“We wanted to build a bike that demanded you take the shortcut. One that constantly makes you ask what’s down that trail?”That was how Raoul de Jongh described the ACME CAM in a recent interview that we did with him. We first came across ACME bikes back in November last year, when Raoul’s business partner, Charl Dettmer, contacted us to introduce us to their bikes. “It’s an interesting time to be launching a bike brand when component availability is such a problem, but it’s allowed us to undertake extensive additional testing and to launch things when they’ve had an extra layer of consideration” he said in his email.

Raoul and Charl are originally from South Africa and soon as we saw some of the images from Charl’s local riding we were buzzing about how great it looked and so asked him to write a piece about it while we waited for ACME to have bikes ready for us to chat about. In the intervening period, ACME now have two different framesets available – their first release, the CAM and their follow-up, the BAR. Named after their children and soon to be followed by the JAC road frameset, all three models have some common details, but are also quite different. The key similarity is that they’re all manufactured from custom titanium tubing, designed for a ride quality that “puts a smile on your face every time you ride them”.

Before we got down to talking about the bikes, we asked Raoul about his background. How come, as a South African, he now lived in Girona (Spain) for example? “Because it’s a fantastic place to bring up a family, that also happens to have world-class gravel, road and MTB riding on our doorstep” was his simple answer. “Although in the longer term, we’re not sure where in Europe we will have as our base, for the minute Girona offers us everything we need”.

We delved a bit into Raoul’s background “My love affair with the bike industry goes back almost 25 years now. I was initially an importer and distributor in South Africa of high-end apparel, tyres and parts in a business which we sold in 2004. I then worked with the local importers of Cervelo, HED & Speedplay but it fizzled out and I went off to work in the software world for a couple of years. In 2013 I got back into the industry and am now importing apparel, bicycles and accessories in the high-end space again. I also have a shareholding in South Industries, where we make world class carbon rims in South Africa. My sports life started in swimming, then triathlon, but eventually I got into off-road biking and bought myself an MTB so that I could compete in my first off road event – the Cape Epic. I’m competitive, but also am a serial bike modifier and tweaker and I knew that one day I wanted to start my own brand. Some ideas just weren’t available to me to keep tweaking. Converted 29er hardtails into dropbar exploration bikes is not as cool as it sounds. I needed more specificity. Charl and I went to school together (albeit a few years apart), but then lost touch. We were re-introduced through a mutual acquaintance, and we got talking about bikes. Charl wanted to get into the bike industry and things just grew from there.” 

We asked Raoul where the inspiration for the name ACME came from? “The reasoning behind ACME was partly about not taking life too seriously, partly about wanting to make the best exploration bike on the planet, which is quite serious“, he explained. “It’s a combination of the Greek word ACME which means pinnacle or highest point, which inspired the shape of the letter A in our logo, but also an element of fun from the Warner Bros cartoons – Wylie Coyote and all the rest often featured ACME products” 

ACME’s first design was the CAM – a big wheeled, big clearance beasty designed for “your wildest bike packing trips and daily local trail shredding.” The frame and forks have been designed with clearance for 29x2.35” tyres and ACME describe the geometry as “balanced but razor sharp”. To make the CAM live up to its billing as a continent-crushing adventure bike, it comes with three bottle mounts, rack and mudguard mounts and a mix of internally routed mech cables (for good looks) and externally routed hydraulic brake hoses (for “when things go bad in the middle of nowhere”). 

We asked Raoul about the inspiration behind their designs. “The CAM is definitely not a dropbar MTB. For one thing I don’t like the aesthetics of short headtubes and suspension-corrected forks with massive gaps between the top of the tyre and the bottom of the fork crown. But it’s also about the geometry – we wanted to make it light, manoeuvrable and playful, but also flexible and adaptable” Raoul continued “There isn’t any ‘special sauce’ in our designs – we came to the final design after an iterative design process with a lot of testing of steel-framed prototypes. The design was perfected once we found the Bearclaw fork – it was the ideal match for the CAM frameset. The other area that has benefited us is advances in tyre technology – big volume, low profile XC tyres which are fast rolling yet have phenomenal grip are part of what makes the CAM ride so well. The combination of our ‘fast forward’ geometry and the grippy tyres means it climbs like a proverbial mountain goat”

Next, we chatted about the BAR, ACME’s “gravel slayer”. They describe it as a bike that “just begged for more time out on the gravel roads”. In similar fashion to the CAM, the BAR is created from a custom blend of titanium tubing. It’s designed with ACME’s fast forward geometry, includes a T47 bottom bracket, three bottle cage mounts (plus a set of top tube “Bento box” mounts), it comes in a bead blasted finish and is designed around a round 27.2mm diameter seatpost to help with the “magic carpet ride”. Unlike the CAM, the BAR is ‘only’ designed to fit 700x47mm width tyres and it has full internal cable routing for a “super clean aesthetic”. “Our aim for the BAR was that it’s fun and capable” said Raoul “You could set it up in 2x mode and run fat slicks and have a fantastic road bike or fit 47mm treaded tyres and you’ve got a fast and comfortable gravel bike” he continued. 

We finally moved onto what’s next for ACME? “We’re sticking with titanium for the foreseeable future” said Raoul “We see our bikes as the perfect ‘for life’ machine and titanium fits with this. We’re going to be launching a road bike in the future and are working on the final set of prototypes at the minute. Only once the prototypes have gone through our rigorous testing procedures will it be released, but we’re aiming for it to come out towards of 2022. We’ve got the geometry and the integrated elements already finalised, but we want to make sure all the details are perfect. It won’t be much of a surprise that with industry standards moving towards wider tyre clearances, even on road bikes, that our road bike will be on-trend, but that’s all I can tell you at the minute”

If you’d like to find out more details about ACME’s bike, check out their website.