Our new Vars Disc AR Carbon all road & adventure bike
Spoon Vars Disc AR with Sharp Precision Gravel wheels, Sram Force 2x and Teravail tyres. Photo by Liz Seabrook
Vars AR or all-road is our new gravel and adventure bike. With shapes aero optimised for our road bikes, it’s a completely new, gravel focused lay-up, for a strong frame designed for going fast wherever you want to take it.
With Vars AR, built with our unique process, you define how big you want the adventures to go and then together we tweak the geometry, components, rack mounts and bottle bosses to meet you there.
You want a bit more road focus, no worries.
We’ll chat through that with you at the design stage to dial in the kind of road manners you need to keep up with the chain gang and then build the sturdier off-road capable chassis around a skinnier tyre but give you the wheelbase and steering you need to slap a 35mm tyre in it, and go play in the traffic on the way to work.
Glen our mechanic is obsessed with lining logos up. The Columbus supplied fork in our AR models features a flip chip. Pic by Liz Seabrook.
If you change your mind about road manners, the bike has your back there too with a flip chip in the fork that lets you tweak the geo yourself to add a bit more trail. Need still more off-road capability? Switch out the wheels for your 650b’s with gnarlier rubber, flip the chip and it's ready to get rowdier.
Designing and building a bike like Alexis’ at Spoon Customs is a process.
First, we take our time to listen to and fully understand your riding and your physiology spend some time to observe you on our fit jig. Our observations then combine with your real time feedback to find a position that works for you at the start of the ride, and at the end of a six hour day. Efficient, powerful and sustainable.
Once we know where your hands, feet and bum need to be in space, we design the chassis around those coordinates, paying careful attention to weight distribution and how optimising balance in the bike might assist with intuitive handling and that feeling of being ‘in’ your bike.
Teravail Cannonball tyres on handbuilt Sharp Precision wheels . Pic by Liz Seabrook.
Once we’ve agreed a design, we get your bike into our build queue for the four to six month fabrication and paint process, which we can walk you through every step of the way.
It’s not the easiest way to make a bike, but when we start with you and the riding you do, and bring you in on the process, we believe something special happens. We believe it makes a better bike.
This Vars AR was designed and built for Alexis who rides in the UK, Europe and South Africa. The fit and handling geo is specific to his needs. Designed around a brief to build a Swiss army knife bike that would be work for the varied riding that he loves.
Spoon Vars Disc AR shot by Liz Seabrook.
The custom made tubeset here is made in our Vars Road moulds, with a gravel specific layup which prioritises T800 fibre over stiffer variants to give the frame a robust and forgiving ride, without sacrificing power transfer. The rear end is all new and specific to our AR models, where we can run rack mounts, and tyres as large as necessary to deliver the brief.
The paint is custom and the designed for Alexis. The colour is inspired by an African bird, and features custom drawn contour lines which fade away into a soft grey, meticulously masked by our painter Sam Weeks at Gun Control, with place names chosen by Alexis dotted on the frame marking out his favourite places back home.
The technical fade seen here used 6 different tones of grey, faded over a soft grey base, which Sam then topped off in a matte laquer for a super durable finish.
2x drive is unusual on a gravel bike these days, but chain retention is assured on SRAM’s new mechs, and we’ve set the cranks up with a wider Q factor and offset front mech band, to allow bigger tyres when they’re needed.
Hidden brass mounts with highest-quality stainless bolts are self lubricating and safe from corrosion so racks can be bolted on and off and used in the worst of the British weather without any worries about dismantling it all and packing it down for a flight to drier rides back home. Non-integrated cables deliberately keep travel options and reassembly minimal and simple.
Euro brakes are a handy anti-theft device if he loses the bike anywhere around London…
Thanks for trusting us to bring your ideas to life Alexis, and I hope you love riding this bike as much as we loved building it with you.