Cyfac ⭐ Top pick

Bespoke bicycle frames since 1982. Titanium, steel, carbon, mastered in the Tours workshops. French frame-building know-how applied to the three noble materials.

Francis Quillon started as a racing cyclist, a sprinter on the national team. During his racing career, he worked for a local bicycle maker that sponsored his team. He repaired teammates' bikes, then began building complete bikes from scratch. In 1974, he joined Cycles Méral in Tours, where he learned the frame-building trade. In 1982, he founded Cyfac in his garage with his wife Mireille, in La Fuye, a hamlet in Hommes, Touraine. The name is an acronym: Cycles, Fabrication Artisanale de Cadres.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Cyfac built frames for other brands, notably Raleigh. Laurent Fignon won Milan-San Remo on a Cyfac frame painted in Raleigh colors. In 1992, the workshop supplied the Castorama team under the Maxisport name, with the arrival of Columbus Altec aluminum series and Hyperion titanium series. Until the end of the 1990s, Cyfac also produced for Peugeot Cycles, a period marked by Laurent Brochard's world championship victory.

In 2000, the Cyfac name finally appeared on riders' frames. The brand sponsored Team Jean Delatour and designed the PROFICA frame, a collaboration between Alain Prost, Laurent Fignon, and Jacques Cadiou. In 2002, Francis Quillon, at age 55, sold the company to the José Alvarez group. A carbon workshop was created. But the 2008 crisis brought the group down. Aymeric Le Brun, then salaried managing director, bought Cyfac back in the middle of that financial turmoil.

Now based in Tours, Cyfac remains an independent manufacture. Artisan frame builders spend between 15 and 200 hours on each frame, depending on material and complexity. Steel flame-brazed, titanium TIG-welded, carbon hand-molded. The Cyfac fit study, developed with the Lyon Sports Medicine Center, defines each frame geometry. One thousand to twelve hundred frames a year, all built, painted, and assembled on site.