Night riders

Not being a welder himself, you might wonder how Pond-Jones got into making bikes for people. In truth it was a quite a pragmatic beginning.

“I was working in London on a TV project for a broadcaster that was based in LA so we were spending a lot of time working to West Coast US time,” he tells RoadCyclingUK. “That meant going home late at night and the easiest way to get in and out of town was by bike. There was something liberating about riding around the deserted streets – it was a London you don’t get to see very often.

“Having got really into riding bikes I decided to buy a bunch of vintage frames and do them up for mates. I stuck a mix of vintage and new parts on them, repainted the frames and gave them to friends.”

And nowadays, is he just splashing paint on old frames and selling them on to friends and family?

“We don’t actually specialise in one construction method over another,” he says. “Some guys are amazing at fillet brazing, while there are others who do incredibly beautiful lug work. We don’t want to limit ourselves to just one of these methods or risk being a jack-of-all-trades but master of none – so we work with builders who are the masters in each particular technique. That way each build is made using the best technique by the best craftsman or woman for that particular project.”

With a frame that’s ready to be ridden, the next part is the painting – and that’s an area where ColourBolt, with Pond-Jones at the helm, really does shine. Unless it’s a matte finish, of course.

Pond-Jones is proud of the array of different paint finishes you can select for a ColourBolt bike – perhaps this is to make up for the fact that all their bikes are monochromatic, 99 per cent of them all-black.

“Even with those early vintage frames I was repainting, the finishes were really important,” he says. “It was a great opportunity to put my stamp on the bikes I was making, even though they were really the work of other people in terms of the construction. I had a ‘dry black’, ‘sparkly black’ and one called ‘bling black’ which actually had little bits of gold laid into the powder coat.

“Now that we build our own frames as well, the paint finishes are what truly set ours apart from other bikes.”

Why bespoke?

Given ColourBolt’s origins, it won’t surprise you that the brand’s earlier bikes were focused on urban riding – but that focus has now shifted towards high-end road bikes.

“Road cycling has experienced such a boom in the last few years that we’ve been increasingly pulled towards this area of the market,” says Pond-Jones. “We were getting requests like, ‘Yeah, I love the look of this single speed, but can you do it for me with Campagnolo Super Record?’ It just made sense for us to start applying that beautiful design sensibility people loved so much to road bikes as well.”

The flagship in the ColourBolt range is the Maximum Black, a disc-equipped road bike built for speed and lightness. The paint finish is a super-tough industrial powder coat that gives the frame a pleasingly tactile quality.

“The discs, sadly, mean it’s not eligible to be raced (yet) – but if you’re looking for a Sunday best bike, something that purrs through the gears and delivers a pleasingly responsive kick when you push down on the pedals, this is the bike for you,” says Pond-Jones. “It will have you charging down descents with a confidence you don’t get with a rim-brake option.”

Other bikes in the ColourBolt stable include Drenched Black, a durable winter mile-muncher with mudguards, unchippable paint and stainless bottom bracket shell and chainstays. There’s also Scarred Black, which features gloss black paint over a mirrored stainless steel frame, the idea being that as your ride inevitably picks up the odd ding or scratch, you polish up the steel beneath the removed paint and it becomes a glittering attribute, rather than an unsightly blemish.

“People say the all-black bike is a bit played out,” says Pond-Jones, “What we try to do with ColourBolt is approach them from a fresh perspective every time. There might be a lot of black bikes out there, but every single ColourBolt is unique, be that the componentry choices, the geometry tuned to your physique or the way we’ve applied the paint or powder coat. We say they’re beautiful bikes that are meant to be ridden, not to languish on your wall or in your hallway.”

ColourBolt will be launching the Black Belter in collaboration with Velorution at the Bespoked Handmade Bicycle Show in Bristol on April 7-9