Medusa Cycles was quietly launched to the public by its owner, Pete Skelton, in 2023. Working out of a large wooden shed in the bottom of his garden in Manchester, northwest England, Pete has been diligently working away creating a small range of custom-built, steel-framed bikes. With a very distinctive style, incredible attention to detail and fantastic paint jobs, it’s easy to see why Pete’s bikes have won accolades and prizes in three consecutive years’ worth of Bespoked shows. As well as being a talented framebuilder and a super nice guy, Pete has a long relationship with Seido, so we figured he would be perfect for our latest Special Build feature series.
Getting started
Olly from Seido: Let’s start with where you came from. I know you’ve probably been asked this a million times, but I’ll try to pick out some of the things that are different from the other articles. How did you get into framebuilding in the first place?
Pete: I think I always had the seed planted. My dad did a little bit of framebuilding back in the ’80s. There were frames he’d built around the house and I was always curious about how he’d done it. Growing up, I wasn’t really finding my direction with anything, but I always loved riding my bike. I went on a long trip on my bike to India, partly to try and figure out what I wanted to do. It took me a year and gave me plenty of time to think.
When I came back, I thought, “I might as well just have a go at starting my own brand.” Initially, I wasn’t thinking about building frames myself. I thought maybe I’d find somewhere that could make them for me. Then my dad said, “Why don’t you just learn how to build frames?” I thought, “All right, maybe I’ll give it a go.” He explained that you can start with relatively basic tooling if you just want to learn the process. So I made my own jig, got some fuel bottles and put everything in my dad’s garage. I was trying to keep it a little bit secret from my mum because I don’t think she’d have been too pleased about having a tank of acetylene in the garage! She didn’t really know what it was, though. It was just, “Oh, it’s fine. It won’t explode, honest.”
I started teaching myself, but I quickly realised I wasn’t really getting anywhere. At the time I was working for Ribble, around the time of COVID, doing some of the paintwork. I thought that was a useful skill to have if I was going to build my own frames, but I needed to learn the actual fabrication side. I found a shop in Manchester where someone was still doing it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Neil Orrell? His old shop was bought by a guy called Peter Butterfield and I started working there as an apprentice on Saturdays, basically volunteering. I wasn’t really getting paid in the beginning. I’d ride from Preston to Manchester every Friday night, stay over, work with him on Saturday and then come back. Neil would come in occasionally and show me a few things, but most of the basics came from Peter.
Eventually I fell back into being a mechanic and the shop got too busy for me to learn much more about framebuilding. I realised I needed my own setup. I decked out a shed with some equipment and went at it myself after learning the basics of brazing. I felt that a lot of the rest was common sense. A bike is quite a simple thing. As long as you understand the standards, keep everything straight and work to a reasonable degree of accuracy, you can pick it up. There are also plenty of people in the framebuilding world you can ask. The great thing about the framebuilding community is that everyone’s happy to give you advice and help each other out. That’s particularly true at shows like Bespoked. People go there to help each other. The community is great.
From there I wanted to do things my own way. You see plenty of framebuilders making very traditional-looking road bikes and touring bikes. They’re beautiful, but I’ve always been a little bit artistic and wanted to put my own flair on things. I wanted to do things differently and make bikes that I thought were interesting to ride and ticked all the boxes I’d want them to tick.
Why Medusa?
Olly: We should talk about the name, because I’ve seen conflicting stories about where Medusa came from. Part of it was to do with the French Revolution, and part of it was your signwriting background and wanting a name with different letters so you didn’t have to duplicate anything. Is there a third version, or is it an amalgamation of those two?
Pete: Those were two of the reasons. I always thought that, compared with framebuilders like Saffron and Ricky Feather, who make some beautiful work, my stuff is a little more unconventional-looking. Maybe a little ugly to some people. Medusa was an ugly, decapitated head that would turn people to stone. Someone who was very road-focused might look at my work and think, “That’s going to turn me to stone.”
Olly: And it’s a really cool logo. It ticks a lot of boxes from a marketing perspective.
Pete: Yeah. Jordan, the guy who designed it had ridden to India with me and is an old schoolmate of mine. He’s a graphic designer, so I knew he’d be much better at that stuff than me. I said, “If I build you a bike, will you help me out with a few things?” He said yes, so that’s where the logo came from, along with a few other bits.
Lessons from India
Olly: When you rode to India, you rode a Surly. How much of the ethos behind what you do now came from that trip? It’s a hell of a long way to ride, with all kinds of terrain, geography, altitude and weather conditions. Presumably it taught you quite a lot?
Pete: Yeah, definitely. I learned some lessons from that bike. It wasn’t particularly well suited to some of the high passes we were riding. The small wheels and small tyres weren’t ideal. At the time, plus-size tyres were around and I was kicking myself for not choosing something like that. So I’ve always been focused on building bikes with lots of tyre clearance.
I also had a really basic drivetrain setup: a 3x8. That stuff is bomb-proof. I still ride a bike with 1x9 at the moment, although it’s been 1x12 in the past. I always thought that having fewer speeds meant the chain could take more punishment. You can put a chain checker on an eight- or nine-speed chain and it’ll tell you it’s completely goosed, but it’ll still ride fine. I like making premium stuff, but I also want to build something more affordable. The Long Haul Trucker was a nice, affordable frameset at the time. Some of the stuff I’ve built recently is quite pricey, but over the past few months I’ve been trying to steer my focus towards building stuff that I could afford.
A lot of the bikes I ride, if I was a customer working as a mechanic, I simply wouldn’t be able to afford them. Plenty of people I know love bikes and work in the industry too, and it just doesn’t pay that well, unfortunately. So there are a few features of that Surly that I’d like to reflect in my future work: building frames that are more accessible and using standards that are easier to service and won’t cost an arm and a leg to maintain.
Designing for mechanics
Olly: Your mechanic’s background must also influence how you design frames. I was reading about the internal routing you use to make things easier for the mechanic or owner to service. Having taken apart loads of carbon bikes with no channelling inside, I know what a nightmare they can be.
Pete: Exactly. I like having guided routing tubes, not just for shift housing and brake hoses but also for internal dynamo wiring. That’s particularly difficult to route.
Olly: Presumably that’s quite a pain for you as a framebuilder, though. Does it make things significantly more complicated?
Pete: It’s a bit of a faff. Usually you put a tiny steel tube inside the main tube to guide the routing. It’s a whole other step in the framebuilding process. I’ve built frames that could be built in a day, but once you start adding internal routing, you’re adding days of extra work.
Olly: Hopefully it pays off in the long run!
Pete: Exactly. You might save some mechanic time in the future.
The bikes
Olly: You currently offer four different models. Can you give us an overview of what they are and who they’re aimed at?
Pete: I’ll start with the Deka. That was the first proper frameset I had really dialled in. It’s an all-road/gravel type of bike with clearance for big tyres. You can fit a 2.25-inch tyre on a 29er rim, helped by the Seido MGV fork. It keeps the whole package looking quite compact. You haven’t got a suspension-corrected fork, just the shorter MGV. You get plenty of grip, a nice short back end and it climbs well, but it also feels really planted with the big wheels and big BB drop. It’s a stable bike that’s ready for everything from commuting to bikepacking and touring.
Olly: I started riding in 1990, when Alpinestars were probably at the height of their frames. As soon as I saw the Deka I thought, “That looks like an Alpinestars Al-mega or Cro-mega.” For people of my generation, that’s pretty cool. I imagine some of your customers will look at it and get the same nostalgia?
Pete: Yeah, there’s a bit of the same reasoning behind it. I looked at a lot of old ’90s frames for inspiration. It means I can keep the back end shorter while maintaining mud and tyre clearance. Sometimes I’ll use a yoke when designing a frame, but this just seemed like a more interesting way of doing it. People seem to like it. It also means that if I wanted to use a belt drive, the frame is already set up for it. I wouldn’t have to split the seatstay to fit a belt.
Olly: What else do you make?
Pete: The Brassica is a flat-bar, all-terrain bike. That was the first version of that idea and it was a show-winning bike. It was quite a modest bike, which I liked. At Bespoked you sometimes see people winning with really technical downhill mountain bikes or similar. This was just a rigid 650B bike. There’s not a lot to it, but it’s nice to ride and quite light. The Seido Acceleron wheels help with that.
This bike was created for Annie and when I built it, she hadn’t been riding for very long. She's 5'1" (1.55m) tall, so I wanted to build something comfortable that she’d enjoy riding rather than having to climb over something too big, bulky or heavy. I’m going to build another one soon, with a couple of tweaks. I wanted it to be classy-looking but simple, while still ticking all the boxes for a classic all-terrain bike.
Olly: And then there’s a more road-based bike.
Pete: The Swale is an endurance road bike. You could call it a gravel bike too, because you can squeeze a 40mm tyre in there. I like to run it with a 35mm tyre and mudguards. It’s a great commuter in winter, but it’s also ready to head out into the Yorkshire Dales from Manchester. It has the same internal dynamo routing as the Deka, but I decided to use fully external shift housing and brake routing to keep things as simple as possible.
It was originally built with a Seido RGT fork, which gives a bit more clearance. If I built another one, I’d probably use a Banjo fork to bring the clearance in and make the front end look a little neater.
Olly: The paint job on that one is pretty funky too.
Pete: Yeah, people seem to like it.
Olly: And finally, the monster truck.
Pete: That’s the Kangal, the latest one I completed. It’s huge, with clearance for 29 x 3-inch tyres. I wanted to build something I’d been dreaming about while I was on that trip to India. I wanted to address all the shortcomings I’d experienced with the Surly. There are a few things I took from that bike, including the 3x8 drivetrain and the capacity to carry equipment.
The Kangal has a Boost rear end, but I wanted to use a triple chainring, so I had to do a funny thing with the seat tube and offset the lower section to allow a front derailleur. There are a few details you wouldn’t notice at a glance. If I went into full nerd mode and pointed them all out, you might say, “Ah, I see that now.” It’s basically a truck, but it rides really well. I was quite pleased with it.
Olly: Looking at it, you’d think it weighs a ton.
Pete: Around Manchester there are some pretty rough trails, like the Pennine Bridleway and the Mary Town Loop. You can easily crush those trails on it. It sticks to everything really well.
Bilaminated construction
Olly: A technical question: lugs. Except you don’t really call them lugs. You’re doing a modern version of lugs, aren’t you? Bilaminated construction. Can you explain what you’re doing?
Pete: I built a Deka for a customer who wanted something more classically styled with lug work. The problem is that you can’t just buy lugs to fit every geometry. So I had to make a lot of my own, which essentially became a sleeved end to the tube. That means you can build a frame to whatever angles are required rather than being restricted by a factory-made lug set. A lot of it involves stainless tubing, drawing it into whatever ornate shape I think is right, then cutting it all out by hand using files and saws.
Olly: That must have been a hell of a job?
Pete: It took a while. I’d never really attempted anything quite like that, but it was fun. The outcome was nice and I got a good prize for it at the last show, so I was pleased.
Olly: And how does the bilamination work? It’s a similar idea to lugs, but a modern version. What is it and why do you use it?
Pete: Originally it was for reinforcement. I first did it on the Deka to reinforce areas of the frame that I knew were high-stress. On a mountain bike, one of the highest-stress areas is where the head tube meets the down tube. You see gussets in that area on a lot of dirt-jump bikes and BMXs. I thought I’d give it a go. If the bike was going to be used off-road, I wanted to make it more robust. But I also wanted to do it in a way that looked better than some of the agricultural-looking gussets you see.
The idea is essentially to sleeve the end of the tube, giving it extra wall thickness, and then braze that to the head tube. It’s become a bit of a feature of my work. I do it on most of my frames. Originally it was purely for peace of mind because I wanted to really thrash the frames I was building for myself. Then it became a feature. It also gives me a platform to get creative with the shapes. If you’re cutting out all these shapes, it gives you something interesting to paint as well.
Olly: It’s certainly become something distinctive about your work.
Pete: I’ve seen other guys doing it too, but I can see why most people don’t. Cutting a tube isn’t just cutting a tube; there’s all the extra marking and preparation that goes with it. It’s more of a faff.
Paint and signwriting
Olly: Talking of looking cool, we should talk about paint and design. You worked for a while as a signwriter and coach painter, which must be pretty rare in the UK. How did you get into that?
Pete: I don’t really know what first caught my eye, but a few years before I went to India I kept spotting traditional signwriting. I’d go to historic towns and see all this sign-written stuff on walls and wonder how they’d done it. Then I went to India and noticed it absolutely everywhere.
Olly: The trucks are hand-painted too, aren’t they? And the buses?
Pete: Yeah. I think it’s amazing that in India that seems to be the most logical way of doing things. You can get vinyl-cutting machines to do that kind of work, but if you can do it by hand, why not? Then one day I saw an apprenticeship with a traditional coach-painting company. They wanted an apprentice coach painter and signwriter. I started working with them. It was really hard work. I was on a terrible wage and doing 60 hours a week or more some weeks.
I didn’t do it for very long, but I learned a lot. It was really intensive. That planted the seed that I liked painting and wanted to do it myself. I then started working in the paint shop at Ribble in Preston, doing some of the custom work there. A lot of the techniques were the same: surface preparation, sanding and so on. Applying the paint was more or less the same principle, just a different method. I always knew that because of my background in painting, the bikes I built had to look a certain way. I knew there were certain things I could do to achieve that.
Olly: Do you still do custom painting?
Pete: It depends. I still do the lettering, but I don’t really have a great facility for painting. I was doing some spraying, but it’s pretty messy and smelly. If you’ve only got a confined space, it’s not easy. I was doing full traditional coach-painted frames for a while. The first few were like that. The outcome was great, but it takes weeks and weeks. There are no accelerators in the paint. You have to let everything dry and then rub it down again. These days I use CNG Finishing in Liverpool. Gerry, who runs it, has been doing it for years. He used to paint frames for a lot of the framebuilders in Liverpool and across the Northwest. He does the base colours and then I sign write the logos on top and lacquer them by hand. It saves a bit of time, he does a great job and he doesn’t charge the earth.
Getting involved with Seido
Olly: We haven’t talked about Seido and how you got involved with them in the first place. How did you come across them?
Pete: I was aware of the brand while I was on my India trip. When I got back, I started seeing a girl called Gaëlle who was one of their [Bombtrack - sister brand] team riders. At the time I was working as a mechanic and wanted to do something different. There’s only so far you can go fixing bikes. It felt a bit stale at the time.
Seido had just launched and there was a role going. Gaëlle said they needed someone to do the marketing. In my youthful ignorance, I thought, “I could do that job. How hard can it be?” I’d been in the bike industry for years, so I thought I could do it.
I started working there and it was good. It was nice to be part of something fresh and different, particularly the alternative side of their design and the components they were making. Their background in bikepacking and gravel was exactly the sort of stuff I was interested in. I jumped at the opportunity and got the job. It was a cool thing to be part of.
Olly: The BMX heritage is interesting too. I’m a gravel rider and mountain biker - I knew almost nothing about BMX, but they’ve been doing it for decades and were real pioneers.
Pete: Yeah. Harry [the Managing Director of Seido’s parent company] was making stuff with WeMakeThings in the beginning and designing cutting-edge components and frame designs. That eventually joined up with Bombtrack and the fixed-gear bikes they were making.
Olly: That’s how I knew of them - their urban bikes in particular.
Pete: Yeah. That naturally progressed from the fixed-gear bikes of the early 2000s and 2010s into gravel, bikepacking and that sort of thing. It was interesting to see how all those things connected.
Annie and the Medusa lifestyle
Olly: Annie - Tell us a bit about what you’re doing?
Annie: I never really thought I was going to start anything like this. It started off around Bespoked. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to knit a giant scarf?” Pete said the guy who runs Bespoked would love that and that I should do it. I made it thinking it would just be a display piece. Then he saw a picture and said, “Oh, sweet. I want to order this many.” I remember thinking, “I guess I can get paid for doing something I like.” I studied textile design at university, but I never really pursued selling my work.
Since then I’ve basically been making random Medusa Cycles-related things. If I want a bag, I’ll make a bag. Maybe I’ll sell it at some point, but we’re still figuring out where we’re going with the merchandise side. I love sewing, textiles and art. I like doing everything by hand from scratch. It feels like a natural fit. I see things out in the world and think, “That would be great if we put Medusa Cycles on it.” I feel like we have a similar mindset, just expressed in two very different forms.
Olly: I’d have thought a range of bikepacking bags must be on the horizon!
Annie: There have definitely been discussions about that. I’m a bit obsessed with the idea of making lots of different bags. Because I’m not really a cyclist myself, bike bags aren’t necessarily the first thing I think of. I’m more interested in the lifestyle side of it. I’ve made Pete a musette and I’m thinking about doing a Medusa-style one—something a bit crazy. I like to put a lot of function into things, though, so I have to think about the design quite a lot before I make something. Frame bags are definitely going to become a thing. It’s just a question of when I get around to it.
Olly: Presumably a frame bag is quite a lot more complicated than making a tote bag?
Annie: That’s what I’ve been thinking, but bags are actually easier for me than clothes because clothes have to conform to the body, and the body isn’t a simple shape. Fitting things to the body is much harder. Bags will have their challenges, definitely, but I think it’s going to be fun.
Olly: Do you think you’ll have more things for Bespoked next year? Perhaps some bags?
Annie: We’re potentially thinking about the European Bespoked show next year, to see another crowd. If we do go, it would be fun to have a line of merchandise available.
What’s next?
Olly: What’s next for both of you? Pete - are there more bike designs coming, or will you stick with the four models you have? You do bespoke work too, so presumably you’d consider something if a customer came to you with an idea?
Pete: There are two things I really want to push. I’d like to do a full bike rather than just a frameset. The idea is to build bikes for people who aren’t necessarily cyclists. Manchester is supposedly the cycling capital of Europe, although I’ll believe it when I see it. But I think we need to get more people on bikes. Part of the problem is that people are put off by the image of cycling. I’m a cyclist and I’ll hammer around in Lycra, but most normal people look at that and think, “I don’t want to do that. I just want to get on my bike.”
Olly: Something more like a Dutch bike, where it’s utilitarian rather than a sport bike?
Pete: Exactly. But I think there’s also a certain amount of vanity. People don’t necessarily want to look a certain way when they’re riding a bike. Even the European look you see in Holland and Germany is different from what you see around the streets of Manchester. People want to look cool. So my idea is to build something that people actually want to ride. Something for people who care about where it’s made, so it’s made in the UK, but is also affordable.
I’ve got a design up my sleeve for an affordable, made-in-Manchester bike that kids in the Northern Quarter are going to want to jump on. That’s the thing I’m putting most of my energy into.
The other is a more affordable touring-bike type of thing. Something versatile, with big tyre clearance and enough luggage mounts, but that doesn’t cost four grand. Something that’s just more accessible. Those two designs essentially tick those boxes.
Building bikes for everyone
Pete: Just watch this space. I’ve got a few things I’m going to be putting out there over the next six months that I hope people will find interesting. The last Bespoked show really hammered something home for me. A lot of the people interested in my work were younger people who weren’t necessarily in high-paying jobs. They were essentially kids, students or people just starting out.
When I was in my early 20s, I would never have been able to spend £4,000 on a custom frame. It made me realise, how am I ever going to fulfil these people’s wishes? I want people to see that I’m not here just to cater for the top end of society. I want to build bikes for everybody, not just super-wealthy people.
And on the egalitarian note, we signed off!
If you would like to find out more about Medusa Cycles, you can find all the details on their website.