Friday, October 29, 2010

The Plan . . . Gravel Bike

The plan was to build a new road bike, but now I'm going to build a bike to race on gravel roads. Such as the Dirty Kanza
http://www.dirtykanza200.com/
and here is a couple more links, and if your interested might lead you to more links.
http://gravelgrinders.blogspot.com/
http://cornbreadblog.blogspot.com/

Also I'm trying to build it up all made in the USA. Which isn't got to be possible. So I'm oushing made in the USA as far as I can, then going with USA companies. So as far as shifting goes, that kinda narrows it down to SRAM

Shifters/Brake Levers,& Deraileurs
http://www.sram.com/

Stem, Seat post, & Seat Clamp
http://bikethomson.com/

I've also been working on the geometry. A lot of different ideas out there. For instance where you should have your knee in relation to your pedal axle at 3 o'clock. So say optimize for 3 o'clock, and some say opimize for the whole pedal stroke, not just 3 o'clock. Which is the camp I'm in. Bernard Hinault has/had a book that talked a lot about this. Sure the book is 20 years old, but think his argument is valid even though we are in the computer age. I think a lot of people try to dazzle you with over complication of the simple.

Hopefully after this weekend I'll have it all figured out, so you can all follow along.

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