Bike Stability Feeling vs. Rider Position

I had an interesting ride the other day. I was on my Black Mountain Cycles Monstercross, on my way to see my mom. The BMC has a pretty normal cross geo, which in itself is pretty close to road bike geo going back before I was born. I had it setup with a Velo Orange Granola handlebar:

What was interesting was how bad this all felt.

Half Off Sale!

No, I'm not selling my bikes for half price. I'm getting rid of half of my bike fleet.

One day as I was tripping around stuff in my garage, I looked around and realized I had two of everything, bike wise:

- two 700c, steel frame, fixed gear bikes (Rivendell Quickbeam and Trek 610)

- two 700c, steel frame, medium tired all rounds (Black Mountain Monstercross and Surly Straggler)

- two 29er mountain bikes (Cotic BFE Max and Giant Trance)

- two 20" folding bikes (Bike Friday Crusoe and Bike Friday New World Tourist)

In the interest of freeing up some space and funds, I decided to unload half of my bikes. Since I had two of everything, this was theoretically simple, but some decisions were harder than others. Let's look at them, from the easier choices to the more difficult:

Round 1: Mountain Bikes: Cotic vs. Giant

The Saga of the Bike Friday Silk

 Regular reader(s) of my blog may recall I briefly owned a blue Bike Friday:

I bought this bike off eBay, hoping to fix two issues with my Bike Friday Crusoe:

- I wanted a better fold, and

- I wanted more tire clearance

This BF was interesting because it was the New World Tourist front frame (a bit heavier duty than my Crusoe), but with the Silk rear end. The Silk rear end folds the bottom bracket with the rear wheel, helping to keep the chain on the chain ring and fixing the #1 aggravation of folding a Bike Friday.

Return of the Quickbeam

I recently sold my Titus Silk Road ATB, and my old Trek multi track, and my new Dahon folder, and my Rockhopper cheap bike challenge, and even my modern Vaast gravel bike, so my bike fund was unusually flush. As was garage space. I just bought a Surly Straggler frameset, because in the great tradition of Surly bikes, I had almost all of the parts on hand to throw at it:

The Straggler is a fine bike, really a slightly updated Cross Check with disc brakes. The slight updates are worthy: a bit taller head tube and a bit lower bottom bracket start to fix two of my biggest concerns with the old CC. With the fancy Rene Herse tires, it rolls along really well. But... I'm not really in love with disc brakes for road bikes. They stop fine. These old Shimano mechanical units are super simple to work on. But I just like the simple look and feel of rim brakes.

The Bikes of 2024

Happy New Year to all! I feel like my bike flipping has been slowing down, but I expect writing this post may disabuse me of that notion. Regardless, here are the changes that happened to my fleet last year:

Jan: I bought a Specialized Expedition frame that I converted from a comfort bike to an adventure bike, mostly as a winter project: