Designing Path Racer/Porteur Frame - opinions?

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 :-)

Nice one polybikeuser.

Good to separate the path and porteurs. very different geometry for front loading is what I was originally trying to recommend being sure of, to the OP. Apparently it's all about how much trail you have.

Sad really that OnOne didn't do well out of the Lincolnshire Poacher. But there is the problem with overtly retro-styled things ... they are too much a matter of taste. I reckon the Steamroller is a good example of a sort of trad style fame, but being tigged keep it cheap, and their curved chain stays and stuff also means it doesn't look like a museum piece, and can be built up in different ways with some success. For the On One to try to emulate, in some small way, the finery of Hobbs and Hethchins and Flying Gates with the Fleurs-de-Lys lugs was probably a bad move, especially in a rather basic tubeset.

About track ends with mudguards: yes it is an affectation to build a frame like this. I struggled with having dropouts on my Yates build, and ended up choosing the dogs dinner approach. Still, having switched to chromoplastic mudguards, using the SKS safety QRs on the rear (they're intended to be used on the front), mounted to the inside of the eyes, I have no problems at all with removing the wheel. Those clips do reqiure replacement once in a while as the gripping of the stay gets loose, but that's a price I'm happy to pay.