We’re back Workshop Chattering and for the latest episode we’re digging deep into the mighty Starling Cycles Stainless Murmur.

The video talks through all of the interesting features that make the Murmur Stainless what it is, including a load of the V3 technology that a few people maybe don’t realise they include.

We’re also talking about our latest collab with Cane Creek, the limited edition Stainless Murmur Cane Creek Edition.

Whilst we’ve been offering a free Hope headset and seat clamp with our stainless frames for a little while, the new collab gives you a chance to add a Cane Creek fork and shock to your build at a really awesome price.

The Stainless Murmur can now be supplied with one, or both of the following:

Cane Creek Progressive IL Shock and Volt Progressive Spring + £100 (RRP £550)

Cane Creek Helm 29″ Fork 150mm + £600 (RRP £1050)

You can learn more about the Stainless Murmur here.

If you’d prefer to read, rather than watch we’ve got a transcript of the video here:

Hello everyone, Joe from Styling Cycles here.

Going to do another workshop chatter, and today we’re going to talk about this, which is the Stainless Starling Cycles Murmur.

So, I’ve always liked the idea of stainless frames. We get a lot of people getting in touch with us, saying they want raw frames, they want their frames unpainted. The Reynolds tube frames, the carbon steel frames, you have to paint them. If you don’t paint them, they rust. Even if you put a lacquer on them, moisture gets behind the lacquer, and they eventually rust.

It’s not like BMX frames. BMX frames are quite often left raw and lacquered, but they’re not subjected to damp Welsh woods. They’re not subjected to jet washing. They just don’t take the damage and the hits, and BMXs are a bit more forgiving. Mountain bikers, if they start getting rusty frames, get a bit grumpy.

So, stainless is the solution. We get a lovely, beautiful, raw frame in lovely, shiny stainless steel.

But recently, we’ve kind of seen the sales of these frames drop off a little bit, and I think there’s been a bit of confusion as we’ve released the V3 frames. I think people have got a little bit confused about it, asking “Is the Stainless Murmur the latest frame? Is it a V3?” So, I’m just gonna give a little bit of description about that.

As we did with the V3 video the other day, we’ll start from front to back and talk about the changes.

So, this is actually version two of the Murmur frame.

The initial batch, we just did a really small number, and then this has been updated when these landed, I think perhaps six months ago.

So, it has the thicker head tube, an anti-flare head tube. So, again, yeah, we had some issues on some of our frames with flared head tubes. This Stainless Murmur has that stronger head tube.

Also the cast main pivot part of V3, so the bearings have been moved into the frame. We’ve got this cast main pivot part, which increases the strength here, allows you to move the bearings to the outside to make the bearing seating wider, and allows the bearings to last longer.

All of the frames that come from Taiwan have an insert, an aluminium insert in the seat tube, so there’s no risk of any galvanic corrosion.

The thing it hasn’t got, which the new V3 frames do, it hasn’t got the head tube gusset. These frames are made in Taiwan. They’re not made in the UK by Starling. We haven’t got the skills yet to do stainless steel. These are made by Ora. Ora are the best in the world at doing stainless frames. The welding is beautiful. The quality is amazing. You know, they are beautiful frames, so we subcontracted them for these.

Ora are a little bit conservative about some things, and they’ve never built a frame with a plate-type gusset, and because they’ve never done it, they don’t want to do it for us. So it’s got a doubler-type gusset, which a lot of frames have. So it’s just a different way of strengthening. I personally like the plate with the little bird details, but lots of people don’t actually. We get a lot of people who don’t like it, and this gives a cleaner silhouette. So it hasn’t got the head tube gusset. It’s just got a different solution.

One of the big things it hasn’t got is the adjustable shock mount. So this still has a fixed shock mount. It can only fit a 210 by 55mm shock for 140mm rear travel. If you’re never going to run a longer shock, if you want to run it in trail mode, if you want to run it as a trail bike, then 210 by 55mm is perfect. And our last Enduro frames were 140mm rear travel. It’s more travel than it feels, or than you think it is, is plenty.

The other thing that Stainless Murmur hasn’t got is the slight geometry changes we made for the V3 frame. So the bottom bracket is four mm lower than the V3, and the seat angle is one-degree slacker. But if you’re running this as a trail bike, if you’re running it with a 150mm fork, say that geometry is perfect. It’s still a 77° seat angle. The bottom bracket raising and the steeping up seat angle helps more with the Enduro model bike. That’s slackened out by the longer fork.

So this as a trail bike, and this is the bike I’ve personally been riding for the past three years.. Since we got the first samples, I’ve been riding the Stainless Murmur with a 160mm fork as my Enduro bike. But you can get a little bit more travel out the V3 now, but as a trail bike, this is still a fantastic bike.

So we’ve recently teamed up with Cane Creek.

We’ve started supplying their shocks with our frames, and now we’re gonna start supplying forks. And thought to kind of celebrate this, we’ve do a bit of a limited edition with the Stainless Murmur.

At the moment, all the Stainless Murmurs come with a free Hope headset and seat clamp in any colour you want. But this one has a Cane Creek Inline coil rear shock for 140mm travel and a Helm fork. But this is a 150mm travel, 44 mm offset, coil.

And to me, we’re making a pretty amazing bike here. 150mm coil on the front, 140mm coil on the rear. This is a pretty amazing bike. It will do most people for most things. Swap the wheels out for different purposes, lightweight wheels for trail builds, heavy wheels for enduro builds, and it will be a pretty capable bike, able to do everything. The sort of one bike for everybody.

So part of celebrating this teaming up with Cane Creek, we’re going to do a mega deal on this frame.

So the frames, as I said, come with the free Hope headset and seat clamp at the moment. We are doing an upgrade to the Cane Creek inline coil shock for only a hundred pounds extra on the price of the frame. So an absolute bargain to get you a fantastic bike. And then the coil fork we’re doing for just 600 pounds upgrade. So the retail on the headset and seat clamp is 110 pounds. The retail on this shock with the Volt progressive spring is 550 pounds. And the retail on these forks is 1,049 pounds. So we’re doing an absolute bargain deal on these.

So if you’re interested, go on the website, go to Stainless Murmur and all the details there, and it’ll take you through to the shop and you can buy yourself one and have one of these fantastic bikes.

Only thing to note, we haven’t got any mediums left. We’ve only got larges and extra larges. So sorry for the people who want a medium, but yeah, sorry!