I designed this one for gravel rides and beyond. My hope is that one day Deborah and I will ride the Divide route on this bike! A SRAM Transmission rear derailleur and cassette mean any hills I can’t climb aren’t the bike’s fault.
For the Divide and other gravel rides, I’ll use these Rene Herse Fleecer Ridge 55mm tires, or perhaps something even skinnier, but I wanted super wide clearance for bikepacking rides in Northern WI where it can often be quite sandy. The rear end of this frame will accommodate up to a 29x2.8” tire for just those occasions.
Even with the wide tire clearance I hoped that I could still run a road crankset with a narrower stance, and I managed to squeak this SRAM Apex crank on there with a 36T chainring.
This SRAM XO Transmission rear derailleur should keep ticking off the shifts no matter how much abuse I dish out.
The curved stays look cool, but I mainly bent them in order to have a nicer line where they mate with the Paragon UDH style rear dropouts. The bosses on the seatstays mean I can load up a rear rack for adventures whenever the trails call.
Fillet brazed seat cluster with a a 31.6mm seatpost and the option of running a dropper post in the future.
Internal routing in the down tube for a dropper post, and a carbon Whisky fork up front for now. I plan to build a steel fork eventually that will accommodate 2.8” tires to match the rear.