• As I understand it a Path Racer and a Porteur are rather different bikes with different purposes in mind so somewhat different designs.

    A Path Racer is a bit of a club racing bike that you can ride on the track but then also comfortably ride home afterwards, seem to remember that they also had a nod towards grass racing. So a fairly lightweight bike with geometry predisposed towards racing, but with slightly slacker geometry than an out and out racer and a lower bottom bracket than a bike solely intended for track riding.

    A Porteur is a load carrying work bike, built to stably carry a load rather than for speed, so more heavily built than a Path Racer, with fork geometry tweaked for stability and predictable steering when carrying a load over the front wheel.

    While I'm sure the designs aren't mutually exclusive, not sure I'd consider them interchangeable. My current commuter is a Kogswell G that I'd say broadly had Path Racer geometry. I initially tried building this up as a shopping bike with a Paul Flatbed, it looked great and handled okay when not heavily loaded, but when heavily loaded the steering became much more ponderous and unresponsive, it also felt less predictable. So not a very successful Porteur bike, even if it looked the part.

    Kogswell produced a purpose designed Porteur bike, the PR, they did a lot of work getting the fork geometry right, seem to remember that they also had some input from www.blackbirdsf.org . The Kogswell website seems to be down and I get the impression that they've stopped building bikes, but there's still quite a lot of info/discussion about the PR on the Kogswell Owners Group .

    You might also want to look at On One's Lincolnshire Poacher as a recent example of someone trying to do a traditional path racer, don't think this was a huge success for them. It seems that while a lot of us appreciate the classics and think it'd be a damn fine idea to revive them, when a budget one comes along very few people seem to buy them. At a completely different price point Rivendell have built their business building these kind of genuinely multi-purpose bikes... but at a price.

    I have rear entry horizontal drop-outs on the Kogswell G, which I also use with mudguards and it's a nightmare, the one bit of the design of the bike which is a complete dogs dinner. Rear entry drop-outs and mudguards are a shit idea, sorry, but it's true. What (I think) would be a worthwhile idea would be a Path Racer design, taking advantage of modern advances in tubing design with shortish forward facing horizontal dropouts a-la-Velo-Orange Polyvalent, but for 700c wheels and without the mech-hanger. I know mech-hangers make the frame more adaptable, but they also make my purpose built fixed bike look like a conversion job, which (probably stupidly) irks me.

    Them's my thoughts anyway, good luck to you :-)

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