- Joined
- Dec 20, 2015
- Posts
- 8,397
I've had this carbonium gravel bike for about two months now. I'm in love. With 38c gravel tires, it will go almost anywhere. With 33c mixed surface tires, it will go on, well, mixed surface rides. With 26c slicks it will keep up on a fast group ride, as long as I don't have to pull quite my fair share.
Trek's approach on this bike was a bit different from most. It is unabashedly NOT super long and relaxed. It keeps a fairly nimble cyclocross geometry. I was a bit spooked by this, but have found that the stability of 38c tires is all I need in that area, and we have STEEP hills here. Sliding rear dropouts (silent so far, thank goodness) allow the rear wheel to be pulled back quite a ways for more stability and/or convert to single speed. I've done neither.
The frame has mounts everywhere, like sixteen bottle mounts, fender mounts, rack mounts, and even mounts for a top tube bag. Since this will double as my Winter Rain Bike, fender mounts were a must and Trek does a nice hidden version of them.
My only two cons on the bike have been gearing and bars. The bars were harsh riding, inexpensive aluminum units, and rattled me around too much even with relatively low pressures in the front tire. A set of Bontrager Isocore carbon bars seemed like a high dollar risk, but they worked better than I could have hoped, especially on high frequency buzzy roads like chip-seal.
The second con for my location was gearing. As noted, some of our best gravel roads are very steep, and a low gear of 34 x 34 was not cutting it. This turned out to be a little more involved to solve than I first thought, but with some help from the fine Minnesota boys at Wolftooth Components, I got the gearing down to a low gear of 34 x 40. It required an 11-40 XTR cassette, an XT derailleur, and a nifty little Wolftooth thingamajig called a Tanpan, which is basically a nicely manufactured variable pulley that allows my road shifters to pull the correct amount of cable for the mtb XT rear derailleur.
This bike will never be as fast on a good road as a pure road bike, and it turns out that I don't care, especially when riding alone. The smoothness and control on stupid-fast descents more than makes up for it. And I love being able to re-route things mid-ride at my whim, regardless of surface.
Finally, I'll never buy another bike without disk brakes again, living in the hills and mountains of the Columbia River Gorge!
Trek's approach on this bike was a bit different from most. It is unabashedly NOT super long and relaxed. It keeps a fairly nimble cyclocross geometry. I was a bit spooked by this, but have found that the stability of 38c tires is all I need in that area, and we have STEEP hills here. Sliding rear dropouts (silent so far, thank goodness) allow the rear wheel to be pulled back quite a ways for more stability and/or convert to single speed. I've done neither.
The frame has mounts everywhere, like sixteen bottle mounts, fender mounts, rack mounts, and even mounts for a top tube bag. Since this will double as my Winter Rain Bike, fender mounts were a must and Trek does a nice hidden version of them.
My only two cons on the bike have been gearing and bars. The bars were harsh riding, inexpensive aluminum units, and rattled me around too much even with relatively low pressures in the front tire. A set of Bontrager Isocore carbon bars seemed like a high dollar risk, but they worked better than I could have hoped, especially on high frequency buzzy roads like chip-seal.
The second con for my location was gearing. As noted, some of our best gravel roads are very steep, and a low gear of 34 x 34 was not cutting it. This turned out to be a little more involved to solve than I first thought, but with some help from the fine Minnesota boys at Wolftooth Components, I got the gearing down to a low gear of 34 x 40. It required an 11-40 XTR cassette, an XT derailleur, and a nifty little Wolftooth thingamajig called a Tanpan, which is basically a nicely manufactured variable pulley that allows my road shifters to pull the correct amount of cable for the mtb XT rear derailleur.
This bike will never be as fast on a good road as a pure road bike, and it turns out that I don't care, especially when riding alone. The smoothness and control on stupid-fast descents more than makes up for it. And I love being able to re-route things mid-ride at my whim, regardless of surface.
Finally, I'll never buy another bike without disk brakes again, living in the hills and mountains of the Columbia River Gorge!
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