When pro cyclist Adam Hansen favoured shoes were discontinued he made his own, and an entire brand to go with them
Cyclists are as tough as old boots, which doesn’t mean that that’s what they’d choose to wear for the gruelling Grand Tours, instead preferring lightweight clip-ins.
But what happens if they don’t fit as perfectly as you’d like? In the case of Australian rider Adam Hansen, he took to his workbench, grabbed some carbon fibre and started making his own.
Not only is he the one of the few riders to have completed all three grand tours for consecutive years, and to have ridden and finished in the last seven grand tours in which he has participated, (he was already a legend in our books when he did this), but he is now an official cordwainer.
Hansen has installed a cutting room and workshop in his home to produce the perfect lightweight shoe
It’s not like Hansen is short of the facilities, at his base in the Czech Republic he has a 40 metre square cutting room, racks of rolls of different fibres – carbon, kevalr and boron, and a separate workshop at home.
With each race the design has evolved to provide different levels of stiffness in sections (altered by the epoxy used between fibres) and weight reduction.
Each shoe weighs less than 95g, with the lightest model Hansen has produced to date weighing in at less than 76g – with over half that weight being added by the standard pedal cleat.
The shoes can weigh as little as 76g
To ensure he meets the (slightly ambiguous) Tour rules that all ‘bike equipment’ must be available for all to buy, Hansen has even set up his own webstore to manage production orders – a snip, starting at €2,000.
All of this is not bad considering that he has a rather taxing day job to be training for.
For more information on Hanseeno’s moonlighting career as a product designer, check out the interview below.
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