I’m seeing double, everywhere I look there are way more tubes than there should be!
What The (Actual) Fridge, right?
I can’t believe I’d left it this long to find out how much fun cyclocross bikes are! The ability to switch between roads and back lanes was great fun, but off road descents? Hang on to your fillings! The drop position was fine for the road but felt way too low for off-road use and riding the hoods made reaching the brakes an issue. It was putting punishment on my wrists that the skinny CX tyres couldn’t compensate for!
Project H.G. (Haute Gravel or maybe Hairy Growler, it depends on who’s asking) was my take on a Monstercross/Adventure drop bar off road bike. It started off as one thing and then, gaining a life of its own, turned into something slightly different!
Wheels within wheels.
First dilemma – what wheel size to go for? Standard thinking would be for a frame that would run 700c x 40mm while also allowing clearance for a modest offroad 27.5 wheel. We don’t like to be modest though, right? I like the extra rollover ability and cusion of a chunky 29’er wheel and I liked the idea of being able to swap over the wheels from my Enduro hardtail, so we’d build this bad boy to clear 29″ x 2.6″ Wide Trails!
Having a set of Boost hubs to hand it followed that we should build the frame around the latest 148mm rear, 110mm front hub spacing. The wheelset was rounded out with some bladed Sapim spokes, snazzy Nextie carbon gravel rims and 2.25″ Schwalbe G-One Allround tyres.
The slightly schizophrenic mix of on/off road components continued…
Don’t keep me in suspense.
Suspension or not? I liked the idea of keeping things simple, and you can get a fair way in the comfort stakes with a decent volume tyre. This lead to some musings on fork length. A standard gravel fork would only be 400mm long, axle to crown, but would max out at 45mm for a 700c wheel. We could get the extra clearance with a 480mm long suspension corrected fork, but my word the result is rather chopper like!
Time to get freaky, I went with a split-the-difference length of 440mm. Enough to get plenty of clearance without looking too gangly. That’s going to mean a custom fork though, so what style to go for? A standard twin bladed titanium fork needs to be overbuilt to get the necessary stiffness. Which is why a certain Mr Jones revived the truss fork design and the lovers of all things alternative found a new standard.
But truss forks use lots of extra metal and need an unusual double top cup headset to make them work. I wanted to run something slightly more contemporary. Which meant looking at the third way, as pioneered by Oddity Cycles and Ted James, this is my Quadpus fork. This uses four mini fork blades connected to a standard steerer tube. This has most of the stiffness of a truss fork with a neater look and the ability to run a standard tapered headtube. I went with an integrated headset too just to keep things looking super smooth.
Bar bar bar, bar Barbara Anne.
Checking out the latest off road adventure machines, such as the Salsa Cutthroat, I found they specced a wide flared drop bar, placing the flats at about saddle height. This lets you use the drops for elbows out downhill blasting, while giving you full braking power using only one finger!
Most of the fretting on this job centred on getting the bar height correct. Knowing that I’d be using a shorter fork I compensated by adding plenty of length to the head tube instead.
To double check my maths I also used my existing 29’er hardtail to eye things up and help work out dimensions. In the end all of the number crunching paid off – the position of the Salsa Woodchipper bar is spot on!
But what about that crazy frame?
I know what you’d really like to know more about though – but for that you’ll have to read Part II 😉
