After a long time, I’m back! I’ve still been doing some creative work, but honestly the last few years I have been somewhat subsumed in my day to day work as a mechanic. I have been very involved in trying to figure out ways to make the structure and practice of a bike shop work, as opposed to making the bikes themselves work, and it is difficult and draining work, especially in the pandemic and post-pandemic years of retail weirdness. I honestly have not really processed the horror of having been open through the entire pandemic here in New York City, and the work hasn’t gotten easier. In all this, I just haven’t had the wherewithal to get myself into the workshop nearly as much as is healthy for me. A little early I guess, but I’m entering my new years resolution time of year and I am going to try and keep myself accountable to my creative work more in the coming months. In that vein, I have some thoughts about the bike I recently got rideable for myself! It’s a bit of a story, so settle in-
Orange bike on a camping adventure in the Mt. Hood Wilderness
Once upon a time, back in 2012, I took the UBI framebuilding course when they still had their Portland campus. The teacher for my series was Joseph Ahearne (https://www.ahearnecycles.com/), whose work I have always admired and whose style of bikes aligns with my own interests. I had planned the frame that I would build pretty far in advance, conceptually, but hadn’t come up with drawings or anything at that point. I had also taken a survey metalworking course at the community college in Portland, which acquainted me with the basics of equipment and procedural knowledge before I got into the framebuilding space. I had a pretty specific idea in mind for the bike I’d build at UBI, a type that has become more familiar, common, and refined in the market in the decade since. I based the geometry off of the first generation Kona Rove and made a few minor tweaks, allowing for bigger tire clearance (designed around the Bruce Gordon Rock ‘N Road in 700x43), rim brakes because drop bar disc brake standards hadn’t really coalesced at that time, and I didn’t want to screw myself over with a standard that didn’t stick. It was going to be a touring bike, but more aggressive, with tire clearance bigger than a cross bike. Kind of a road bike with fat tires, beefed up a bit to handle mixed terrain and light loads. A gravel bike!
Since I built it I have ridden Orange bike on any number of camping trips, gravel rides, and extended tours on the east and west coasts. It has performed absolutely wonderfully, handling consistently with and without loads, getting me in and out of loads of different terrains. I’ve wound it up as fast as around 50mph on a couple of sustained descents, and it has ranged from Denali Park Road in Alaska to the backwoods of West Virginia, the coastal range of Oregon, and all throughout the Catskills and Green Mountains between New York City and Montreal. I truly couldn’t be happier with a bike. HOWEVER! As I’ve added the miles, the bike world has changed and developed, and geometries have diversified. Bikes as genre-blurring as the Evil Chamois Hagar and the Kona Libre series have pushed the definition of “gravel” pretty solidly into geometries that we once would have considered out there for mountain bikes. I am never eager to jump onto a new trend because it is new, but I also love it when designers and manufacturers take risks based on their own riding and ridership. The two mountain bikes I built for myself have allowed me to feel out an iterative sort of design process, which I have at last brought back around to my beloved Orange bike.
TravGrav’s maiden build!
Orange bike’s geometry is not anything especially remarkable: it uses very common head and seat tube angles, although the seat tube angle is a little slacker than most, a decision that I made as a way to lengthen the bike. It is also a longer bike for its height than is typical, mostly due to my long arms and torso, but also because I wanted a fairly aggressive posture on the bike. There are tradeoffs to every decision that you make picking numbers, but I have started to think of bikes more in terms of the relationship of the metrics to each other, the ratios, rather than any single dimension on its own. My interest in these ratios is what fueled some of the decision making in laying out the geometry of the TravGrav. The first big change that I knew I wanted to make was to extend the reach and push the headtube forward. This gives me more room to move my weight around when I’m climbing up techy stuff and helps solve the very minor toe overlap I had on the Orange bike. The next big move was the seat and head tube angles, which are 75 and 70 respectively. 75 degrees is very steep for a road-ish bike, more similar to a time trial bike or many modern full suspension designs. I went with the steep seat tube for two reasons: first, the steep angle of the seat tube pushes me forward, loading the front wheel of the bike for an aggressive riding posture for maximizing efforts on flat sections or while descending. Second, I tend to prefer climbing seated. When I ended up climbing very steep sections on Orange bike, there were times when if I remained seated and squatted back against the saddle that the front wheel would wander or even lift. With the seat tipping my torso forwards on to the handlebars, the front wheel should stay weighted and allow me to stay on the saddle. The extended reach of the frame gives me the room to get up and forward when I need to get out of the saddle to climb, but the bike wants me to be on the saddle. The headtube angle is a fairly slack 70 degrees, which pushes the front wheel out in front of the bike and keeps steering relaxed and controllable over chunky stuff or at speed on pavement. I almost never find myself in situations where I need lightning fast steering reflexes, so I preferred to prioritize stability over quickness.
The big thing about the TravGrav is of course that the frame splits using the Ritchey breakaway system. I used it for the first time on my trip out to PDX for the MADE show, and it was a revelation. Navigating airports, taxis, and busses is all so much easier and less stressful with a regular size suitcase instead of a massive bike box. Given that this bike is larger than the Ritchey models that the bag was built for, I had to make sure that the split apart dimensions would still fit into the case. As a result, I went with a pretty dramatically sloped top tube. If you squint you’d almost think it was a compact road geometry, but then while squinting you’d notice how long the reach is!
There’s a lot more coming about the luggage handling systems that I’m working on to go with this bike, but after a couple hundred miles of riding I am very pleased with how it fits and handles. I took it on the same test track that I initially took Orange bike on when I was back in Portland and everything worked out very nicely. I’ll try to remember to get an update post up once I finish the build and get everything powdercoated! I have ambitious plans for a hybrid paint job/powdercoat, so stay tuned but don’t hold your breath-