Fully Loaded.
Here is a frameset that went out the door a few days back. It’s a fillet brazed frame with XL tubes designed and built to be used as a fully loaded touring bike. It has custom Bruce Gordon racks made for it that have built in fender mounts to keep it all clean.
Touring bikes above all need to be functional and while that doesn’t mean they can’t be pretty (as JB paint shows) they are all business. You’ll notice that the tubes are XL sized to keep the frame stiff torsionally to keep the handling right when the bike is loaded down with 70 pounds of gear. The top tube as a little bit of slope to allow for more standover which is really appreciated when you have the bike loaded. It also has old school, long slot Campy 1010A dropouts. These may seem to be an odd choice at first but there is a very good reason for them. Murphy’s law often strikes when you are in the middle of nowhere and if you have a broken rear derailleur or shifter you can shorten the chain and run the bike as a single speed to get you to the next town. Pragmatism rules when you are in the middle of nowhere.
I look forward to getting photos of this bike all loaded down and in fun places I’ve never been to.
Thanks for looking,
Dave
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4 responses to “Fully Loaded.”
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It is another lovely bike. Still, I was wondering about the horizontal dropouts. I realize it is a tradeoff but I would prefer the vertical dropouts so a nice fender line is easy with a rigid fender mount.
Although I’ve never tried it, in the broken RD emergency scenario, isn’t the diversity provided by 8-10 rear cogs and 2-3 front chain rings sufficient to find one gear combo that would reasonably fit a chain on vertical dropouts without a rear derailleur?
Even better, would it be possible to design a chain stay length and a vertical dropout so that a certain preferred gear combo, (say 39/15?) was a good fit for a chain with an integer number of links? Or is that impossible because either chain lengths are too variable as the chain wears to get a decent match or you can’t insert a wheel in a vertical dropout if the chain is sized just perfectly for the wheel once it is in place? (I’d say that more clearly if I could.)
Hey Roy,
I hear you on the fender line but in reality it’s a non-issue. The wheel will run in the forward position of the drop 99.9% of the time so the fender can be fit nice and close.
It is VERY difficult to find a good combo of gears front the rear that will give the proper chain tension. Combine this with the chainline needed to get into that combo and the fact that the rear derailleur may not be there to guide the chain onto the rear cog and you can have real issues with the chain derailing. With the slotted drop you can set it in a gear that will work well for the terrain you are on, slide the wheel back until you have good tension and then you are good to go. You can even then change gear combos and reset the wheel and be on your way. It works very well in practice.
I think designing the stay length to work with a given gear combo would be next to impossible. The difference in placement between perfect chain tension and too tight/loose is VERY small. Couple this with the fact that tolerances on chainrings vary from brand to brand and model line to model line and you end up with something that seems like it would work but in the end doesn’t. It’s a good thought though. it’s been tried in the past with some very hight end BMX bikes where they didn’t want to risk the wheel creeping in the dropouts and it was always such an issue that the idea died.
Thanks for looking and for the comment and please come again.
dave
Dave, is the tour rider planning on bar cons or STI shifters? I’ve seen very few of your frames with DT braze-on stops… I know time has passed them DT shifters by, but they are a nice option for some of us.
Hey JIm,
Thanks for the note.
The cool thing about using HT guides is that the rider can use STI type shifters or bar ends equally well and have a nice smooth cable routing without the cable rubbing on or rattling against the head tube. The only thing you can’t do is use a DT shifter. Of course one can set up the bike with shifter bosses and adapters and get the job done and I often build bikes with a DT shifter boss as a no cost option for people that want the option down the road of setting it up differently. So you have that option – just ask for it and we are good to go.
Thanks again,
Dave