Plowman Craven Pinnacle

The 2008 Plowman Craven team will be once more riding Pinnacle Bikes, in 2007 they began the season on the Alloy/Carbon Aeos but when they appeared at the Irish RAS and the Tour of Britain they were riding a full carbon Pinnacle Aeos.

More pictures of the Pinnacle team bike

ProTourNews was invited to take a look at the 2008 team bikes when they arrived at the Pinnacle Gatwick HQ in February. Also in attendance was Tony Gibb, James Milliard and team mechanic Mark.

All three got stuck in opening boxes and fettling bikes under the supervision of Ben. Tony Gibb told us that "Its just a great morale booster to get your new bike and kit, especially with ours, we look great as a team, everything matches and its all very colourful". Tony was pretty impressed with his new Limar helmet and my goodness, it's light! Some time was also spent cutting up the Pinnacle prepared name stickers to form nicknames.

We talked to Pinnacle's Ben Spurrier in late 2007 when he told us that; "Rather than buy a carbon fibre frame ‘off-the-shelf’, paint and re-brand it as many bicycle brands still do, we went down the path of custom mould design. We started with rider feedback from (among others) the Plowman Craven Evans Cycles professional racing team. We then produced concept sketches to show the key details of the frame designs. Finally we produced a detailed specification for the qualities of the frame so that the carbon fibre lay-up could be tuned to our requirements."

The Aeos Carbon range is based on unidirectional Mitsubishi and Toray carbon fibre from Japan built up in multiple layers, with the bottom bracket and head tube junction areas reinforced with 3K weave carbon fibre layer. "We then went further and applied high modulus (HM450) unidirectional carbon fibre in critical areas to ensure high durability in areas of stress and high tensile Mitsubishi unidirectional carbon fibre in areas where torsion resistance is required."

The range begins with the Aeos Carbon 1.0 and then the 2.0, and both utilise a 12K top sheet to add a little durability to the frame package. For the Aeos Carbon 3.0 and Team, this is removed and they have a straight unidirectional finish. "We even run less paint on the team model to save a few grams!"

2008 customer bikes
The carbon Aeos Team ‘pink n blue’ comes with a Dura Ace groupset (bar the FSA carbon chainset), FSA finishing kit and Fulcrum wheels.

It seems that Pinnacle got good feedback from visitors to the London Cycle Show in late 2007 and intend to make the Plowman Craven bike available to the public. Patrick Trainor of Pinnacle/Eavns said; "We have a very limited number of the PC team bikes for sale at £2499.99. The exact same bike but with the black and orange paint job, will also be on sale in slightly more numbers for £2,499.99. Both will go on sale at the end of March."

Bike Spec