Well, all good things must come to an end…like this guy’s scooter ride:
And so it is that I announcing that The Great Gravel Experiment, AKA The Quest For Spog, AKA my profound emotional journey deep into the heart of the American Gravel Exprience, is offically over, for I have now sold the PRJCT GRVL bike, AKA the Industry Standard Gravelling Appliance (ISGA):
While saying goodbye to a bicycle is always bittersweet, my mission was a success by every metric, for I did discover the true meaning of gravel, and it is this:
Riding A Bicycle Marketed Explicitly For Gravel On Anything Other Than A Paved Road
As for the ISGA itself, overall the experience of owning and operating a modern gravel bike was quite satisfactory, with two exceptions:
- Setting up the internal cable routing, which was completely infuriating
- Mounting the tubeless tires, which took me two days, and which felt like hanging off a building ledge by my fingertips
But at least there’s a reason to use tubeless tires; whether or not you need them is another story and depends on your particular [throws up in mouth, swallows it] use case (eeew), but obviously they eliminate the problem of pinch flats, and people who live in regions plagued by nasty thorns generally swear by them.
As for internal cable routing, the two excuses for it I’ve seen are:
- Protects cables from elements
- Makes it easier to mount bags and stuff
Both of these are complete bullshit. It’s a garvel biek. Your cables are not exposed (if you even have cables) and you’re using full housing from end to end, or else sealed hydraulic lines. What difference does it make whether that stuff is inside or outside of the frame? As for mounting bags and stuff, please Here’s a loaded-up Jones:
Jones bikes have externally routed cables. Where’s the problem? SHOW ME THE PROBLEM!!!
But sure, at least once you run the cables through the frame you probably won’t have to do it again for a long time. (Though you might kill yourself before you finish.) And nobody’s making you use tubeless tires and rims. If you want to use MA2s and Panaracer Paselas on a modern gravel bike you can certainly do that.
Otherwise the bike was lots of fun. It was light and comfortable, it handled well on a variety of terrain, with mechanical shifting and brakes I did not have to stray too far outside of my comfort zone, and for the time that I had it I ended up riding it quite a bit. Overall, I get why gravel bikes are popular, and as long as you avoid proprietary gimmickry it seems to me you can get years and years of good use out of one.
So why get rid of it?
Well, that was always the idea. Last year after my friend died I had to sell, donate, and otherwise re-home an entire apartment full of bicycles and sundries, including the gravel bike project he was never able to complete. I just assumed a brand-new, never-assembled gravel frame would sell quickly, since everything’s gravel gravel gravel now. But when I listed it for what I thought was a pittance it did not sell. So I figured it would be easier to sell as a complete bike. Yet even then I barely had any responses, and in the end I’ve let it go quite cheaply indeed.
Also, part of the Great Gravel Experiment is to explore the gravel market, and so selling the ISGA was ultimately essential, and as for why the bike was tough to sell I suspect it’s a combination of the following factors:
- I’m only using Craigslist, which is a cesspool, but I don’t want to create a Facebook account or sell through Ebay or some other site and deal with shipping or do any of that other stuff. I suspect most bike people have moved on from Craigslist, but hey, I still use rim brakes, too, and I like listing a bike locally and handing it over to someone;
- An aluminum frame with budget parts probably manages to alienate both the the high-end Gravel Freds (GRVL FRDS) and the Ultraromance/Party Pace set;
- The bicycle industry is hemorrhaging bikes at this point so it’s a buyer’s market, and why buy a used bike on the Internet from some stranger when you can order one from Canyon or State, or even buy one from a shop and keep coming back for those free tune-ups (“Hewp, my bwakes are wubbing!”) even though the poor shop barely made any money from you in the first place?
- Some people are only just now getting back on the bike after the winter, so it’s still probably early in the season for the sort of person who’s looking for an inexpensive garvel biek
And yes, I did come very close to keeping the bike, since I do really like it and I took a lot of time getting everything just so. However, ultimately I need the space much more than the bike. I have several bikes already that can do “gravel” (even the Roadini can easily take the same tires that are on the PRJCT GRVL bike), and for anything beyond that I have the Jones. Furthermore, I have years’ worth of parts for most of those bikes, whereas the PRJCT GRVL bike introduces several new standards, so it makes sense to let the Jones remain the only tubeless/disc brake bicycle in the household rather than feed two of them. (And the Jones and the ISGB can’t really share stuff like wheels and tires anyway.) And of course if I do end up missing the ISGB, another one is not exactly hard to come buy, and having put one together I now know exactly how I’d approach one. (More or less the same, only with externally-routed cables.) Though I could also see putting wider rims, flared bars, and a Sword group on the Roadini to net the pretty much the same effect.
Anyway, it was a fun project, and hopefully the new owner enjoys it as much as I did–though he’ll probably enjoy it more since everything’s together already.
Speaking of gravel, I really didn’t want to watch this, but I did anyway. and if I’d ridden a 100-mile gravel race I couldn’t have felt any dirtier:
They say any publicity is good publicity, but when an S-Works gravel bike surfaced as a vital piece of evidence I thought I’d finally found an exception…
…that is until the defense attorney lifted it repeatedly with one hand, inadvertently flaunting its feathery weight:
You know somebody out there was impressed.