All 8Ball bicycles are completely hand made, either brazed with silver or TIG welded depending on the model. They are shipped to us raw and hand painted in an old barn in Lincolnshire. Our bicycles don’t come ready built from a factory and we don’t have boxes of them sitting in a warehouse. Each complete bicycle is designed and assembled by hand in Britain. Just for you.

We believe in good products at a fair price and trying to support ourselves by doing something we love. That’s a challenge but right now I’m just having fun. You should be too.

james @8ballbikes

8Ball designs it’s own frames in London and gets them hand built by a small team of specialist builders who produce frames for some very big names. 

Our frames are made from steel (and a few from aluminium), the same stuff used in brand name bicycle manufacturing, only it often becomes more expensive once you stick a brand logo on it. Not all steel is made the same and to make our rides better we specifically use a steel alloy called chrome-moly 4130, which is the same stuff used in aircraft. It’s usually just shorted to CrMo. As of mid-2017 we're standardising on Italian steel from Columbus - the Zona tubeset to be exact. 

We use steel because it’s plentiful and therefore inexpensive but also because it’s durable, strong as hell and also flexible enough to soak up those potholes and other road wrinkles that make your teeth chatter.

There is some stuff you can do to steel to make it lighter, like ‘butting’, which means the tubing is thicker at the ends and thinner in the middle, so you can decrease weight without sacrificing strength and overall it’s just a great material to work with.

You may have heard the phrase “steel is real” and if you haven’t you are increasingly likely too as steel seems to be enjoying a bit of a resurgence right now. The gist of it is that steel just gives a nice ride.