A Summer Fling with Clem

I had another brief fling with a Rivendell this summer. Occasionally my positive bike budget will intersect with a bike I've been thinking about now becoming available, and that happened this past June. Post-Jones, my bike fund was pretty flush, and the RBW bike list had a fellow looking to sell a Clem Smith Jr, my size, my favorite color, but up in Ann Arbor. Time for a road trip, then.

Of course, I immediately had a volunteer to accompany me, and that was honestly a good sized chunk of my motivation in this endeavor. Henry and I made the three hour drive to Ann Arbor on a Friday I took off work. The bike test ride left me a bit ambivalent, but after a three hour drive, it was hard to walk away. So I didn't:

I had googled pizza buffets beforehand, so we stopped at a local spot for lunch before hitting the road for home:

Lunch was also a bit underwhelming, but we had a pleasant drive back, listening to our audio books and snacking on junk food.

What I ended up with is basically a bone stock Clem Smith Jr, 59cm, high bar model:

I quickly made some changes. My first ride was cut short due to some pain and discomfort in my legs. The saddle was simply too wide for my narrow hips. I replaced it with something from my stash. Good bye and good riddance:

The initial handlebar position was also too high for me. This is a bit unusual, as I'm typically trying to get my bars higher with various threadless gimmicks. But the four inch rise of the Boscos caused me to slam the stem as low as I could, an easy operation with the threaded headset.

Ah yes, the Bosco bars. In a way, the Clem is built around these bars. The reach or effective top tube is quite long, longer than my XL Karate Monkey, but the bars come so far back, I could still sit bolt upright.

The main grip position was so upright that even with my creaky back, I still found myself placing my hands on the forward bend of the bars for anything except slow cruising. This position was OK, but lacked any quick brake access. The bars also have a narrow position up near the stem that I didn't particularly like. Finally, for such a burly bike, the bars are relatively narrow at just 58cm wide. All of which led me to step up to the Open Bar, at a manly 66.6cm wide:

This was a better bar bend, but now the stem was too long. I raised the bars back up to try to decrease the reach. That sorta worked. I could have replaced the stem with my threadless adapter, but honestly one of the main things I liked about the Clem was the lean and elegant Nitto stem.

I did grow to quite like the way Clem looks. With the swept back bars and long stays, it kind of reminds me of a streamlined locomotive.

Alas, locomotive propulsion was let down by the awful tires on the bike. The stock tires are Kenda Cement Bags. I think they were actually jokingly named "Kwik Nines", but there is nothing quick about these, except how fast I took them off. Heavy and slow rolling, they are also surprisingly harsh riding for a two inch wide tire. I kept dropping my tire pressure in a fruitless attempt to get some cushy float out of them. At about 15 psi, the casing threads started to show:

That's when I decided enough was enough, and pulled them for my Resist Nomads:

Even though these tires measured just over 40mm wide, they were noticeable softer riding than the Kendas, but also felt considerably zippier. They improved my experience on the Clem by a big degree.

The brakes on the Clem were great, as V brakes usually are. The shifting was mediocre, which I blame on the soft indexing of the right hand shift lever. There were lots of useful braze ones to put on racks and baskets, though some of these took an M5 bolt instead of the typical M4. 

I had hoped the long wheelbase of the Clem would make it super stable with my Burley Picolo attached, but it wasn't noticeably better than my Rockhopper when I put it to the Henry test. Admittedly, having a strong 10 year old try to steer from the trail-a-bike is a pretty extreme test, but I had hoped it would be better than my $50 mountain bike.

Which kind of sums up my experience with the Clem. For a long time, I had pictured the Clem as my ideal city bike, but in practice it didn't really gel for me. A reasonable person would have spent some time with the bike, played with stem lengths and bars and tires and shifters and grips and accessories to get it just right. But sometimes it's nice to have a commitment free summer fling.

Turns out, you can ship a Clem cross country for less than $100, if you pack it tightly. The next owner will probably miss out on a nice road trip with his son, but perhaps he'll have a better bike experience.