Mtb danglers used to be cross compatible with road shifters. 9s and older shimano mtb played with road shifters up to 10s. SRAM was cross compatible up to 10s mtb danglers with 11s road shifters.
1x works depending on your local terrain, around here it’s great. I couldn’t be bothered until clutch danglers and narrow/wide chainrings came about. Wouldn’t bother with a pusher on gravel bike ever again, just sold my coveted CX70 top pull FD from BITD.
oh he likes them nice and thiccc, and exclusively oversized
normally 1.0/0.7/1.0 even when there are multiple top tubes, and significantly thicker for bikes marketed with clearance for MTB tires
in recent years they also got into extra thick seat tubes, hence 26.8mm seatposts
the Cross-Check and LHT were direct clones of the good parts, one decade later
The 700D bikes were really an attempt at an Import Tariff hack to get a better margin at the same retail price. They were an even worse market failure than most of the other bikes of that era already mentioned, and extraordinarily overbuilt.
The Rock Combo was probably the very worst, there was only one batch of them and IIRC they’d been put together with the TT and DT swapped — both tubes being 28.6, and the wrong one stiffer
I think the longest lived bikes marketed consistently throughout the 90s/00s would have been the Sky Yeager Bianchis and the Novara Randonee
sometimes you make happy little mistakes
Sounds right. I love the spirit of the Tachyon but that thing felt like an anvil to ride.
What I’m really learning from this thread is that I am not very in touch with the thing commonly called gravel. I don’t think I had given it enough thought.
Moving forward I still might not, but it’s more interesting than I thought.
I’ve been hoping to lure Fred here to write a several page essay. I took a hard long break from thinking about bikes during COVID and forgot more than I recall about it all.
Most of those danglers only cleared a 32t cog though due to upper pully placement. 9s predated the existence of compact road cranks too. So you were still stuck pushing a 39 (or 38) x 32 even on CX bikes. The very first compact I saw was from FSA and was some weird ISIS/carbon jobber. That took off like wildfire where I was as nobody buying a “nice” road bike wanted a triple.
The key elements were compact cranks, road disc brakes, and tubeless tires. Once that all fell into place the rest was just marketing. All three of my pre-Endpoint “gravel bikes” were hamstrung by lack of decent tubeless tires and all had mechanical discs (one is mechanical ONLY) because of the cable routing.
For a reference point… the first Salsa Warbird dropped in 2013. The same year as the Vaya… and same year as the Coffee Grinder MFers.
The Vaya was 2012 and ironically, the Civia Bryant was 2011 and that thing was the test mule for much of my fooling around that led to my custom Indy Fabs and then to Endpoint.
Diverge didn’t happen until the 2015 model year. This likely means they probably started designing it the second Salsa released the Warbird.
“monstercross” was the term tight about when I was putting together this thing. “Gravel bikes” happened soon after.
ETA: Alex Wetmore’s Gifford was a big influence and definitely has a place in the weird PNW nerd branch of gravel’s family tree
yep we definitely have FSA to thank for 110bcd road compacts, they made an infinite variety of them at exactly the right time and were OEM on a ton of complete bikes
was 110 really that new? i know it hadn’t achieved full adoption by the time i really got into bikes but wow. it’s young and i’m old
110 double road double dates to around 2005? in terms of OEM spec on a big brand bike. 110/74 mountain triple goes back more furtherer.
Alex Wetmore ATMO. His blog, comments on the iBob list, and general nerdedy around front loading/low trail/nice tubing/wide tires was quite influential to my view.
And there’s a nexus there with threads touching Rawland, Kogswell, Jan, John Speare and Elephant, Fred, Cycle Fab, etc.
And then VBQ (now just BQ) which was interesting imo because tho it wasn’t quite gravel racing, Jan’s focus on randonneuring and setting “fast times” and riding gravel roads was at least adjacent to full on gravel racing.
Jason Boucher was calling his Vaya a gravel bike in 2011. Gnat Likes - Gnat Likes Bikes Blog
Sortof. I can’t remember exactly when, but it was sometime around 2003.
I think it was 2003 (maybe '04?) when I picked up my first compact…an octalink Ritchey WCS.
My remaining 700c machines (3 of them, though the midlifecrisismobile is on the way out) are on G-d’s Own Tire.
pre-subcompact cranks, there were a not-insignificant-number of people out there running road triples. A 50/39/30 triple + an MTB dangler with an 11-32 or 11-34 cassette was not an uncommon setup in the midwest gravel grinder circles.
Yeah, Shimano didn’t have a compact double until the Ultegra 6650/105 5650 cranks in ~2007.
oh it’s weirder than this. Some of the more recent bikes had 31.8mm TTs and DTs, both 1.0/0.7 single butted (thick end against the head tube). A buddy of mine bought an ultrasonic wall thickness gauge and we were scratching our heads over the Rivs we sampled.
There was a non-series one first
