Prior to the arrival of the latest Classic Cycle Testcycle (CCT), I’d been spending a lot of time on my recent gratuitous used bicycle purchase:
This is partly because the most recent acquisition generally gets the most attention, and partly because it’s a fun and fast bike, and and easy to keep handy for when I want to squeeze in a quick ride. (I try to only keep one bicycle at a time in my actual living quarters, and for practical purposes a light, smallish bike works well it that regard. It’s like keeping an umbrella by the front door that you can easily grab on the way out.)
Anyway, I mention this bike because at some point a commenter asked (and I’m far too lazy to go back and find the actual comment) what the point was of putting a crabon fork on a metal bike, or something to that effect. Well, the simple answer to that is the crabon fork is not only lighter, but it’s less work for the builder. But for a longer answer I’d like to quote from the Book of Farbman, Vol. 3:
Thus saith the Farb:
This resonates with me, but admittedly I’m biased:
More objectively, there’s a fork for every bike. It’s like pasta sauce out of the jar: it could be perfect, or it could ruin the meal. It all depends on what you’re eating and who’s doing the cooking.
Also, even if most of us can be happy eating sauce from the jar 99% of the time, it’s important for humanity that somebody out there remembers how to make it from scratch.
Speaking of ships sailing, that horn you hear in the distance is the SS Every Single American Bicycle Company preparing to leave port and disappear over the horizon forever:
X-LAB may sound like one of those clubs where people take lots of drugs and dance for 36 hours straight, but it’s actually a bike:
And boy are companies like Specialized and Trek screwed:
To put that in perspective, I found comps from both Specialized and Trek: two of the largest bike brands in the world. The closest comparisons I found were the Specialized Diverge 4 Expert at $6,499 MSRP and the Trek Checkpoint SL 7 AXS Gen 3, also at $6,499 MSRP.
This means the GT8 is literally less than half the price of comparable bikes from major brands, and it weighs less, too.
We’re not just talking a few hundred dollars in savings, like you might get by buying from Giant instead of Specialized. We’re talking literally half the price for a bike you might soon be able to purchase from your local dealer, or can buy online with free shipping (which you won’t get from brands like Specialized). The amount of savings from consolidating all of the bike industry’s moving parts under one roof is insane.
If the game is to give customers the lightest, most electronic, and most crabon-fibrous bicycle, what do they offer anymore that justifies the premium? X-LAB is even selling their bikes through local shops:
Beginning with a dealer model was a very intentional choice for X-LAB. “It’s an important part of the strategy, only because of what we want to do,” said Pan. “We’ll take some market share from established brands, certainly, but it’s not enough to scale the business in the way that it needs to scale, which means that we have to figure out how to make ourselves relevant to new riders out there […] discovering cycling for the first time. To do that, you really need to involve the shops, because that’s just such a critical touch point for a lot of the folks that are newer to the sport.”
But hey, things change. For example, back in 2011 (holy crap is this blog old and tired!) I wrote about Larry Olmsted:
Olmsted was high as a dancer at X-LAB off the recent purchase of a custom Seven, and he wanted you to know why it’s impossible to find cycling fulfillment on a stock bicycle:
The other day I was riding with a guy who had a Serotta, one of the top companies for custom bikes, and he told me how he went to a fancy bike shop and they told him that due to his size and shape, no off the rack bike would fit him well. He naturally assumed they were scamming him into buying a high-priced custom, so he spent the next two years going from shop to shop, unable to find anyone who could offer to sell him a bike that fit, riding a painful compromise the whole time, before biting the bullet and investing in the Serotta, which he now wishes he had bought two years earlier.
Even Richard Sachs, the Karl Farbman™ of Bicycles, doesn’t claim his bikes will make you faster or better, but Olmsted and his friends with their fancy custom bicycles all knew better:
In a recent interview with Men’s Journal Magazine, Sachs said, “My bikes aren’t going to make you a faster or better rider.” I don’t know if that is true or not, but I know my Seven, and my friends’ Sevens and Serottas and Penguins have made them faster, if not better, riders, because they are lighter and optimize efficiency while better comfort on longer rides reduces fatigue.
After all, how can you make a decent bicycle out of that crappy “steel” stuff?
The other “problem” with the small custom shops is that for the most part they only work in metal, and many only in steel, because titanium (better than steel) requires more specialized equipment (especially for welding) and carbon fiber (better for some applications, like time trial and aero triathlon bikes) even more so, while the bigger companies offer the full choice of materials.
Well, here we are 15 years later (holy crap this blog is old and tired!) and Olmsted is still at it–and like everyone else he’s moved on to gravel:
I read this expecting to be outraged, but this description of the gravel phenomenon is…well, perfectly fine for a non-cycling publication:
Historically you could ride pretty much any bike on pretty much any terrain, and lots of people did. But then came mountain bikes with shock absorber suspensions designed for really going off road, for riding rugged and technical trails with no roads at all, which became extremely popular and turned the industry and public onto the entire idea of cycling beyond road cycling. Gravel has filled a middle ground between these and spawned a new generation of bikes that are designed for unpaved roads but work just fine on pavement, and are closer to road bikes than mountain bikes, but with elements of both.
Also, he’s quite happy on his [insert needle-scraping-across-record sound]…Surly Straggler?
The road bike industry has largely moved away from steel and into higher-tech materials such as carbon fiber, and more precious metals such as titanium, but steel frames have always had fans, and three big selling points is that they are strong, less expensive and they do not fatigue over time which many lighter materials do. So, last year I decided to try a Surly Straggler, which delivers a lot of gravel performance and comfort at a very reasonable price, with three levels from $1,359-$2,699. I have been extremely happy and thoroughly enjoyed it to date, but I’ve only ridden a handful of other gravel brands, so at the end of the day I’d recommend visiting your local shops, asking how their brands compare, and doing a little research. Then it is time for you to try gravel grinding.
This I did not expect.
Maybe some people really do become wiser with age.
I wish I was one of them.