Cyclist
Meet the maker: Sami Al-Khayat of Wolken
When self-confessed bike nerd Sami Al-Khayat was gifted a mysterious vintage frame just days before he was due to appear at handmade bicycle show Bespoked, he knew he had to do something special with it. Passed on to him by a friend, the old Rossin frame was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked like a Ghibli – one of the Italian brand’s most iconic bikes that won its fair share of Grand Tour jerseys in the 1980s – but it lacked many of the model’s signature details, and featured Columbus Gilco tubing throughout.
‘My best guess is that it was a Ghibli prototype frame,’ says Al-Khayat. ‘It didn’t have the typical Rossin bottom bracket, it lacked bottle cage threads on the seat tube, and it didn’t have the internally routed rear brake cable.
‘After a lot of digging online, I managed to track down one other person with the exact same frame. He had bought it from the Rossin factory once the company had shut down, which led me to believe it’s most probably a prototype.’
Al-Khayat is no stranger to tinkering with experimental designs. In his day job as a development engineer for German cargo bike manufacturer Muli Cycles, he can often be found knocking up prototype frames of his own.
‘In my mind, Rossin most likely received some tubing samples and built up a frame quickly to test it out. This is probably why they didn’t bother with some of the finer details.’
Old bike, new life
With just five days between him and Bespoked, Al-Khayat set about stripping the frame down and carefully removing and restoring every single original tube piece by piece. His plan was to create a modern long-distance road bike to take on randonneurs, which meant re-mitering every tube to achieve his desired geometry.
‘Looking back, I don’t understand how I actually managed to do it in time,’ he laughs. ‘Every single tube was taken out – nothing was left joined together. It’s more work than just building a new frame from scratch, but I kept at it from morning to night for five days, and it ended up working out.
‘I think I saved time by taking a lot of risks, and the fact that it was a proto frame was actually very helpful in the construction, because the tubes didn’t have internal cables or threads, so they were still very raw. There weren’t many holes that I had to patch up.’
While the entire frame was dismantled, Al-Khayat didn’t want to lose the Ghibli’s character, so he kept some of the factory paintwork on the down tube, and gave a nod to the frame’s original lugged design by using a bilaminate construction to join the tubes back together.
‘Usually, I don’t really like the look of lugged frames that much. I prefer this very organic, fillet brazed, everything is only curves, no hard edges type of approach. I love this contrast of having the tough hard steel but shaping it in such a way that it looks organic. To me it’s like creating a sculpture. But I knew the original frame was lugged, and I wanted to reference that. The bilaminate construction allowed me to have both styles, because it has fillet brazing, but it also kind of looks like a traditional lug.
‘The original head tube was broken too,’ says Al-Khayat. ‘But it didn’t matter to me as I wanted to have a modern standard rather than an old one-inch steel tube. Now it has a tapered head tube and dropouts. These are just some of the small details I reworked to give the bike my own little spin and make it a bit more modern.’
Pick of the parts
Componentry-wise, Al-Khayat’s choices were dictated by his tight turnaround to get the bike finished. He didn’t have the luxury of agonising over every piece of finishing kit, and instead pinched some parts from his own bike, his friends’ bikes and slapped them on the Rossin.
‘Ultimately, it’s going to be built with different parts,’ he says. ‘I built the frame so that it can only accept Di2 for shifting, so the groupset is the only thing that will remain the same. It’s going to be my long-distance randonneur bicycle, so the plan is to put 32mm tyres on it, build my own biplane fork, add a dynamo light and put some really nice fenders on it.
‘I just want it to be a bike where I don’t really have to think about the weather or what time it is, or if it’s going to be dark. It will just always be ready to go, be weatherproof and be comfortable.’
Unfortunately, Wolken’s weird and wonderful bikes aren’t currently available to buy. For Al-Khayat, it’s more of a creative outlet than a money-making scheme. ‘My plan is a little bit different from what most framebuilders are trying to do,’ he explains. ‘I’m kind of building up a media production around the whole thing. So, it’s less that I’m going to sell products, and more production of videos of projects like this one. It’s somewhere for me to document my crazy projects and experimental stuff.’
• This article originally appeared in issue 148 of Cyclist magazine. Click here to subscribe
The post Meet the maker: Sami Al-Khayat of Wolken appeared first on Cyclist.