When Cycling Weekly visited the Pyrenees for the launch of Mavic’s new Allroad wheel and clothing range recently, we stopped off to visit the workshop of French framebuilder Caminade.
Caminade works from this single room workshop in southwest France
Based in the small town of Ille-sur-Têt, around 25km from Perpignan, the brand operates out of a single-room workshop, producing made-to-measure bikes to order.
All Caminade's bikes are built to order
Caminade’s speciality is its gravel bikes, but it also makes road and MTB frames. All feature the brand’s distinctive curved top tube with an up-curved cross-brace between this and the seat tube. Caminade works in titanium and steel. Its titanium frames use tubing from Dedacciai, while the main tubes of its steel frames are made by Columbus. The curved steel top tube comes from a French foundry.
Caminade's frames are fillet brazed
The area around Perpignan can be windy, so gravel offers the opportunity to get off the open road into the forest, where there’s a bit more shelter and an extensive network of fire roads, canalside paths and singletrack to ride.
Frames waiting to be finished
With frames made to order, Caminade has a six month waiting list. To help address this and offer gravel framesets and complete builds at a lower price point, Caminade has recently introduced the AllRoad Titanium frameset.
New AllRoad gravel frame uses titanium tubes glued into carbon lugs
Rather than being welded, this uses titanium tubing bonded into carbon fibre lugs, using aerospace grade adhesives. The seat tube and seatpost are a single titanium tube, with a separate seatmast cap providing some adjustability. There’s a fully enclosed cable and hose run through the enlarged bottom bracket shell. The frame will accept 40mm 700C tyres or 47mm 650B.
Caminade's new titanium and carbon gravel frame will increase its output. Photo: Jeremie Reuiller
Caminade offers the AllRoad Titanium in four single ring builds with 10-42 cassettes, from SRAM Apex 1 at €2790 up to SRAM Force 1 at €3990. All come equipped with the new Mavic Allroad wheelsets.
Here's Caminade's video of the AllRoad Titanium in action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOYgUXmqyi4
Delivery time is between six to eight weeks from order.
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Paul started writing for Cycling Weekly in 2015, covering cycling tech, new bikes and product testing. Since then, he’s reviewed hundreds of bikes and thousands of other pieces of cycling equipment for the magazine and the Cycling Weekly website.
He’s been cycling for a lot longer than that though and his travels by bike have taken him all around Europe and to California. He’s been riding gravel since before gravel bikes existed too, riding a cyclocross bike through the Chilterns and along the South Downs.
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