Disc brakes are dead

Not really.

I already have a hydro disc winter bike and thats staying for winter usage. There is a hole in my life for a fun fast steel road bike as everything else I have is carbon.

It will be a 'fast' steel road bike. So this will have as short chainstays and wheelbase as possible with front centre to match basically whatevers possible to go with 28mm (with guards) and 32mm without guards.

It will have Paul Racer Medium brakes in black. They will be brazed onto frame and forks.

Toying with Campag Potenza for teh lols with fallback on sram apex.

Maybe quill and threaded but maybe not.

No idea about what tubing or fork crown, I want to go SAX MAX 2.0 with the curved blade but that might be bit too 'touring' plus not sure about the width with braze on Paul Racers.

Winston will build this.

I am thinking pearl white frame and black forks and black finishing kit and groupset (although potenza has a silver option). Or just pearl white frame and fork. If modern then Ritchey finishing kit if 1" threaded, nitto.

Wheels logically should be TB14 but not sure if silver rims would work with a white frameset .. R460 or something otherwise. Black spokes, black hubs.

Most importantly it will have two of those £5 looking King Ti bottlecages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=984t1ebWUcM

Essay 1:

I concur with the sentiment that STRM and DBAD are not equals, however I feel that very important characteristics of DBAD are either not being recognised or are misrepresented in your evaluation.

Most problematic is that you have opted for a very Modernistic perspective; you root the genesis of DBAD in a concern for the real or imagined approval of its functional componentry regardless of their usage. In fact, DBAD is the world's first Post Truth bicycle, and to judge it by its physical characteristics would be to ignore its very Trumpian nativity.

For instance, Trump declares he will build a wall. The biggest wall. Somone else will pay for it so it doesn't matter. People become enraptured by the theatrics even though deep down they know no wall will be built. Amey proclaims a short wheelbase build, the shortest wheelbase. Custom if needs be. The rationale for this, like Trump's wall, is laughable, illogical even. When Amey buys a second hand off the peg frame from an obscure shop brand, it has a regular wheelbase but it doesn't matter; his audience is already caught up in the maelstrom of ridicule and glee-a voluble energy that crescendos with the added criteria of taking this banal frame and customising it at great expense to add S+S couplers and Paul Canti mounts-brakes which entirely subvert his own narrative of seeking effective braking solutions.

With one fell swoop Amey has re-focused the ridicule upon these equally risible criteria, whilst the frenzy of humour and ridicule continues to rise ever higher. It's a trick that works again and again throughout the build; promising "Potenza for the lols" but delivering the peasant-fare of Shimano Sora. In a manouvre worthy of Gideon Osborne and David Cameron DBAD has gone from a 'short wheelbase bedecked with Paul components and bling' to become a semi-bespoke, expensive but perplexingly basic componented 'austerity travel bike' that embraces its illogical, contrary failure as a project and exchanges the substantial material investment in it for cultural capital-however this can be defined. Until page 75 it wasn't even certain if DBAD even existed, such was the astute gamesmanship of its author.

DBAD is therefore the Bitcoin of 'custom' or 'bikepacking' bikes; it probably exists in some kind of dimension, more and more money and speech is being wrapped up in it, but nobody is really sure what it is for or how long it will last or if it will be ridden up a Col before disappearing into a cloud of sub-par braking, upset and ill feeling.

STRB, on the other hand, is nothing but a two dimensional pastiche of DBAD-a half hearted scribble on the cubicle wall of the pretentious cycling one-upmanship that DBAD so comprehensively molested for its own gain. DBAD is Livestrong-embodied in not just the laboured and contrary bicycle cypher that spawned it but also its notoriety-STRB is the violet eyed old man jangling a collection box outside Greggs on a Saturday morning, devoid of wider relevance or reach.

(Parklife!)

Essay 2:

STRM and DBAD are not equals. DBAD confronts your worst fears about bikes and makes them palatable: that the bikes you own are exceptional. That they cannot be recreated. That the sums of your parts are not greater than the full build. DBAD reveals to all of us that there are people, deeply misguided people, who are watching your builds, judging you, who feel overly passionate about the prospective stopping power descending Toys Hill. DBAD reveals that in fact there is not a man somewhere in California who rides on balloon tyres taste-making bike technology that has virtually no application in real life; that this man in California exists only in your mind, and it is not him but your brain that become the arbiter of what is 'good', what is 'fast', what is 'rad' and, most importantly, what you need to stop yourself.

STRB is merely a sad a troglodyte, stuck at the back of the Socratic cave naming the shadows on the wall.

Essay 3:

This thread is a perfect exposé of Amey's fundamental Radical Leftism.

He began as an outsider, promising a proletariat-based solution using traditional components overlooked by "the petty and haute bourgeoisie" who said it would never work, or that he should simply integrate current capitalist modes of production or "Ultegra Di2" which would only further condense the post-colonial powers' grip on his property and the wider popular imagination.

Then he rode to infamy in an manner that none of us -- least of all him -- expected. But his words and actions had impact. He had this traditional frame, which he then modified employing some of the greatest working hands in industry which actualised his beliefs in the true rise of voice the Working Class. But he was wildly misunderstood, and his stance was never that it was to be held as structure for mass movement, but rather as a symbol of how to remove power from those who control the means of production.

So he returned back to the masses to show them with searing irony the futility and painful cycle of late-stage capitalism or "hydraulic" by giving the populace what it craved; a litany of disc brakes operating as a effectively a mirror to itself with DBAD as a maintained reflection of how we drug ourselves into submission (or "Brevet Windblock" ourselves). Now that DBAD serves not only as a symbol but also a reality on which the future can be ridden, a chorus of voices choose to impede DBAD's call to the Left for individual workers to reject capitalist modes of subservience, while @amey encourages them to "braze-on".

Now @motoko owns it and has done it justice: https://www.lfgss.com/comments/15845497/