Gravel bikes off tarmac?
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
It probably depends where you live, but around here there is a lot of forestry track riding in the hills, plus some ropey lanes that become more attractive if you have wider tyres. I do see folk on gravel bikes quite a lot. I watch out for them when I walk the whippet off lead, to avoid conflict. We have many miles of this sort of thing: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.63200 ... 240!8i5120 and https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.69739 ... 760!8i2880
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
Gravel riding is what we used to call “Roughstuff”. I remember doing it as far back as the 70’s locally - Sewstern Lane/The Drift, High Dyke. Add in all the local bridleways and canal towpath and you can easily string together a mostly off road route. I don’t have a gravel bike but I do ride off road on my touring bike - a Dawes Super Galaxy with 37mm tyres. My son in law rides a his gravel bikes on the road, in fact his winter bike is a gravel bike with 35mm road tyres, great for absorbing the many potholes on local roads.
Sherwood CC and Notts CTC.
A cart horse trapped in the body of a man.
http://www.jogler2009.blogspot.com
A cart horse trapped in the body of a man.
http://www.jogler2009.blogspot.com
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
Here in the colonies, crap roads that haven't been repaved since Queen Thatcher, make a 'gravel' bike
a good road bike (36mm road tyres are common), also the large tire clearance leaves plenty of space for mudguards.
The days of race frames that could barely clear a 23mm seem to have passed.
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Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
I really don't think either Thorn (who produced their first nomad in the mid 1990's) Dawes (who produced the Down-One) or Orbit (who built the Carraway) remember it that way - indeed before the gravel bike there was the dropped bar, 26 inch wheeled tourer/mixed use/go anywhere bike...rareposter wrote: ↑19 Mar 2023, 7:37amBefore that you had road bikes - great for riding on smooth road, capable of things like cobbles on occasion; and you had MTB - great for proper off-road but dull, slow and cumbersome on the simple stuff (like fireroads, country lanes etc).Nearholmer wrote: ↑18 Mar 2023, 9:55pm it’s a trendy type of cycling, with a big following among younger people, which it certainly wasn’t say ten years ago.
Along comes a bike with the drop bars, looks and rack mounts of a road/touring bike but the clearances, wider range gears, tubeless tyres and disc brakes from a mountain bike and you've got something that's capable of a huge range of riding in the middle ground where a road bike would get shaken to bits but a mountain bike would be slow and boring.
And that's really only happened in the last 10years or so.
..Which were fitted with rack mounts, 26 inch wheels - with a range of different tyre types and widths,
..which seemed to be fitted with a triple chainset of all things.. gosh how did people did with the complexity! (But it gave an amazing range of gears, with a limited number of sprockets).
For those who doubt you could get anywhere on a 26 inch wheel (*gosh they were so small!) Robin Thorn has collected photos from happy customers who have cycled their 26 inch wheeled bikes, all over the world...
Last edited by cycle tramp on 19 Mar 2023, 10:59pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
They were obviously the trend-setters, clearing the way for the big globals. Or alternatively they were too far ahead of the curve, and it never went big back then because the technology to make it work in volume hadn't been developed.
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Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
Thorn are still building high quality bicycles, and their frames can now be fitted with a mixture of wheel sizes (anything from 26 to 700 and in-between)
Orbit sadly did go under, but for other reasons
Dawes produced its Down-One over a number of years in different re-carnations, and the Down-One still has a fan base.
The idea of a genuine all terrain bicycle is nothing new
Motorhead: god was never on your sidehttps://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&client=m ... +your+side
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
At the dawn of the bicycle, roads outside towns and cities had been largely neglected; rail was the future, or certainly the present. So it might be said that all early bikes were gravel bikes by necessity.
As for the manufacturing trio above, it's perhaps unexpected that Thorn should be the one to survive. I think Dawes also survive, but only as a label really (by the way wasn't it One-Down rather than Down-One? or did they make a Down-One as well?). Just as well to remember that Giant, Trek and other current behemoths started off in someone's garage and will also end up there, at some point.
As for the manufacturing trio above, it's perhaps unexpected that Thorn should be the one to survive. I think Dawes also survive, but only as a label really (by the way wasn't it One-Down rather than Down-One? or did they make a Down-One as well?). Just as well to remember that Giant, Trek and other current behemoths started off in someone's garage and will also end up there, at some point.
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Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
In the UK, and very definitely in England, it certainly seems to cover pretty much the same ground, which is to say very varied ground, but most of the big-brand bikes being sold under the “gravel” banner are optimised for gravel road racing under the conditions that exist in the US and other countries where the lower rungs of the public road network are still as most roads were here in the 1890s.Gravel riding is what we used to call “Roughstuff”
Some of the more aggressive/racy (and as it happens more insanely expensive) gravel racing bikes look to me to be geometrically almost totally unsuitable for “English rough stuff”, although they are so light that carrying them over the difficult bits wouldn’t be a problem! Of course, there are other “gravel bikes”, in a wide range of materials, and a wide range of geometries, and one edge of the continuum blurs off into modern MTBs, so it’s pretty much pointless to attempt to pin-down the bike type outside of gravel road racing ……. The riding surfaces can, I think be characterised though: not feasible to ride on a modern road bike, but not absolutely necessitating an MTB.
Last edited by Nearholmer on 20 Mar 2023, 8:35am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
Good point. Main-stream bikes are designed by people not omnipotent beings and as well as having their own ideas these people are influenced by production, cost, and supply restrictions before those ideas become a product. Beyond those companies there are equally competent people; some that tinker in sheds and some that go on to form smaller companies themselves. All of them have a unique take on what makes the ideal bike for what they have to or want to ride and their designs reflect that.
The older I get the more I’m inclined to act my shoe size, not my age.
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
It's gone full circle again which brings us back to Cyclo-cross when riders were happy riding full on road bikes over such terrain with the only difference being cantilever brakes to aid mud clearance.
Which goes to show there's nothing new about gravel just the industry trying to convince punters to empty their wallets.
Which goes to show there's nothing new about gravel just the industry trying to convince punters to empty their wallets.
At the last count:- Peugeot 531 pro, Dawes Discovery Tandem, Dawes Kingpin X3, Raleigh 20 stowaway, 1965 Moulton deluxe, Falcon K2 MTB dropped bar tourer, Rudge Bi frame folder, Longstaff trike conversion on a Giant XTC 840
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
Mixed surface riding has always existed, people have sought out routes off the beaten track and have found bikes capable of doing so.cycle tramp wrote: ↑19 Mar 2023, 10:54pmThorn are still building high quality bicycles, and their frames can now be fitted with a mixture of wheel sizes (anything from 26 to 700 and in-between)
The difference now is it's mainstream, I can go into Halfords and look at a variety of such bikes. All the producers, big and small, are including bikes of this sort and all the component manufacturers are catering for them, more than that, they're developing products suitable straight out the box.
I like mixed surface riding, away from the traffic and into the scenery without all the concentration and effort of proper MTBing. Rather than banging on about having always done so, on a succession of Hybrid and Touring bikes, I rejoice at the current availability of better stuff to do it on.
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
It’s been mainstream before too. Late eighties mountain bikes had these attributes. The higher spec models had shed the slack ‘clunker heritage’ frame angles thanks to the design inputs and racing requirements of messers Ritchey and Murray in the states. In the UK custom builders such as Roberts, Bromwich and Overbury’s showed that we could build a fast, manoeuvrable bike for our trails too.
As I’ve already mentioned, these can still be better for the job than modern offerings.
The older I get the more I’m inclined to act my shoe size, not my age.
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
Indeed.
I heard an amusing phrase around this recently:
"British Gravel" - until you try them could be any flavour of surface, meaning often muddy tracks/bridleways
As ooposed to the marketing dream:
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
It's an argument, but I'm not sure it's right, weren't such bikes still very much considered off-roaders rather than mixed use? I got into cycling in the late 90's, maybe such bikes were available, but I didn't come across any, the choice at Halfords was road bikes, city commuters (Hybrids) and MTB's.
The first of the crossover bikes I noticed were based on cyclocross bikes, with the geometry relaxed and some practical additions, the Specialized Tricross being the most successful. But people don't like canti brakes, so it wasn't till discs gained popularity that it really boomed. A few years on and I was tempted by a couple of bikes, the Genesis Croix de Fer and Trek Portland, both of which I recall received considerable derision on this forum for being neither fish nor fowl, some things don't change.
Re: Gravel bikes off tarmac?
Good stuff!TrevA wrote: ↑19 Mar 2023, 3:40pm Gravel riding is what we used to call “Roughstuff”. I remember doing it as far back as the 70’s locally - Sewstern Lane/The Drift, High Dyke. Add in all the local bridleways and canal towpath and you can easily string together a mostly off road route. I don’t have a gravel bike but I do ride off road on my touring bike - a Dawes Super Galaxy with 37mm tyres. My son in law rides a his gravel bikes on the road, in fact his winter bike is a gravel bike with 35mm road tyres, great for absorbing the many potholes on local roads.
I believe the RSF even predates your 70s adventures. Luckily this forum has already covered it:
viewtopic.php?p=1674148#p1674148
Clearly one could do this riding well before tubeless, disc brakes and "1x" tranmissions.