Lee Cooper LA Cycles Elevated Chainstay Retro Steel MTB Frame like Dave Yates Vulcan. Here we have a very rare beast. In fact it’s the only be ever built. Lee Cooper is a master frame builder based in Coventry. He’s done contract building for most of the British frame manufacturers and for a time in the 1990′s he and business partner Al, ran LA Cycles behind John Atkins Cyckes on Far Gisfird Street. Lee was the builder and Al was the painter. Their bikes were fully custom in the vane of Dave Yates, Chas Roberts et al and on the rare occasion their bikes were tested in magazines, they loved them. In the late 80′s / early 90′s lots of people were experimenting with elevated chainstay bikes. They were briefly popular but solved a problem that didn’t really exist and had some inherent flaws like BB stiffness, heel-clash on the chainstays and weight. Lee got over the first two of these issues by using Reynolds Tandem tubing in a massive 38mm diameter for the down / top tube and 31mm wide fork blades for the chainstay / seatstay. To make the joints rigid, he used plenty of fillet brazing which was not smoothed down to keep its maximum integrity. Lee told me Al was not a small guy. Well he was quite short but strongly built, so this was a great test of its strength and it never had any problems. But it is quite heavy at 3.275kg for frame, fork and headset at a time when his lightweight XC frameset were around 2.5kg. I’m not sure why they didn’t make more to sell but this is the ONLY elevated chainstay bike Lee ever made. I know Lee quite well both from bitd and from doing a lot of frame repairs on my retro MTB fleet and so when he was moving his workshop he offered me his old frames. All but three are now gone. I’m keeping one. My son has been riding this for the past 3 years and loves it but he’s now progressed to a slightly larger Cotic so it’s time to move it on to an appreciative collector. Bring fully custom, it’s not a “size” as such but I guess you’d call it a 16 based on seat tube length centre to top. The actual dimensions are. Seat tube centre to top: 16 / 41cm. Top tube effective horizontal: 20.75 / 53cm. Head tube end to end: 3.5 / 9cm. Seat post diameter: 27.2mm. Front mech diameter: 28.6mm. Headset: 1 threaded. Fork axle to crown: 39cm. Rear axle spacing is 130mm but you can splay them slightly to get a 135mm wide hub in if you like. This worked surprisingly well; better than cantilever in my opinion. The paint has lots of chips, especially the light blue portions but you could touch in the chips on the dark blue parts easily enough and re-spray the light blue fade. There is no damage to the frame and the headset is a quality vintage Tange Levin. Will be well packed and delivered insured to value by Parcel Force or you are welcome to collect from CV47 0HZ. Any questions, please ask.
