John Caskey's Llewellyn Custom Bicycle

John Caskey commissioned Darrell McCulloch to build his custom Llewellyn bike.

Darrell is recognised worldwide for his attention to detail in bespoke bike frame building. Built to last, Darrell McCulloch's frame building methods and choice of frame building materials, ensure that his bikes will be ridden for decades to come. Already collectors items before they leave his workshop floor. Darrell's Llewellyn bike workshop is located in Brisbane Australia. You see a lot of Llewelyn bikes on the streets of Brisbane, close to the place of production where Darrell's reputation began to spread. Darrell started building bike frames here, way back in the early 1980's when he was working for legendary Brisbane frame builder Eric Hendren. Hendren's race bikes were popular in the Australian bike racing scene and branded as Hoffy.

John Caskey's Llewellyn bike features hand polished stainless steel tips, a hand polished stainless steel Llewellyn head badge. The seat stay bridge is hand cut and hand polished in stainless steel, complete with Darrell's heart cutout, pierced by an arrow with a tear drop. Representing the love and care, blood and sweat that goes into building every single component that makes up a custom Llewellyn bike. The hand cut lugs on the brazed head tube are painted by Joe Cosgrove. Darrell offers an option for hand polished stainless steel stem lugs, if you want to hand over a bit more cash for the extra hours of polishing.

This Llewellyn frame is built using a combination of Columbus True Temper and Nivachrome.

The requirement for the bike was to create a machine to meet a twenty year expectation of daily riding. As a result of the expectation of long term reliability, Caskey's bike has a restrained look. Darrell always builds his bikes to last, they still look great with a huge range of options available for finishing. Yet Darrell will not cut corners on delivering a rock solid frame that will not break. All aesthetic consdiderations come after. To keep the bike up to date with modern bikes over sized tubing was used.

Painted in a classic blue by Joe Cosgrove Custom frame builder and master frame painter of Cycle Design. The colour was custom matched to a photograph and hand tinted from clear until an exact colour match was achieved.

All Llewellyn bike photos by Robert Cobcroft