VISIT: Atomic22, bicycle security specialists

VISIT: Atomic22 - Cycle Security Specialists

Call it the road less travelled; describe it like climbing a vertical cliff; measure the unlikeliness of it actually working: first, to design a security skewer that thieves can't foil, then extend it across the architecture of a bike to all the beautiful parts that can be taken at the twirl of an allen key. Finally, to commercialise the results but keep the manufacturing on site, in the UK, to standards that would be immediately apparent to the likes of Cliff Polton (founder of Royce) or to use a Stateside example, Chris King.
Patrick Wells and Ayantika Mitra started out on this gruelling path back in 2009. Four years later they have a small, CNC-equipped facility on a rather lovely business park situated amidst the flowing hills and woods around Horsham, West Sussex. Just as importantly, they have a growing business on the cusp of expansion.
CNC means 3D manufacturing, and the magic sauce of Atomic22, if you like, is its invention of a security skewer with a three dimensional key/bolt head, so that the unique pattern to which each component is cut is unique in more than one plane.
Everyone Patrick and Ayantika turned to said this was impossible, but being beautifully unreasonable people (try that book - The Power of Unreasonable People, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan - it's full of brilliant examples) they ignored the negativity and kept at their metier. I don't know exactly how they did it, and understandably they don't want the world to know every detail, but they have.
At this point they have already worked through multiple prototypes for a wide range of security parts, centred around wheel skewers for both road and track/fixie.

Shiny sun, red bricks, fields all around

I met Patrick and Ayantika at Bristol Bespoked (AKA The British Handbuilt Bike Show) in 2012, and have just visited them at their facility in Horsham, eighteen months later. They struck me as completely dedicated when I first met them, incredibly intelligent in several fields (they both have weapons grade backgrounds in mathematics, to give you a hint) - and it's fantastic to see them again on their home ground, with several bikes hanging from the ceiling, a little resident cat called Pebbles, and precision machinery behind closed doors, out to the back (I was offered a glimpse but don't count on it - they've been plagued with the wrong sort of well-wishers, call them 'well-phishers').

Patrick Wells, Ayantika Mitra. Founder-owners, Atomic22

More than anything -and this trip confirmed it- they've got that gleam in the eye that says they're going to succeed.

Patrick hates what he describes as the 'cycle of misery' which results from so much of the bike industry importing so much low quality stuff from Asia, where we all know that there are sweatshops and worse.

 He spends a long time showing me the inner workings of a beautiful bike bell patented by his great grandfather in the years following World War Two, and then I begin to realise that this flows in his blood: precision engineering

The 'Harmo' bell by Fearnought Ltd. Pebbles top right...

mixed up with perfectionism. The bell in question features a clockwork element, with a push mechanism. It works beautifully today.

Moving over to Atomic22 products, he shows me the latest iteration of a masterpiece, the Atomic22 wheel skewer.
Patrick explains how it features a butted profile to reduce weight - it's not just about security - and offers a floating head to alleviate alignment issues, serrations to prevent movement or rotation, and a tab called a dog, also to prevent wrench-induced twisting or chisel-induced shearing. Meanwhile the threads are both internally and externally rolled, making them extremely smooth. The central experience I relate this to is the day I bought my first pair of ZIPP 303s. I described the skewers as jewel-like, and you can say the same about these.

Thieves will move on to less challenging targets

So who's buying them? Having already had great coverage at the NAHBS (North American Handbuilt Bike Show), Atomic22 is taking orders from all the markets you'd expect: USA, Australia, UK and Europe, plus a long ragged tail of other countries.
The biggest frustration is the sheer number of standards prevailing in bikes now, which makes measuring bolts more complex than it used to be and is set to get worse with the plethora of bespoke bikes, plus large manufacturers striving to be 'different', often for the sake of it rather than any meaningful advance. But that's where Atomic22 will need to scale up and take a view on how exactly to proceed. For now, the core customer is high-end commute (geared and fixed) and roadies, which makes eminent sense given the current state of the MTB sector.

I ended my visit by ordering a set of bolts for my Enigma - wheel, seat post collar, saddle and stem. I'll re-blog the results when they are in hand.