Jeffrey’s adventure bike

Jeffrey had been enjoying riding another bike with big 650B road tires, but wanted to get the fit, handling and options just right with a custom build. This bike will mainly be ridden on the road with the occasional gravel excursion, and then doubling up for light touring duty now and then. As we discussed options for carrying some gear, Jeffrey initially asked about a rear rack – ultimately we went with my suggestion to use a front rack instead. To have the bike handle well with a load on the back requires increasing the torsional stiffness of the frame, which compromises the ride quality when unloaded. Jeffrey came across the Rodeo Spork fork which had the features needed (thru-axle, flat mount and additional mounting bosses).

The frame has a custom butted integrated seatmast with matching adjustable cap, an oversize headtube (with carbon insert) to fit the tapered fork, and internal routing for the rear brake hose.  There is plenty of clearance for 48mm tires (42s fitted initially).

After a bit of research, I wasn’t happy with the options for a front rack, so decided to build a custom one, using stainless steel so that there is nothing for the pannier clips to scratch. This ended up tying in really nicely with Jeffrey’s paint design – he wanted to have polished panels on the tubes. This was created with paint on the maintubes, but I used stainless for the seatstays which gives a nice balance with the polished rack up front.

Jeffrey wanted to do a 1x drivetrain, and was interested in using eTap. SRAM don’t yet offer a true 1x version of this groupset, but we worked out that the 3T 9-32 cassette would give the required gear range. Unfortunately these cassettes have been a bit delayed, so the bike initially has an 11-32 installed. A Wolftooth 1x chainring keeps the chain secure, mounted on a Lightning carbon crank.

And then to paint! Jeffrey sent a Rapha jacket to reference the chartreuse color, and then chose an aqua color as an accent along with the polished silver and white. Colorworks did a great job of making it all happen, down to fine details on the matching PDW fenders and Silca framepump. The final weight complete as shown with fenders and pump is 19.6lbs.

• Tweet