Cinelli Nemo Tig

Gorgeous to look at, fun to ride, but careful spec choices will make or break Cinelli’s latest steel frameset.

- James Spender

 

By the time you finish reading these next two sentences, 1,667 Big Macs will have been eaten, 77,160 hours of video will have been watched on Netflix (of which 23 per cent will concern Kevin Spacey), 250 babies will have been born and 37 litres of blood will have been pumped around your body. There will also have been at least two award ceremonies entitled Bike of the Year 2016, and it’s a good bet that at one of them, the award for best paintjob will have been given to the Cinelli Nemo.

Coming to the surface

Back in the late ’90s Cinelli decided to have a crack at the mountain bike market and released the steel Capitano Nemo, named after Jules Verne’s inimitable antihero and Nautilus commander from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. It was made from Columbus Nemo tubing, billed at the time as being ‘as light as titanium but as strong as steel’ thanks to aggressively butted tubes.

Accompanying the Capitano Nemo – a bike so rare that by all accounts Cinelli didn’t even bother issuing serial numbers to frames – was the Nautilus, also made from Nemo tubing. It was TIG welded and comprised a telltale seat tube and binder bolt lug, which also, somewhat curiously, made it a brazed frame as well. TIG welding and brazing are at such polar opposites of the frame building spectrum that to put them together is like a duet between Lady Gaga and Lulu.

Neither bike still exists in Cinelli’s range, although the Nautilus has in part resurfaced in the form of the all-new Nemo TIG. But don’t be fooled, this is no nostalgic reissue – the Nemo is a steel-framed racer that means business.

The wonderful thing about TIGgers