Howard’s gravel bike

Howard is an older rider with some loss of mobility but still an avid rider – he requested a setup that would make it as easy as possible to get on and off the bike. So for his design, I set the BB as low as I could, then specified a mountain bike dropper seatpost with the longest available amount of drop. The frame is then very compact to accommodate this post when it is at it’s lowest position.

To get the bars where they need to be, Howard and I went over several options before settling on using a 17deg stem angled up, along with the Specialized bars that have a rise from the stem.

The drivetrain choices were affected by the pandemic parts supply issues – Howard’s first choice was a very compact double crank with a wide range rear cassette. But in the end we were able to get the parts to do a ‘mullet’ drive, with road levers operating a SRAM AXS mountain derailleur over a very wide cassette. So the full range desired, just slightly larger jumps between gears. I supplied Howard with two chainrings for the 1x crank so he can fine tune the range to suit his riding.

Up front we have an Allied carbon fork, which has plenty of clearance for the 650×48 tires and fenders. Beautiful paint by Colorworks, and the final weight with the fenders installed is 20.6lbs.

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