Merlin CrusherTi Frameset

The Merlin CrusherTi Frameset began life here in our office bound daydreams with the eventual aim of producing the ideal gravel racer. The Crusher isn't a grinder made for noodling and commuting. Instead, it's inspired by the new breed of multi surface races and events that take riders across road, gravel, dirt, and high altitude granite moonscapes where patches of snow manage to persist even into the heat of July. By adding an ENVE carbon disc fork to Merlin's titanium expertise, we think we've helped establish the new standard, but we'll let your own legs and gravel ambitions be the final metric. By now, you know the standard line about titanium. It's springy, it dampens vibrations without feeling dead, it's responsive, it's lively all of which sounds very nice, but the tendency to apply these modifiers to a frame's material alone glosses over the most important aspect of any frame's ride quality: how the damn thing is put together. That's why names like Merlin, who knows how to manipulate titanium in order to excite the above praise, carry so much weight in the cycling industry. That's also why the US based manufacturer was the only obvious choice to build the CrusherTi. The CrusherTi's head badge indicates that Merlin's company name refers to the bird of prey and not the sorcerous Briton of Arthurian myth. But we know better. There's definitely some alchemy at play in how the frame transforms rough roads and multi surface punishment into solid gold. Of course, no frame design magic in the world can elicit descriptions like springy, damping, etc. from a frame that starts with sub prime materials, so the CrusherTi is made entirely from double butted 3Al 2. 5V titanium sourced right here in the US. This alloyed Ti's particular modulus means that, under stress, it expresses less deformity than aluminum and more than carbon fiber all of which is the pseudo engineering talk behind the pseudo marketing fluff springy, responsive that all sloughs away onc...