I get asked alot where our frames are made and recently on a web forum in a galaxy not so far away, some one obserbed that all things US made must be better than all things Chinese made so i thought i'd offer an insight - both on that issue and to clear up where our framesets are made.

We (Sunday) now use a combination of suppliers from the USA, China and Taiwan – some simply for working samples, some for full on production. We don’t now bother to state which frames are made where – we’re very much design led so we find a manufacturer who can do the ‘best job’ of a given design rather than asking for a version of what they already have. We might use the USA for their expertise on folded 6al sheet work or the guys in Taiwan for their extruded butting quality. Lynskey weld well, no disputes, but its weird that people hold them up as the benchmark for manufacturing when Litespeed have had some well documented manufacturing failures in the past (tearing integrated head tubes seem to come up a lot on web forums). We’ve had not one failure from a frame yet. At all. Zero. So that's why we've not considered changing our manufacture to the USA - what's the benefit if we have a 100% manufacturing success rate?

Well, there's the humanitaran issue, potentially. Cheap labour and all that. In fact the forum post that got my goat specifically implied our frames are assembled by 'emaciated 13 year olds'.

One of the Chinese factories on our panel of suppliers has ISO accreditation and is constantly at pains to meet international standards precisely because they are aware that they have to fight unhelpful semi-informed notions of them employing ‘emaciated 13 year olds’. On paper they are the best qualified and professional of all our suppliers. Their fees largely reflect this - They're not so cheap that we couldn't switch production to, say, Lynskey and be able to keep our retail points the same.

Sadly, the same factory has been ‘emaciated’ thanks to the recent earthquakes –the factory is about 150km from the epicentre and their community is living in camps while they wait for their homes to be re-built. Iain and I are travelling out to see them in July, firstly to see the people with whom we’ve developed a professional relationship over the last few months and to place an order – naturally they risk customers walking away as they’re unable to fulfil orders at the moment and we don’t want that to happen. For all that we use some Chinese suppliers, we at Sunday do have a moral compass and try to use it as often as possible.

When i read the forum post that invoked my ire, i made a response to it - largely what i've put here - and then ffound that I was about to apologise for having a rant and taking the topic off thread. But it wasn’t me who took the topic off thread. We use responsible suppliers and we are currently doing all we can to support people who have indeed been emaciated over the last month – though not through unethical employment practice, but by mother nature.

Greg

Reviews

The thing is that I can't really complain. Only I'm going to.

When we get a good review, people point out that reviews are 'rubbish' and that reviewers talk drivel. When we get a - well, we haven't had a bad one - but when we get a less positive review, people suddenly start quoting lines from them back to us.

Last week we came 'last' of the 5 finalists in Cycling Weekly's 'Race Bike Of The Year' review.

I actually don't mind that. To be in a final 5 alongside the likes of Cervelo and Litespeed is amazing and a testament to how fast we've developed already. We've been going as a business for 20 months and our product development budget is small - tiny - compared to these market leaders. But we, or specifically Iain as far as design goes, work really, really hard.

So, in a way, we can live with coming 5th. I can even live with the fact that of the 6 reviewers, 4 of them liked the bike, one of them, a leading UK elite, absolutely loved it and one really, really disliked it (sadly, the lead author of the review), so we found ourselves 5th.

I don't mind that the bike - our Mondays Child model - wasn't to all reviewers tastes. We have 2 race-specific products in our range to accomodate different likes or dislikes in terms of feel, so anyone looking to buy who got onboard a Mondays Child and found the ride too stiff and harsh could find solice in the ride of the equally raceable Silk Road Pro. But the reviewer was testing a specific product, not the Sunday range or, indeed the buying and fitting experience, so i guess i'm being unfair in this respect.

What i can't live with though, is the nature of the criticism and the inconsistency in the write up.

Let me explain.

When I asked Iain to design the Mondays Child frameset, I specifically wanted him to disprove the popular assertion that 'you can't make a frame from titanium that's as stiff as a carbon frame'. As they observe in the review, we met our brief. In fact the central complaint from the reviewer is that the Mondays Child is just too stiff and harsh. I've worked as a journalist. I would have thought that the central story here is that, 'yeah, maybe it needs refining, but these guys have created a ti frame thats actually stiffer than its carbon competition. I didn't like it, but they're clearly onto something.' But no. Instead we got odd contradictions.

In the Litespeed section of the article, there's the observation that ti frames can't be designed to be as stiff as carbon. In the conclusion, there's the complaint that our bike was too stiff. Confused?

We heard that Mondays Child was both 'dead and wooden' and 'immensely rigid...super responsive' in adjacent paragraphs. Odd?

As I say, I just feel the point was missed. I love my Mondays Child. It's what I ride. I wouldn't - and I don't - recommend it to many customers, but it is genuinely remarkable for its quick handling and super sharp stiff ride. A bit of a ti revelation. Don't want that? Buy a Silk Road (hey, that got a blinding review, and its a great, fast sportive bike, but I wouldn't want to ride a UCI road race on one particularly.)

I was going to write a conclusion. Instead I'll just make an observation. Race Bike of The Year had no disearnable criteria. In absence of this, we looked to the rule book for race bikes when we submitted our Mondays Child build. I note that all three bikes finishing in 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in the review are below the UCI minimum weight of 6.8kg - so, you couldn't actually start a race on one legally... I think that's the sort of detail that let the article down.

I'm not sure I'll read many more reviews with a scientific interest anymore. I'll continue to put more credence in our solid design briefs that examine the legal criteria for a bikes intended end use, and which push bike design forward, than in arbitrary reviews.

And yes, you're right. I will be happy next time we get a great review, scientific or otherwise. In the meantime, I'll keep riding my own Mondays Child as a matter of choice.

Greg's first blog

Being a bike rider isn’t, on the face of it, relationship, social life, working life or family friendly. I train between 12 and 16 hours a week. That’s when I’m at home. And come the season, I’m not home a whole lot at weekends. Oh and the odd stage race – Like the Tour of Taiwan, which I’m starting with the team on 8th March, can mean a full weeks’ absence.

During my early 20’s I lost a number of girlfriends thanks to this pattern of behaviour. Je regrette rien. My bike would be freshly washed, my kit bag neatly packed and labelled and the pasta meal partly digested when it would be observed that, once again, I was off ‘somewhere nice’ on my own. Those labelled kit bags had somehow been cast as symbols of my intended escape.

I love being away at a good race. Ideally a stage race somewhere - with nice weather, reasonable hotels and me in good form. You can switch off your brain, (and your phone) ignore the outside world and concentrate on putting yourself through hell for four or five hours a day for a week. Nothing beats the clean feeling of nightly exhaustion that comes from menial physical labour. Particularly when self imposed. When you’re working hard in a break, when it’s bloody killing you, when you’re being sick into your mouth and lazily dribbling it onto the top tube and dashing a bit off your knee caps, you can always stop pedalling. It would be the easiest thing in the world to just stop pedalling. Only you wouldn’t get that nightly clean feeling. You wouldn’t have got it all out. And anyone who’s ever been nearly serious about bike racing knows the clean feeling would be replaced by a strange, needless, acute sense of self loathing.

Life moves on. I found a girl who, if not understands exactly, recognises my needs. Oscar, our son, has yet to form an opinion, but one of his first words is ‘bike’ (to be accompanied by a vigorous pointing gesture) and he knows his dad is intrinsically linked to the numerous two wheeled items that inhabit his tiny world.

So I’m going to be away again. For as much as I need to go away and torture myself on the bike every now and then, the baggage labels, as ever, direct me home again. These days I write them out in capital letters. Not symbols of escape, then, but an unspoken promise, always, to come home.