First Look: J.Guillem Orient + video

The Orient is a titanium all-road bike, that term covering all kinds of of quick and comfortable road riding over various different sorts of surfaces. You can imagine the Orient being used for weekend rides, winter training, longer commutes, Audax… It’s intended to be versatile and rugged and a bit of an all-rounder.

The frame is made from seamless 3AL/2.5V titanium which is designed to be strong and lightweight. It has a hand brushed finish.

In terms of frame features, you get a cast head tube that’s tapered – it takes an 1 1/8in bearing at the top, 1 1/2in at the bottom for some extra front-end stiffness.

You get very skinny seatstays, designed to offer a bit of give at the back, and cast titanium 3D disc dropouts that take flat mount disc brakes.

The Orient is built to an endurance geometry. We have the 56cm model here with a 558mm top tube, 530mm seat tube and 185mm head tube. That’s going to put you into a slightly more relaxed riding position than a race bike, but you won’t sit completely upright by any means.

The full carbon fork holds the front wheel with a 12mm thru axle, the same system that’s used at the back.

Like the frame, the seatpost is titanium and so is the collar, while the saddle, handlebar and stem are all J.Guillem’s own. 

The Orient is built up with Shimano’s new Ultegra R8000 groupset. You get a compact chainset here (with 50/34-tooth chainrings), an 11-30-tooth cassette, and hydraulic disc brakes.

The wheels are DT Swiss R23 Spline Disc, and the tyres are Schwalbe G-One in a 30mm width. They’re set up tubeless.

With J.Guillem you can either buy an off-the-peg bike or frame only. On J.Guillem’s website you can also hit the ‘configure’ button and choose things like crank length, handlebar width, stem length. You can choose the model of wheels, seatposts and stem you want and the price will be adjusted accordingly.

We’ll get this bike out on the road and have a review on road.cc in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can get more info from jguillem.com.