oh i meant less like “find a story that shifts product” and more like “a bike with big soft tires affords off-roading”
More like “shit I’m doing is sketchy with current tires, I wonder if I can get some bigger tires?” And that’s how you get a cross check with firecross knobbies. That thing sucked to pedal and didn’t have enough tire for real singletrack stuff and was pretty useless on the cross course but was ok on the gravel road around the back of PIR
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Yes, this. And the answer was: “not many and not on this bike”
“In the beginning, there was Grand Bois”
Not true but it sounds good. Let us not forget the Challenge Parigi-Roubaix and the brief & ill-fated fascination with fat tubular tires. What a ride!
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I was thinking of it from the perspective of there being bikes that have big tires, and these big tires affording possibilities for riding that are minimally doable on a bike with narrow tires. So less about the perspective of someone finding the limits of the 33mm cx tire and more about the possibilities of hybridization given that big tires exist - taking them as the foundation, what has to get built around them?
One thing I’m not going to be able to get into is the way that the late-aughts cx boom taught a lot of people to care about dirt riding and about tire size and pressure. For people coming from road and or fixed gears, this was probably the first time they considered something other than “get 23mm tire, pump up to 120psi, enjoy the VERY LIVELY ride that results”
and I’m up to 2100 words on this gravel origins piece, with some points where people can add in. Far as I can tell, there are a lot of precedents, everything was kind of a big stew, and things really started cooking money-wise around 2015.
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This is definitely a valid approach. One problem Fred was trying to solve with his bike is how to stuff big tires into a road bike frame (with fenders too!) without compromising it* (ie. thin tubes, low bb, narrow q factor, etc…). Granted that 10 years ago the tire selection wasn’t great. You will have to give some kooks credit there for anything being available at all.
*Though the former problem is much easier to overcome (just add disc brakes, basically) than the other real exciting thing front-load bikes like the one described by Fred’s post above do, which is having a wiggly road bike frame that can carry rather large loads–but that gets you into bike camping/rando/low trail awesomeness/quackery, which definitely contributed to sparking this latest gravel resurgence yet is rarely understood. There are lots of bike models with racks and baskets out there mimicking this design but lacking the front end geo to make those front loads disappear. Or the bikes are built with gas pipe tubing “because they have to carry stuff and/or go off-pavement” when in fact that is not at all necessary. So now having written out this footnote I wonder if you’ve mentioned some of the kooky google/usenet groups full of people that have been excited by fat tire road bikes since the beginning of time?
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The breadwinner b-road was in 2014
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Pre-Fredmobile you had the Rawlands and Kogswells and the peer influenced (comments section) microbrand genesis
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Have you considered expanding the piece to a coffee table book?
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i’m aiming for toilet reader for this one, i’ll level up to coffee table once i get graham watson to sign in to do a bikepacking origins project
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Is this why touring bikes/Rivendells aren’t really part of this conversation? It seems like the tires 15 years ago sucked, and the frames are quite stodgy, but I have always felt like bikes like the LHT were “go-anywhere road-ish bikes” before “gravel” arrived. Certainly built to a different level of performance/sportiness than most of the bikes y’all are discussing but definitely sharing some traits with what became “gravel”.
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Ken Burns could get at least 10 hours out of it.
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in all seriousness yes bikepacking and touring fed into all of this but i have to draw the line somewhere
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afaik rivs have pretty nice tubes. But then Grant hangs durable components from them. Also he refuses to use disc brakes.
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XOs and Atlanti were there in the wings, just too early
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I mean how close is this to every x-biking dream build?
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Honestly I kinda wonder if something like gravel could have happened in like 2003 if GP had been afflicted with less Small Business Owner Brain and less fixated on weird retro stuff. He had a very compelling case for how bikes could be!
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The Rock Combos and Project 7s and Headshock road frames were equally market failures for the bigger players as the XOs
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yeah, fair, I am just picturing a version of Rivendell that was still an independent firm and thus able to work without the constraints of big existing product lines to bump into, but also without a founder and company head who wanted to be extra-quirky.
I mean I guess I’m describing Black Mountain Cycles…
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Another Gravel Origins question:
how important were ultra low geared 2X cranksets? I get the sense from this forum that 46/30 was pretty foundational to a lot of gravel/bikepacking/randoreenactment bikes starting around a decade ago, is this so?
And are 1X equally important to modern gravel bikes?
did the tachyon already enter this conversation? was ahead of its time with the fat slicks and fatter knobbies setup with the flip flop double quill
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