53 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
53 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
Building the Ultimate Cave Bike
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Paul Walko
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Do you ever wish you could bike to all your favorite caves instead of getting your car all dirty every time you go caving? Yeah? Me too. This is THE definitive guide to building a bike capable of handling any ride to a cave including all gear.
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Here are some specific features I'm looking for:
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- Steel frame (for a more comfortable ride vs aluminum)
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- Somewhat relaxed geometry good for endurance (not racing but also not full touring)
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- Front rack compatible
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- Rear rack compatible
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- Frame bag compatible
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- 650b wheels for hills (bigger than typical mtb, smaller than typical road)
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- Good gearing for hills
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- Dynamo hub for charging 18650s
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- Disk brakes (for better breaking in bad weather)
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- Lots of holes for mounting things
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For you bike nerds out there this style might sound familiar; that's because it's essentially the same as old style randonneuring bikes, but unfortunately it's a fairly niche market now. Between the rear rack, front rack, and frame bag we should have enough space for everything.
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The first 2 requirements narrow things down quite a bit. I mainly looked at 3 manufacturers here: Surly Bikes, Soma Fabrications, and Velo Orange (VO). I really liked the Soma Fogcutter for a while, then I discovered the VO Polyvalent and liked it even more. Both of these are steel with similar geometries, but the Fogcutter required a bit more work to find the fork I wanted. They also both have all the features I was looking for, great! I definitely spent days looking through tons of different bike models and reading reviews until I knew exactly what I wanted.
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With the frame out of the way the next big things are figuring out the wheels and drivetrain. Thankfully East Coasters helped out a lot with the wheels and I decided to use a standard 11 speed Shimano groupset to keep things simple. I won't bore you with all the tiny details about sizing or figuring out which brakes to get, but I spent a lot of time looking through tons of different options.
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The specific front and rear rack aren't super important as long as you can fit a front randonneur bag along with 2 rear panniers and have spots to strap more stuff on the rear rack. With all that figured out, let's take a look at what we're working with!
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<INSERT PICTURE HERE>
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I don't quite have everything yet but it's almost there! Here's my recommendation for splitting up gear:
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Front Bag
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- Boots, possibly sticking out the top
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- Phone (for strava)
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Left Pannier
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- Helmet
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- Food
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Right Pannier
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- Change of clothes
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- Water
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Strapped to top or rear rack:
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- cave bag
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I haven't gotten a chance to test this out yet thanks to the Coronavirus, but look out for an update next year!
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