36h TA SP dynamo
Tell tale saddle slammed forward and pointed down, short stem and bars rolled back
I’m accepting donations for me to buy this bike and slam the seat back, rotate the bars, and give it a 110mm stem
butterfly anime guy meme “is this a ** cyclocross bike **?”
those stands are interesting
Some dude on a certain bike slack made the argument to me a few weeks ago that gravel bikes are sooo much better now than so-called cyclocross bikes and I was like…. (Silence, no response).
A whole bike generation brainwashed to think you need a special bike to ride dirt roads, and that before bikes with “gravel” in the name were being sold it was somehow unfun or unpleasant riding.
I will not however defend canti brakes.
lower BB and tuning for comfort rather than speed helps though
My niner is more fun on gravel than my Ridley cross.bike was. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t fun before.
Bikes have lower bb drop now than they used to? I thought that was an industry guideline that factory-made bikes stuck to. It was one great reason to get a custom bike 10-15+ years ago.
Did a cursory check of my last non-custom cyclocross I mean gravel bike, a Lemond Poprad, and it has a bb drop of 74. Checked a Niner gravel bike since Kyle just mentioned it and it has a bb drop of 75 in small sizes and 70 in 56+
4mmer
Poprad was ahead of its time, I might be misremembering but bikes like the Empellas that were super popular for cross all were very tall BB
In the heydey of canti CX, BB drop was really really high, for cornering on off cambers (or something). Typical numbers were in the 55-65 region. My old Spooky CX bike was like 57 or something, felt really tall. Contrast that with top end CX bikes of today (Crux and Canyon Inflite) have BB drops in the 74 region
See this article from 2009 for reference:
Not saying those older bikes weren’t fun offroad (they were!), but the geo is pretty significantly different than what was popular/accepted at the time.
It’s true, they’re right.
Yeah I know the cx bike bb narrative but the gist of it is that you kinda had to go out of your way to get a bike with a high bb if you were a cyclocross tru head bowing to orthodoxy.
Even the linked article says as much:
Companies like Bianchi, Stevens, Santa Cruz, Trek, Gary Fisher (the former Lemond Poprad) and Jamis are just a few larger brands that have embraced lower bottom brackets as well.
Of course I knew that my lemond example would have a properly low bb 