Gravel / Gravé / Gnarmac / Groad / ATB

Arkose clearly

Better at what?

Groad.

IG likes.

Shredding the gnar

Walked into that.

I’d buy a croix de fer with a surly fork.

Or a thorn club tour tbh.

I have a CDF with straggler fork. It rides lovely but it is heavy.

That just looks like the tsunami on aliexpresss with a fancier paintjob

@chrisbmx116 buy this

😂

ridden both, they pretty much the same frame

the surly looks nicer

Stop fucking with me! Almost looks ok to me.

Those Holdsworth Stelvios will only really do 32mm knobblies max. Me and a pal went into PX and asked them to mix and match a few wheels into one of their frames. My pal still bought the frame cos it was about £150 at the time, but his 30mm tyres with guards is about as good as it gets.

My Cotic Escapade. Rode it on a recent 'gravel' audax. Cept North Yorkshire gravel is predominantly boulders the size of babies heads.

Struggled on the off road bits, mainly due to tyre choice - I used 32mm file treads and got overtaken by an Arkose with 42mms, but caught up on the roads again. But it won't take tyres as wide as an Arkose. Cotic say 40mm max but 34mm small-knob knobblies don't leave a ton of room. The tubes are S-shaped, but not dimpled/crimped.

Cotic also say it will take 47mm 650b tyres, but I've had a few pedal strikes (170mm cranks) riding it off road in the peaks with 700x34, as it's got a fairly low BB (70mm drop). The 47mm 650bs would drop it a bit more and it seems that knobbly 650bs are more available in 42mm. So if you really wanted a 650b knobbly tyre bike you might be better looking for a frame with ~60mm BB drop.

It's surprisingly light - 1900gm in a Small made it the same weight as the OS 853 road frame I've had a problem with in another thread. They only had the full carbon fork option available, for £599.

One of the issues with the wide tyre drop bar thing is the myth of the short chainstay - the idea that a road-type bike has to have short chainstays as it's stiffer, better for climbing etc.

To get more tyre clearance - you either use MTB chainsets, longer chainstays or do funny things to the chainstays (yokes, or lots of crimping). If you just used longer chainstays (e.g. 440mm) you could avoid as much manipulation of the chainstays, fit wide tyres and still get away with road cranks.

The Cotic is good, but maybe not great. It uses 425mm chainstays and it it stretched to 435 or 440, it could probably squeeze in wider tyres without adversely affecting handling.

As it is, it feels a lot more like a road bike than it looks. It would make a super winter road bike, with 32mm tyres and guards.

I also don't love the drop-in headset bearings. Apart from the price (they cost as much as the equivalent model with cups), you just know that if you've had a gritty ride (such as a 166k off road torture ride in vile weather, with no mudguards) you need to clean them out, as any grit that's made it's way in there is touching the frame, not just a cup. I asked Cotic about this and they said the bearings used are the same size as the bearings used in the cups of their MTBs with tapered headsets, 'so why bother with cups'. I suspect it was a case of the available tubing and a cost-benefit choice. I bought one anyway, as it was the closest thing to what I needed, and partly to tell myself not to be such a grinch over modern features.

The benefit of the fork being full carbon and the frame being fairly light, is that it might be genuinely competitive in the CX season, should I fancy some masochism later this year.

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Cotic also say it will take 47mm 650b tyres, but I've had a few pedal strikes (170mm cranks) riding it off road in the peaks with 700x34, as it's got a fairly low BB (70mm drop). The 47mm 650bs would drop it a bit more and it seems that knobbly 650bs are more available in 42mm. So if you really wanted a 650b knobbly tyre bike you might be better looking for a frame with ~60mm BB drop.

My Arkose with 650b 48mm tyres have pedal strike, in the manner you described, worse even, the best solution I have found is simply changing how you ride.

Um. Did I miss something or are pedal strikes off-road not par for the course?They are with mtbs and nobody suggests it’s the frameset or cranks (unless you buy something stupid)

More in point that those are billed as gravel bike rather than cyclocross and generally have a much lower BB height*, so pedal strike gonna be part of the ride.

*having said that, some now have a lower BB height also.

Granted. But. Surely that’s just riding bikes.

are pedal strikes off-road not par for the course?They are with mtbs

Edit: misunderstood

I also don't love the drop-in headset bearings.

Could you not just get another cartridge bearing and drop it in?

Yeah, so it's fine in that sense and no different to another headset. It's more that any grit that gets in is in direct contact with the frame rather than a replaceable cup. Obviously you'd clean it out even if you had cups, but you could also get away with not doing so if on a multi-day trip. I'm toying with wrapping the gap between the headtube and fork with a strip of self-amalganting tape and then slitting it (so the bars can still turn) to offer a bit more sealing. The old school headset protectors don't fit tapered headtubes. Or maybe a thin o-ring type thing if it won't interfere with headset preload. The cane Creek 40 crown race has a rubber seal but grit did get past it. I split the crown race on cotic's recommendation but left the rubber seal intact.

Yes it's to be expected, though I don't get it a lot on my MTB. I'm pretty sure it comes up in MTB reviews when they look at BB drop etc. Some new geo full sus bikes are now coming specced with 165mm cranks for this reason. I think it's maybe more an issue when you're designing/marketing a bike to take 700s and 650s - you want a fairly low BB with the 700s to keep it feeling planted on road but this will drop a bit with 650s in the same bike, unless you go to really mahoosive tyres. I had a cx race bike with 55mm BB drop as opposed to this Cotic's 70mm. No pedal strike that I can recall, but didn't feel as stable as everything was higher - saddle further off the ground and headube taller too, to maintain stack height in relation to BB centre.

On this bike it's most alarming when you're pedalling fast in a rut. Given the nature of UK gravel (lots of it not really gravel) there's an argument for an UK designed bike to use a touch higher BB drop.

Just looked at the Arkose and Pyrolite BB drop - 77 and 75mm respectively. This gives me a bit of confidence to build up the 650b WTB KOM rims I got for peanuts off PX last year!

Just looked at the Arkose and Pyrolite BB drop - 77 and 75mm respectively.

And there is an Arkose model that comes in 650b.

pedals strike, like toe overlap, are non-issues, there's a lot of bike on here that have massive toe overlap, where a change in riding style made the biggest difference.

I'm toying with wrapping the gap between the headtube and fork with a strip of self-amalganting tape and then slitting it (so the bars can still turn) to offer a bit more sealing.

That’s me being told!

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Since someone came up with Veloheld: you can choose between the steel fork (that i don't like in combination with the head tube) or a nicer carbon fork that really goes well with the frame (which is what i got for my bike). Great bike at a good price: 899€ in total incl. headset and seatpost clamp.

Here a pic from their homepage of a bike with the carbon fork. The second one is mine.

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“So what the best way to show my bike on the Internet? I know! Let put it in front of direct sunlight!”