To love something is sometimes to be dissatisfied with it. You get a sense that the object of your love could be better, if only it could change in the ways that seem obvious to you. Why do bikes have to cost so much? Why isn’t anyone making a cargo unicycle? These are just a couple of life’s burning questions.
Anyone who has ever been a bicycle product manager has had to weather a deluge of good reasons their simple vision can’t be realized. When you’re trying to hit a certain, in your mind very reasonable, price point, you come to realize that the whole really is the sum of its parts, and there are a lot of them, and they each cost money. Don’t forget the labor hours, the product manager’s time with their parts spreadsheet, the frame designer’s hours poring over the geometry chart, the time it takes to pre-assemble the bike before it goes in the box.
Bikes should be cheaper, but they’re just not.
Innovations are hard too. They require new tooling. Sometimes they just can’t be made to conform to a prevailing standard. What seems so simple to the rider slightly dissatisfied with their bike actually represents a Herculean engineering effort and a paradigm shift in the industry. Should it be this way? I don’t know. What do I know?
I have been this person a few times, sitting in front of a spreadsheet, trying to make a bike and a buck. It is not the dream job you might suppose. It is massively frustrating as you accept compromise after compromise, until your dream bike, the unicorn vision in your mind, looks something like a draft horse, difficult to discern from the rest of the herd.
Still, I dream. In my mind it’s a flat bar gravel bike. Wide rims and tires. Maybe even 80mm of fork travel. The seatstays join the seat tube down low, which allows the rear end to flex and flow a bit. It’s got mountain bike gearing. This bike is a real hybrid of gravel bike and mountain hardtail. One day, if I’m brave, I’ll build it.
This week’s TCI Friday wonders if you’ve got a bike you think should exist. What does it look like? Or do you want a very specific innovation that would improve the bikes you’ve got now? What does that look like? And do you think any of your bright ideas could fly in the market today?
Inspired by a local legend, High Mileage Steve, I too am building up a flat bar ‘gravel’ bike. He used to to ride upwards of 13 centuries a year on a mountain bike! I have a second IF Deluxe that I’m building up to do the same. (…fuck that, I ain’t riding a hundred miles ever again!) Being a smallish frame my only concern is figuring out a good bag to hang on it.
@Rutter, please share the result! I have an old IF that is looking for a real purpose. It is currently a franken-bike 27.5/26 mullet that is kinda fun but needs some adjustment or repurposing.
I think the bikes available now are all pretty damn good. As for a bike that I think should exist (at least for me and one day just might) is an aggressive borderline hardcore hardtail (64 and change degree HA with a 150 or 140 fork) made of steel or titanium with a coupler system of some sort (S&S, Paragon Machine, Ritchey) that would fit neatly into a travel case that would not be oversized for flights. I have mapped this one out for awhile and it may be either me ponying up the kale to go a custom builder or the less expensive route of taking an existing frame and having couplers added. Now for a specific innovation I’d like to see the return of is an old innovation in a more reliable form that being Marzocchi’s ETA (extension travel adjustment) switch from the early 00s. This worked brilliantly (when it worked as the reliability kinda sucked) allowing you to achieve a steep HA for climbing and the let you get full travel when it was time to party. I don’t know how marketable this would be, but Fox has had good luck rolling Marzocchi back out so it could work. It would help me with the aforementioned travel bike as I could more easily shrink the size of the fork for transport. #soselfish 😀