About Me

My name is Alex McNulty and I’m a wheel builder based in Colchester, Essex. My passion for cycling started relatively late, in my late 20's, but you could argue that I've been making up for lost time since then!  Aside from keeping fit, cycling is a means of going places and, like any cyclist, I'm often guilty of looking for ways to make my bike feel better and go faster!  I think wheel building is the ultimate expression of this.

A large part of the fun of building wheels is being able to ride them and, whether I'm commuting or riding with my local cycling club, ColVelo, not many days go by when I'm not on my bike. My riding has primarily revolved around long distance cycling and audax in recent years and you could say that I've invested blood, sweat and tears into the pursuit of cycling further and continuing to find new ways to challenge myself and my bikes.  In fact, blood and tears aside, I'm sure part of the reason for my nickname ‘Salty’ was born out of the condition of my cycling jersey at the end of a ColVelo 'Monument'! (ColVelo has a series of big rides or Monuments over the summer months, all comfortably more than 200km and the longest at just over 300km - although not in 2020 for obvious reasons!)

My first multi-day audax was the Bryan Chapman Memorial in May 2018, a 600km ride over a weekend, from South Wales to North Wales and back again.  I had been fascinated by this ride for a while so it was a great feeling to finish and it effectively secured a provisional place for Paris-Brest-Paris the following year - a 1200km ride dating back to 1891 that takes place every 4 years.

I started building up the mileage with a 300km ride in February that year, and after four qualifying rides (200km, 300km, 400km, 600km), four ColVelo monuments, commuting miles and a couple of additional audax thrown in for good measure, I made it to the start line, ultimately finishing in a time of just under 73 hours.  I slowed down a bit in the last few months of 2019 but I still finished the year just shy of 10,000 miles - you could say that I'm a good test of my wheels!

Build quality and reliability become especially important when you're riding day in, day out, with rides of a few hundred kilometres occasionally thrown in.  Hand built wheels are a means of me eking out as much performance as I can from my bikes without any of the compromises you get from factory built wheels.  Oh, and I really enjoy it!