I’ve known Broady for a really long time. I remember seeing him back in my BMX days when I first arrived in Leeds aged 18. He always had a different bike to anything else you’d see. He’d have custom frames and handlebars when everyone else had the same old stuff. I’ve made modifications to BMX bikes since I was about 13 years old, just playing around with the angle grinder in my grandad’s shed, until eventually, the mods my mates and I used to make actually caught on with the manufacturers and became standard on just about every frame, fork and stem. Broady, however, had access to machines as an engineering apprentice and would modify other parts a bit more professionally and certainly with more grace. He’d make compression caps and countersink stems so the caps would sit flush and look ultra clean. He’d make his own bar ends too. All pretty straight forward, but eye catching and different. Again, nowadays, parts come like this straight from the factories.

When I began building frames, Broady was one of my first followers on social media and would like just about every post I made. We have ended up working on quite a few things together. He’s helped with both tooling for the workshop and parts for custom bikes when I have been building something that just needed that special touch that you couldn’t buy off the shelf.

Fast forward a few years and I start seeing photo pop-ups of Broady riding road bikes and somehow I just knew that it wouldn’t be long before the idea of building him a bike would come up. Once electronic shifting and hydraulic disc brakes on road bikes came along, it hit his soft spot. He loves that thing that no one else has yet and we just had to do it. I had done a few disc brake road bikes before, but this one was the first that had that true performance road bike feel about it. We did it before there was any option of the full Dura-Ace, or even Ultegra disc groupset, so it really is an early adopter of the race-ready disc brake road bike.

In true Broady style, there was no expense spared on this bike. It has the best wheels, the best finishing kit and an absolutely stunning paint job based on the classic Nike AirMax ’95:  The ultimate choice for any scally of the mid 90’s. For a good while, this remained my favourite Feather out of about 250 bikes. It’s still up there in the top 3 or 4, and it’s even better that it was built for a mate and someone who has been involved in the evolution of the Feather workshop.