Cicli Boom x Pancalen Cycles: Fitra's Somec Mercury

Yes, yes. We spilled an awful lot about this project before, mainly here and noticable on the wheelbuild. Now this Italian beauty is finished, and it's a nice example of how a resurrected bicycle should be.

Cicli Boom is a conspiration of two, specializing in providing decent quality and hard to find vintage road or track bike frames and parts. According to their Twitter profile, "We post or sell things that we love. Don't give a shit on market's demand." They have fine taste and knowledge about those things they loved though, so when they asked us to build their first project, the shoe fits.

Somec is an abbreviation of SOcieta MEChanica, a working guideline standard for bicycle mechanics established by Oliviero Gallegati. What's interesting about this brand is that its logo consisted of two elements, a tulip and a prancing horse. Yes. That very Italian prancing horse.

The Prancing Horse, or known in Italian as Cavellino Rampante is a symbol used by Count Francesco Baracca, an Italian fighter plane pilot during the World War I. 

The symbol is eventually adopted by both Somec and Ferrari as a tribute to the national hero. To avoid confusion, they made a gentleman's agreement. You can see that even though both horses are prancing on the same direction, the tail on Somec's horse is facing downwards, while Ferrari's horse tail faced upwards.

Yee-haw.

Somec is famous with fillet-brazed seatstay and Tetris-bricks-like colourful decals, although not as spectacular as Rossin. This Somec obtained via Cicli Boom is a Mercury type with fillet-brazed Columbus SLX tubing and uni-crown fork.

Pantographed unicrown fork. Notice the Campagnolo cable stop adaptor and headset.

As a design geek, we have this guideline when it comes to classic handmade frames; beautiful frames always have more time spent on building the seattube cluster, whether is it lugged or fillet-brazed. Check out the detail on this Mercury, imagine how long would it take to braze, fill, file and sand down those joints into smoothness. It's like sculpture.

Fitra is a daily cyclist who sometimes tours on his bike, the most epic one is his solo ride from Jakarta to Lampung last year on a brakeless Leader 722TS track bike. When building this Mercury, he wanted to combine classic Italian steel geometry and feel with more robust modern parts, so we throw a mix of Shimano Ultegra 6600 crankset, shifters, derailers and cassette combined with Ultegra 6700 hubset and brakes on this Mercury.

Ultegra RD-6600SS shortcage rear derailer, shifting 105 CN-5701 chain along Ultegra CS-6600 11-23T cassette.

Ultegra FC-6600 170mm crankset, 53/39T chainring. No fuss on installing the modern Ultegra FD-6600 front derailer on this  classic frame, the mounting braze-on is just the same. The pedals are Shimano XT PD-M770.

Ultegra BR-6700 caliper brakes (NOT U-brakes, darn it!). On prior testing I almost catapulted myself from squeezing the front brake too hard.

Italian frames means Italian bottom bracket shells. Again, that's a modern BB-6600 bottom bracket over there, installation is a snap.

This beauty is built to be ridden. It handles as gracefully as ballet dancer, the 2 x 10-speed drivetrain shifts flawlessly, just lovely. Coming up on Fitra's list is a touring ride that will surely makes any cycling computer begging for mercy. Wait until I get my bottom bracket assembly and fork so we can ride together, will you!