Tech / ideas that are old but as good as current quo

[munkey_bwy]

Even at nearly 50, i still love to get out into the country and enjoy being able to say to myself....yup i climbed that or i did that distance.
i get the ease of just going to a trail centre and riding purely off road, but it takes away the pleasure of the great outdoors to me.

I think gravel bikes are a great development & fat bikes. once the marketing hype is all past and the designs settle you can see the reasoning behind the geometries. 71 / 73 degrees works extremely well on most gradients and terrains. low and slack is great for steep and jump laden trail centre riding.

Another thing that really bugs me is the obsession with taking a shovel to every loamy woodland. when we all started riding we were taught to respect the wild places not turn every thing into a berm and destroy the top layer.

 

[munkey_bwy]

Christ i sound like a right gumpy old fool.

Old geometry - great
modern geometries - great
new developments or the re-use of old designs i'm for....no its not all bad

 

[Prodigal Son]

Re: Re:

I think the current gravel and adventure bikes are in some ways very similar to 90s rigid MTBs, but with bigger 650b or 700c wheels and some with drop bars.


I don't have a car, so all my rides include some road. The latest, very off road focussed MTBs really don't interest me, so I've just bought a gravel bike.

Yes. Remember the acronym ATB? All terrain bikes. Gravel bikes are ATBs.

 

[Graham_hkr]

Re: Re:

I think the current gravel and adventure bikes are in some ways very similar to 90s rigid MTBs, but with bigger 650b or 700c wheels and some with drop bars.

I wonder whether they came about because modern MTBs are so off-road focused, such that people drive them to a trail centre, or to a location, to do a purely off-road ride. I imagine a 30lb bike with fat 2.8 inch wide knobbly tyres and 120mm or more suspension travel is something of a drag to ride on the road; I haven't tried one.

Like early rigid MTBs, a gravel bike isn't going to be as cabable off road, especially on the really technical stuff, as the latest all mountain or eduro, or whatever they're called, bike, but it's a lot more versatile if your ride includes a wide variety of surfaces and is longer than a five mile loop around some woods.

I don't have a car, so all my rides include some road. The latest, very off road focussed MTBs really don't interest me, so I've just bought a gravel bike.

Nailed it.. ^^^

 

[mattr]

A lot of it is the segmentation of the market.
What we used to ride was one bike for everything, so it had to be good *enough* at everything. Now you have bikes for DH/Trail/XC/Jump/blah/blah.

Most people buy what is fashionable (trail oriented stuff) which are bloody useless on fire roads/gravel trails because.....

I imagine a 30lb bike with fat 2.8 inch wide knobbly tyres and 120mm or more suspension travel is something of a drag to ride on the road

so you "need" a gravel bike. Which is essentially a rigid XC race bike with drop bars.

 

[greencat]

One thing that is so so wrong even though its not really tech, but it is pivotal to mountainbiking or offroad cycling.

Trail centres..... wrong wrong wrong. what happened to getting out in to the countryside & widerness?

I rather like trail centres as it keeps the traffic away from some of the more remote/ecologically fragile stuff/gets people out into nature who might not otherwise do it.

Personally, I've never been to one.

 

[Prodigal Son]

so you "need" a gravel bike. Which is essentially a rigid XC race bike with drop bars.

... and 29er wheels but...2.1 tires are back in business.

 

[ultrazenith]

The funny thing about 29er wheels is they're generally faster off road, rolling more easily over bumps, but nobody is sure why exactly. Is it the outside diameter of the wheel, is it the tyre contact patch, is it the tyre volume, is it the flywheel effect of the wheels being heavier? If nobody's conclusively pinned this down yet, then it's probably a mixture of several of these effects. It would be amusing if it turned out to be the flywheel effect wot did it, because then you could make any wheel size faster by simply using heavier rims ... heavier wheels basically make it harder work to get up to speed but then once up to speed you get slowed less by bumps and other resistances, which is exactly what people usually describe when making the jump from 26 to 29.

Not that I'm much of a retrogrouch, it's excellent to see people getting out on a bike, whatever they choose to ride, and the diversity of bike types nowadays is amazing if you like experimenting with unusual set ups, like my rigid steel El Mariachi with 29 rear and 29+ front.

 

[xerxes]

Re:

so you "need" a gravel bike. Which is essentially a rigid XC race bike with drop bars.

I'm guessing you have just one bike and "need" it to ride to work on.

No, I don't need a gravel bike, but I've been hankering for a drop bar bike for a while. However, I didn't want an out-and-out road bike; the position is too extreme and with where I ride, country lanes with the odd detour along a track when I come across one, and the state of the roads, I didn't want skinny 25c tyres.

When I first considered something with drop bars I looked at some tourers, but I thought they might be a bit heavy, and some cyclocross bikes, but they have a rather racey position and also rarely have any provision for racks, mudguards, extra bottle cages etc. Also, I was put off either either by the rim brakes, or the cable operated discs that were available at the time.

Now, a few years on, there are dozens of gravel style bikes available and rather than a case of me falling for the hype, it was a case of the sort of bike I had envisioned becoming available. Also there are now plenty of options for drop bar hydraulic brakes and shifters.

There are bikes ranging from light and racey, to full on loaded touring style with room for massive 29x3.00" tyres. I opted for something in the middle, room for 700x45c tyres, although I reckon you could fit 700x50c. It can also take 650b wheels with even fatter tyres. It has provision for mudguards and a rack and should be reasonably light, probably under 10kg; I'll weigh it when I've finished putting it together. Obviously 10kg is a fair bit more than the latest carbon fibre road bikes, but it's lighter than the steel road bike I used to do time trials on when I was a teenager and lighter than any MTB i've ever had.

 

[mattr]

No, i have 9 or 10 bikes, all in full working order. None of them are gravel bikes. Despite having hundreds/thousands of km of usable gravel trails round here, i need a gravel bike like a fish needs one..........