an absolute freak of nature that thing. It's one of the craziest frames I think I've ever seen. I've seen frames that were bigger in some dimensions and smaller in other dimensions. But in terms of the overall length and the overall drop to the front end, this is a one in a million. Yeah. So very interesting frame and he's super happy with it but this is so far outside what we would have been able to do with any off the shelf frame geometry that it had to be custom. There was no chance of ever finding, of us ever finding a bike which would enable this to happen. Unless we were looking at like a really large race orientated frame with a custom stem, maybe like a 170 millimeter custom stem or something on a really steep angle to get his bars out and down far enough. You start to run into problems with a few frames that I've done up over the years with people who were trying to use standard frames to create positions like this. When the bar center gets too far out over the front wheel, the handling goes out the window. So people using big 170 millimeter custom stems and stuff, the bike, as they tip it into a corner, it tends to have a tendency for the front end to tuck underneath and then high side them. I think the motorcyclists call that high siding where the front end will actually get pulled in underneath you as you provide steering input through a sharp corner at high speed. And so they become very, very unsafe to ride, which is why you've got to do something like what Chris has done here and go custom, yeah. Beautiful bike, but... So hard for him to upgrade. He can't go by the latest Tarmac SL7 Kenny. I said to him, you ever want to sell this thing? You know, it might be two other people in Australia that have got the same ability as you got. So yeah, he's never going to be able to sell it, but I don't think he'll ever want to because he's a fantastic bike. Yeah, do you know how much it was? I don't know. I don't know. Okay. If I find out, I'll ask, but you can ask the guys at Prova what a custom build like that would cost. I think it depends a little bit upon the type of steel you're using and that type of stuff and which bits you want with it, but most high end titanium or steel frame, custom frames like that, you know, you can get a curve or something for sort of three and a half, $4,000, but if you go something high end, like a balm or one of these, you're looking closer up towards the five figures, I believe. Yes. So it's worth it if you've got a body like Chris. Yes.