OMAKASE: Rapha x Palace Tribute

Remember that Rapha x Palace x Cannondale Education First Team bike that stirred up the peloton and the cycling press last season? The one with the funky ducks and the accompanying kit? It kind of gave the middle finger to a lot of the rules and since then they’ve expanded on its themes with another belter this season and we’re here for it. You might have seen a few pastiches, tributes or copies; we did one here on behalf of a Trash Mile rider and it came out great. At the same time, we had this one on the back burner at the workshop…

Personal projects always fall by the wayside. They’re the first to get put on hold and the last to be picked up again when you’re busy, that’s why this one is still in the workshop after such a long time! The original production bikes were, as far as we can tell, given some paint but the most part of the graphic embellishments were applied with a decal/transfer/sticker kit - we’d presume for the sake of the and cost savings.

In much the same way as a musician might perform a cover song and practice it to improve their skills, we used our tribute project to skill share and practice our chops and in order to get the most from the challenge, we used no stickers at all. Every one of the graphics and flourishes on this bike is done with paint. Our team here is small and we each have individual specialisms so for this project, we guided one another in our key areas to help improve and develop our skills.

Now, we didn’t want to do a direct copy, and based on the fact we had to grab an hour here and there to work on this, we’ve had to make some changes… few of our graphics overlap… this allowed us to paint small pieces at a time and leave it to rest while we did other things for a few weeks. None of the graphics here are original… ours doesn’t say Rapha because it has nothing to do with Rapha… it doesn’t say Cannondale, or Palace for the same reasons. All the sponsors aren’t the same; they’ve been digitally redrawn to be made into multi-stage stencils which are similar but not identical. We ditched the Palace ducks in favour of some of our own favourite cartoons so ours has a Charmander, a Bartman and a Pickle Rick.

All things considered, it’s a bit of fun with a great deal more product and technical paintwork than perhaps this frame warrants! We estimate it to have around 140 hours in it and more than 20 different paint colours.

There’s some media-blasted logos on the chainring and stem because that was a process we were dialling in, and the cranks are in a custom colour because we wanted to refurb them following some wear. We’re mentioning all of this because this bike is for sale. It could be yours. The details are all up on the website. The steerer can of course be cut to your preferred height if you want us to do that for you.

We had some fun painting it and we hope it raises a smile with you. Get in touch if you want to buy it. It’s a 54m Dolan Track Champion with a decent spec all told. Please share and post it about… let people know the kind of thing we can do here.

Thanks!