Donhou DSS1 Signature Steel road bike

The DSS1 Performance Disc road bike is the first stock bike offering from renowned custom bike builder Thomas Donhou, and represents a distillation of the design ideas expressed in his bicycle creations over the years.

What Donhou has created in the DSS1 is a signature bike, a culmination of his bicycle design ideas. One common signature on many of his bikes over the years has been disc brakes. Donhou started adding disc brakes to steel frames many years ago at a time when doing so was still far from the commonplace sight it has become this year.

The Reynolds 853 frame is specifically designed for disc brakes. The rear brake is mounted inside the rear dropout and all the cables routed externally along the down tube - the brake cable runs a full length of outer housing for protection from grime and grit. There are no mudguard mounts; the DSS1 is not meant as an all-weather commuter/winter training bike, it's pegged as a high performance disc-equipped bike.

And on that front it delivers. This is a bike with exemplary handling and top notch performance. The ride displays a superb smoothness from the Reynolds 853 Pro Team tubeset and a high class build kit that shines in every department.

The only sticking point for some will be the price, but making comparisons of a solo framebuilder against bigger companies with more buying power is perhaps a little unfair. It's undercut by the new Enigma Evoke Disc Titanium 1.3 by nearly £500 for example. If the price is too high for you, that's fair enough, there's plenty of choice on the market at the moment. But there are few bikes that offer the distinctive looks, attention to detail and creative flair you get from one of the UK's most highly regarded framebuilders.

Donhou has used custom selected Reynolds 853 Pro Team tubes for the DSS1, and TIG welded them into three available sizes; 54, 56 and 58cm. The attention to detail is exquisite, the welds are of the highest quality and small touches like the seatstay bridge and cable guides on the head tube and downtube are well thought out. There's space for up to 28mm tyres if you want to go wider than the standard 25mm tyres.

The tube profiles are reasonably oversized, and combined with a 44mm head tube and Enve carbon fibre disc fork, provides a stiff and taut ride quality. The frame relays power from the pedals to the rear wheel with a good sense of urgency; there's not a hint of wayward flex when you stomp and stamp on the pedals. It's got plenty of get up and go. It reminds me of the excellent Enigma Elite that I tested last year.

Unlike Donhou's custom creations where the only limit on the paint job is your imagination, there's just one paint job for the DSS1. But what a creation is it. The base colour is a deep granite grey with a pink to lime pearl fade along the length of the down tube, with a white panel near the down tube. It's painted in-house. There's a Signature Steel head badge featuring the Donhou Swallows.

Steering is precise and well balanced, the Enve fork provides a high level of front-end stiffness that slightly overshadows the steel frame. The bike feels very stable. It doesn't bounce and skip across rough roads, rather, it's all very settled and that composure makes it a good distance bike for bagging some big rides. That it never feels rattled on any sort of road surface is helped by the fitment of 25mm tyres but there's an inherent suppleness in the frame too.

The geometry is spot-on with a 170mm head tube on the 56cm bike I rode, combined with parallel 73 degree seat and head angles. There are no nasty surprises in the way it handles, it's all very predictable. It's very easy to adjust the bike mid-corner with plenty of feedback through the controls.

At 8.7kg (19.1lb) it's no featherweight but it is, interestingly, a competitive weight to some carbon fibre and hydraulic disc brake road bikes that I've tested, so for a steel bike that is very impressive. The DSS1 doesn't at all feel heavy, and displays a high sense of pace and acceleration that makes it a real hoot to blast along the lanes.

The high quality wheelset shines through when you get the bike up to speed. Chris King hubs on H+Son Archetype rims (built by August Wheelworks) are a superb quality wheelset. The black anodised aluminium rims have a 23mm wide profile and this gives the Continental Grand Prix 25mm tyres a nice wide platform and creates a bit of extra cushioning and a more stable feeling than a wide tyre fitted to a narrow rim can achieve. The rims are reasonably light at 470g each are a decent weight, yet are also brilliantly robust. The wheelset is a gem.

You can buy the DSS1 as a frameset for £2,295 and build it with any parts you want, or go for or the complete bike with the pictured build kit for £4,385. For this bike, Donhou combines a dependable and durable Shimano Ultegra 11-speed mechanical groupset with Avid BB7 SL disc brakes. Avid's simple mechanical disc brakes are generally highly rated, and the brakes on the DSS1, maybe because they were really well bedded in, providing a really nice feel with good consistency and plenty of bite.

There's no shortage of nice kit on the bike, and it all combines to create a smart looking package. The Fizik Cyrano handlebar, stem and seatpost are rarely seen despite being available for a number of years, but the bars have a nice shape, the seatpost is easy to adjust, and from an aesthetic point of view, it all matches the bike nicely. The Fizik Ardea Versus saddle was as comfortable as you can imagine.

Based on ride quality and performance, it's top marks for the Donhou. It has a refined comfort that delivers more smiles the faster you push it, with a lovely sprightliness that makes it an involving ride. It doesn't hang about and it's very absorbing fun to ride. The front-end is very reactive to steering inputs and it corners without hesitation, the Enve fork is possible a smidgen on the stiff side, but it just about gels together with the steel frame. And make no mistake, the DSS1 benefits from the disc brakes with brilliant all-weather retardation and bags of stopping power.

The finishing kit is all premium stuff and it's nicely thought out, and it's certainly a very good bike, but the high price will be a sticking point for some. That aside, in every other department the the DSS1 sparkles. It's a fabulous bike.

Verdict

Fabulous bike with sparkling ride and handling, but the high price will put some off