Ditto
almost a decade since this bike lit a certain corner of the internet’s brain on fire
also lol forgot that article directly referenced the “fast bikes and fat tires” tarck thread
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I remembered this Oregon Manifest’s Constructor Design Challenge from 2009. I can’t find the route, but I recall it was over some rough pavement and gravel in spots. If they were coming from Vernonia, there are more than a few ways to take that.
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WHOS MANS IS/WAS THIS?
i remember the bike and i remember it being posted here but that wasn’t one of us was it?
Fred’s Elephant also had a big influence on me, because the way he kept breaking it suggested to me that I should probably stick to riding Surlys
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i decided low trail was for me based explicitly on fred’s elephant. turns out i like it
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The article said it was someone in Sydney. I live in Sydney and haven’t heard or seen of it since, it definitely wasn’t a tarcker.
ok phew
when gravel was getting popular, these was a common framing that old guys in the midwest had been putting together gravel bikes “since forever”. this was kinda a surprise to me, was this accurate or some kind of just so story about a part of the country with lots of farm roads?
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maybe not “since forever”, but yeah folks have been riding farm roads in wyobraskowa for years and years, and often hacking together proto-gravel bikes to do so. The Karate Monkey (introduced in '02, first mass-produced rigid 29er?) was a popular platform to build off of. The first Trans Iowa was in '04 IIRC, and they were by far not the first people to put together an event of that type. Dirty Kanza started in '06. There was easily a decade+ of pretty serious grassroots experimentation before gravel got “big”.
Then on the other hand you have folks like Jobst Brandt, Ray Hosler, Tom Ritchey and the whole gang of people associated with them, who’d been riding bay area dirt perfectly happily on their road bikes since the mid 70s… “isn’t every bike a gravel bike?”
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650b mailing list goes back to '06 according to wayback machine
KEEP DIRT OUT OF GRAVEL
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when did the rock & road come out? 94?
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a few different retro MTB websites are all claiming the tire came out in '88. For example: 1993 Bruce Gordon Rock n Road - Vintage Mountain Bike Workshop
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yeah, that makes sense- surly giving people a cheap open platform to see what works.
the road bike on dirt approach is time tested too, there’s that unbelievably smug article from ‘89 or thereabouts (in…Velonews?) from some bay area roadie who’s like “yeah i have an ATB because i know how to handle my colnago, here’s me blasting trails in Redwood Park “
my guess is that the late 2000’s cx boomlet got a lot of people thinking about dirt road riding. monstercross was a thing for a sec in ’09 or so.
east coast had D2R2 from twenty years back, right?
edit: I’m mostly just gathering random threads here, thinking backwards from gravel as a mainstream, UCI approved format with lots of sponsors and whole lines of bikes from big manufacturers to the situation 10-15 years ago, when it looks as if you can see modern gravel bikes starting to take shape.
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y’know I’m not so sure about that. ISTR that they were. edit just read to the end and saw @teepz found the smoking gun
lol, fyxo is still doing his thing right?
the fixed gear mailing list was just retired due to lack of support, moved to a google group, but traffic was like 2 emails a year
Well that’s interesting. I don’t remember anything about this person, but they definitely mention commuting in Sydney.
edit: just did some digging, turns out he’s a digital compositor who did some work on a few movies with a friend of mine. Small world.
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small fry amirite
Not biketart?
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