Thorn Cycles Forum
Community => Thorn General => Topic started by: rualexander on May 21, 2026, 12:29:00 PM
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Anyone bought a Mercury 40 yet?
Looking at the specs and have asked Thorn a few questions so far.
It seems that they have rationalised their line up a bit and come up with the Mercury 40 to replace the Mercury Mk3, the Club Tour, and the Audax.
But from what I can gather there has been a bit of a downgrade on some features, notably the frame fittings like cable guides, rack mounts, etc are now no longer stainless steel, and the paint is no longer the Imron of the Mercury Mk3, possibly back to powder coated?
Seems a backward step, but probably based on economics I guess.
Considering a frame to base my rohloff on as haven't used my Sherpa much in recent years since getting a gravel bike from another brand 😱.
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sounds a bit cheapskate maybe they thought nobody would notice. :-\
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Disappointing on the fittings, if that's so. Although realistically it would be a real-world problem only for your grandchildren, unless you're planning a few round-the-world trips. A paint downgrade would be disappointing too.
I'm still really enjoying my Mercury Mk3 650B. Perfect for my use envelope of day rides and light touring, tar and gravel.
Hard to know whether the 40 will be as good, especially as I doubt many Mk3 owners will trade for a 40. Probably it's not quite as good, but that's still very good.
The Mk3 is a great frame for a Rohloff because the rear dropout is designed to prevent the hub outer from rotating without the need for a torque arm, and the cable runs are Rohloff specific and well thought out. Albeit you still need to protect the frame from the cable outers, in places.
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Considering a frame to base my rohloff on as haven't used my Sherpa much in recent years since getting a gravel bike from another brand 😱.
Depending on your intended usage, this discussion might be of interest https://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=14396.0.
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Following up on Moronic's comment,
I'm still really enjoying my Mercury Mk3 650B. Perfect for my use envelope of day rides and light touring, tar and gravel.
Yep. Here, the only interference is from our inaptly named "spring weather": cool, wet, and windy, with occasional 30º days thrown in...
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Are you feeling clever to have got your Mk3 while you could, John? I'm certainly delighted that I stretched to the purchase of mine at a time when that needed some faith.
I've been stepping up the riding after having succumbed to various distractions, among them moving house (but not far). There's a lovely 40km (25 mile) cycle route (one way) that now begins pretty much at my door, and ends at a rustic outer suburb that offers several cafes. And a train that can bring me all the way back.
There was a time when I would cycle both directions, and I'm nearly back to that. Working my way up to it.
I've attached a few pics from the ride last week. The Merc really is a superb steed for this kind of going. You could argue that just about anything would be, but I would claim that not many other options would so effectively combine liveliness with comfort, and none with so little maintenance.
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I should add for completeness that it's not all like this - the trail I mean. Some bits are quite rough, other bits are quite steep, and there's about 10km of pure gravel. The pics were taken as boast shots - 'guess where I am today'. Forty km on this trail is harder work than the same distance on a typical public road, except that motor traffic is mercifully absent.
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Are you feeling clever to have got your Mk3 while you could, John?
I'd like to say I timed it all well, Ian, but really, I just lucked in. There was this fellow on the Thorn website who praised the Mercury, and I thought, "Why not? If it's good enuf for Ian, it's good enuf for me."
I sold two good bikes to cover much of the cost: My Raven went to a friend of our daughter, who was over the moon about it when she rode it: "I don't have to fuss with derailleurs, I just twist the grip to the right gear!" She's toured in Ireland with it.
Then, I sold to my yoga teacher, the ti-framed Eclipse light touring bike I bought here in Ottawa in the winter of 2002-03. This was the first really good bike I ever bought, and I was treating myself, as we were going to South Africa for three years in Aug 2003. The Eclipse was a lovely bike in many ways, but I had innumerable problems getting the gearing right. (But there's often a silver lining: my frustration about not being able to get my lowest gear on a steep uphill in the Ottawa Valley in 2013 led to my discovery of & eventual membership in the Church of Rohloff.) My yoga teacher bought the bike for his teenaged son, who never rode it much, and then announced he wanted an e-bike. I kept quiet, though it crossed my mind to offer to buy it back...
But my Mercury (named Freddie, of course) has been a delight. It does most of what each of the other bikes would do, and I no longer need the Raven's medium/heavy touring capabilities. I've done overnights and a weeklong tour in West Qué (with Ron Séguin); on these, and on day rides, I find myself saying, "Dang! This bike works sooo well!" A couple of years ago, I was visiting friends in the back country of the Ottawa Valley, and on my ride out of town, I eased past two women riders. One said, "Oooooh, fancy bike!" I said, gallantly, "Thanks, lass!" She smiled.
That road you have as your "regular" ride looks a treat, Ian. This spring, I've not been riding as much as I'd like (wretched weather, heavy-duty head cold, etc.) but I've started riding across the river and into the hills and trees of Gatineau Park. (Will assemble some photos and post those.) Today, I rode to the base of the long/steep hill to the lookout which is the turnaround for my favourite 33 kms/2 hrs 15 mins out-and-back. The canopy of trees has blossomed in the past two weeks, and just two days ago, my wife and I saw & heard the largest wing of Canada geese we'd ever seen/heard -- there was 80 or 90 of them overhead, heading for a bay on the Ottawa River for the night; perhaps going -- where? -- further north in Eastern Ontario, I'd guess. Absolutely magical sound, and with the trees' foliage, confirmation that summer really has arrived. :)
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Well, I'd say the cleverness came in when you elected to sell two excellent bicycles and replace them with a single Mercury, and if it was all about my recommendation then I'm delighted to hear it has worked out so well. I certainly don't envy anyone else their velocipede when I'm out on the trail. And the Merc is so damn versatile – not just in what it can do but in the way that it does it. A bike that can comfortably handle a camping load in four panniers shouldn't feel this lively when you're out on a day ride. And yet, as you observe, it's superb in both roles.
Here's an extra shot, this time from my most recent multi-day trip. Which I've intended to write up on here, but haven't so far. This was a three-night camping trip conducted almost exclusively on cycle trails in the north-east of my home state, Victoria, where they've converted a series of disused railways to bike paths. You'd think that would mean the route was mainly flat, but one of the lines they converted was long famed as the steepest in the southern hemisphere.
For Australians on the forum, this was the Murray to Mountains trail. We did Wangaratta to Everton, then took the climb to Beechworth and from there the descent to Yackandandah. The pic is from the return journey, a lunch-and-cuppa stop on the Yack-Beechworth leg.
Curiously, while I've tested the Mercury with four panniers, and have a low-rider Tubus rack for the front, I've not yet toured with four panniers. The loads I've carried haven't demanded that much space, and I keep seeing reasons for saving the 2kg that the front rack and twin Ortliebs add empty. But I think I will use four next time. It will be nice not to have the bags stuffed to the gills, and I think a couple of kilograms each side on the front will balance the load a bit better. There were times on this trip where the front end felt a bit light.
Getting off topic, I know. But comments about the Mercury Mk3 could be helpful for people considering a Mercury 40, which seems to be very similar.
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John:
But my Mercury (named Freddie, of course) has been a delight.
That made me spill my coffee!
My Raven is still looking at me sadly from the garage. Exercise now for me must be varied; so swimming and walking 3+ miles/day put the Raven third, I'm afraid.
But it's like having an old friend hanging around for support when needed.
Cheers from Aberdeen Scotlandshire UK
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Matt, great to hear from you & to know that you're drinking coffee -- even if some gets spilled ;)
Ian, while I've tested the Mercury with four panniers, and have a low-rider Tubus rack for the front, I've not yet toured with four panniers. The loads I've carried haven't demanded that much space, and I keep seeing reasons for saving the 2kg that the front rack and twin Ortliebs add empty.
I've done a weeklong tour with four panniers, with this setup:
> on the rear, I use a pair of Arkel Dri-lites. These are sturdy and soft, weighing about 500 gms. In these, I stow cookware and food. On my rear rack, I stow my tent in a dry-sack, rolled up & secured with lightweight clip-together cords.
> on the front rack, I use a pair of Arkel Dauphin waterproofs, about 16 ltrs each. These hold my clothing & sleeping bag, etc.
> the weight of the two pairs of loaded panniers is about equal.
> I use a small handlebar bag as well, 7-ltr Axiom
Love the photo, and esp the name Yanckandandah! We visited Wangaratta on a circuit tour in 2017, Melbun via the Ocean Road to Wangaratta, Canberra & Sydney. Nice wee coincidence on that trip: In Melbun, I saw a paperback store, walked in, and asked if the young woman at the desk if they had a copy of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. They did, she said, and pointed to a shelf. As I walked over to it, a voice from behind it said, "John! What brings you here??" Was a fellow I knew from Ottawa, originally from 'Straya. He had returned home, and was managing the store on behalf of his sister, the owner. Small world, eh? :)
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Small world indeed. Isn't it fun when that happens?
Yes I too smiled at your having named your Mercury Freddie. My name for mine, in so far as it has one, is Tailwind. Because that's how it felt when I first took it out on a run, having substituted it for my excellent carbon-aluminium Trek, which was always a bit small in the frame for me. Remarkably perhaps, it still feels like that.
Thanks for the detail on panniers. I think my Ortlieb fronts weigh 700g each. I doubt I'll replace them with lighter bags, but it's interesting to be reminded that there's weight to be saved.
I've attached a blurry shot of the Merc with four Ortliebs, taken when I was preparing for its first multi-day trip (when I ended up using just the fronts and a rack bag, a mistake).
A part of what appeals about the four-bag setup is that everything could go in them, with the rack-top reserved for contingencies. It will look neater, and as we all know, neater is lighter: it saves the mental load attached to untidiness.
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This thread is specifically about the Mercury 40.
Can we cut down the long winded waffling about other bikes please?
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Well if I'm the chief biovator, I'll confess I was excited to see someone open a post about any Mercury, since they don't come up often. The research you opened it with was interesting, too.
The waffling was offered in a spirit of helpfulness. From your research and Thorn's promotion, it appears the Mercury 40 is a Mercury Mk3 with a less durable finish, Thorn's own-brand high-spec tubing and a gate in the rear triangle. There is every chance it will be all but indistinguishable from a Mk3 to ride, and so some reflections from people who've owned Mk3s for a few years seemed more than tangentially relevant.
However, I'm happy to leave the thread to all the Mercury 40 owners who haven't responded since 21 May. Perhaps some will chime in as the 40 finds buyers.
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Another contribution from someone with no experience of the Mercury 40, no obligation to read...
it appears the Mercury 40 is a Mercury Mk3 with a less durable finish, Thorn's own-brand high-spec tubing and a gate in the rear triangle. There is every chance it will be all but indistinguishable from a Mk3 to ride, and so some reflections from people who've owned Mk3s for a few years seemed more than tangentially relevant.
I'd be interested to ride and know, I'm not sure the tubing has the same degree of manipulation, the stays are likely to be stiffer to accommodate the belt and gate. OTOH I have speculated in the past that the the design may have been a bit self indulgent. I am somewhat sceptical that a single frame can replace the Mercury, Club Tour and Audax models without there being some compromise. Only by riding would one know if that were correct and where such compromise might have been made.
The powdercoat on my Raven was adequate but not brilliant, the DuPont enamel on my Mercury is a superior finish to that. But powdercoat has moved on in twenty years, I've seen some fantastic finishes in the last few years, including a multi coulered Tout Terrain, so I'm not assuming it is inferior. I also note the fork is only available in black, like it was on the original Raven, I can't see that being popular.
The Mercury 40 frame is £100 cheaper than the last batch of Mercurys, I wonder what the price of the next batch would have been. We can be pretty sure not the same, the price jump on the Nomad between batches was over £200. I was thinking Thorn's pricing was getting close to a custom frame, but I had a look at my local frame builders pricelist and that isn't the case. Their prices are up 50% since I last looked, though they went bankrupt and were bought out by new owners in that time.
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Another contribution from someone with no experience of the Mercury 40, no obligation to read...
it appears the Mercury 40 is a Mercury Mk3 with a less durable finish, Thorn's own-brand high-spec tubing and a gate in the rear triangle. There is every chance it will be all but indistinguishable from a Mk3 to ride, and so some reflections from people who've owned Mk3s for a few years seemed more than tangentially relevant.
I am somewhat sceptical that a single frame can replace the Mercury, Club Tour and Audax models without there being some compromise. Only by riding would one know if that were correct and where such compromise might have been made.
Here are my thoughts as a Club Tour Mk4 owner .
Cost savings not withstanding, the new Mercury 40 looks to be a light touring frame and seems to have inherited most of it's DNA from its predecessors. I remain to be convinced that it can adequately replace the Audax Mk 3, it's possible that Thorn don't see a future for that model. Audax has moved on, I've got a couple of old style audax bikes, hand built steel frames, rim brakes and 28mm tyres with mudguards, which I very much enjoy riding, but the impression I get is that very few newer audax riders are choosing to ride this type of machine. Yes, you can build it up with disc brakes and fatter tyres, but it would always be a frame designed for light touring.
The Mercury as a replacement for the Club Tour is a much more realistic proposition, it's something that I've considered myself. They are essentially very similar bikes but with different gear train options. That said I wonder how many buyers will choose the dérailleur build option. There's no shortage of competition in the dérailleur geared touring bike market, the problem for Thorn is that they have always been seen as a premium product, but with the Mercury 40 the gap has narrowed.
I suppose the bottom line is, would I buy the new Mercury? The answer is, probably not, but I might well buy a secondhand Mercury Mk 3.
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Perhaps it’s simply a case of business realities.
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Going from imron back to powercoat doesn't seem like such a step down in an era, when frame-protection tape is so common in the bicycle world. Primarily favored by bikepackers to avoid bag-rub, but it’s not as if there are any downsides to using it even if one doesn’t have such bags.
My Nomad Mk2 frame is powercoated and even unprotected by tape, and used now as a local-use bike in a wet climate. I can't say the paint seems particularly more vulnerable than my imron Nomad Mk3 frame.
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Perhaps it’s simply a case of business realities.
Probably
Going from imron back to powercoat doesn't seem like such a step down in an era, when frame-protection tape is so common in the bicycle world. Primarily favored by bikepackers to avoid bag-rub, but it’s not as if there are any downsides to using it even if one doesn’t have such bags.
My Nomad Mk2 frame is powercoated and even unprotected by tape, and used now as a local-use bike in a wet climate. I can't say the paint seems particularly more vulnerable than my imron Nomad Mk3 frame.
Frame tape is fine in the obvious areas but it won't wrap around bottle bosses, cable guides, and rack mounts, which in my experience with my Thorn bikes are areas which start to rust and from where it creeps under the paint and can start to bubble.
Maybe the Thorn paintwork has improved since I bought mine. But I liked the idea of the more durable Imron paint and stainless steel fittings.
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Perhaps it’s simply a case of business realities.
Probably
Oh, I think we can take that as a 99% certainty. Here are just a few costs associated with such an efflorescence of models and fits as offered by Thorne while Andy Blance was their designer, all of which I knew about before I went to business school:
Cost of capital (interest, repayments of loans cutting into distributable profits) to finance so large a range, warehousing space built or rented, sales lost because a large range of sizes and fits and models must be compensated by reduced colour range which is arguably more important to the vast majority of bicycle purchasers, time to train customer-facing staff in so large and varied a range, multiplication of showroom fit-out of so many models meaning larger stocks of expensive parts. The absolutely brilliant 100 days free trial also brought costs to the vendor, as well as welcome buzz on the internet. We also saw some of the fits at the margins being offered well after the main body of the production was sold, often at bargain prices; these discounts are an additional cost of so large a range.
On the other hand, you might say that the two main ranges established Thorn with a bang as a premier manufacturer of touring bikes after making custom bikes ran into a brick wall of costs and Far Eastern competition, and very likely brazier staffing problems too. (A quarter century ago already, when I drew a design for a custom bike built of triangulated small tubes, I couldn't find anyone except art school welders and silversmiths-- Jesus help me! -- to braze it together for me.) Thorn wouldn't be THORN today without all that; it might not be more than a fringe curiosity, as so many of the once famous custom builders in Great Britain have become. Whichever way you choose to do it, it is expensive to establish a mainstream brand, and niche brands perversely cost more to establish.
There is a time to take such a risk, and pay its costs, and inevitably a time arrives for consolidation and rationalization.
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It's worth saying that this is a standard business school (or at least good, meaning non-political, business school) applied micro-economics analysis: in short, a point well understood would arrive where the owner of the business would have to make some unavoidable hard choices.
Personally, I came to appreciate Thorn's exquisite care for the fit of their riders after Sheldon Brown drew my attention to it, and to Mr Blance's insistence on the best value, long-lasting component choices which would least often immobilize the tourist in some godawful place.* Getting on for twenty years later I see no reason to change my mind about either early impression.
*In Oz you get a choice between 'The Pub With No Beer' and 'The Fatal Wedding', the latter 114 stanzas that start, 'The Hearse Overturned At The Crossroads.' You shoulda stayed in Melbourne: at least there you can get a 'Floater' from the cart at the bottom of Spring Street, which is a meat pie in a bowl allegedly of pea soup, and the only danger is the tram lines bending your rims as it they cast you onto the tarmac.
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😴