jasonmytail

Author: jasonmytail_11ehe7

  • 75 day / 700km Review – Rivendell Charlie H Gallop

    I had the opportunity, fortunate timing, and reckless spending habit to purchase my size from the V1 prototype samples of the upcoming road-ish bike with ‘swoop tube’ technology from Rivendell dubbed the Charlie H Gallop. Each size was painted a different colour, and the 54cm that fit me best happened to be silver, which was exactly the colour I wanted.

    The state of the build at the time of writing this (May 1, 2022)

    The bike came as a complete for $1800 with a mix of parts that largely aligned with what I wanted to set it up with, and the differences were easily accommodated with help from my parts bin.

    The reason I wanted this bike, and the reason I wanted silver too, was to build a low-key everyday bike that was suited to my 16km each way commute as well as keeping up with quick friends on around-town rides to parks, breweries, and the like.

    As-delivered build spec (Feb 10, 2022)

    To this end, the sporty tubing (I use that term in the context of Rivendells..) combined with the long, comfortable geometry seemed optimal for the swift-but-supremely-comfortable bike I wanted. I went on the larger size for my stature because I knew the extra top tube length would be needed for me to comfortably run sweepy bars. I haven’t checked too carefully, but I believe this frame has about a 580mm ETT and 500mm chainstays. I believe the HT/ST angles are 71 / 71.5, and the BB drop is a generous 80mm.

    Let’s get this out of the way now: this prototype has canti studs, but the production plan is to run side-pull caliper brakes. I seem to be far from alone in thinking this is a mistake, and it’s partially why I had to jump at the chance to buy this prototype. This is my all-weather, year-round commuter and Vancouver is pretty well known for its rain! Perhaps it’s not too late to petition Rivendell to go with canti-stud brakes.

    Enough about why I bought it, time to talk about whether my hopes for this bike played out!

    I first rode it as it came as a baseline, though I was fully aware the reach with the 46cm Noodles it came stock with would be a bit too much for me. I would be insincere if I gave much feedback about how it rode with drops, because I only rode about 8km like this. As a placeholder, I installed my Nitto Wavie bar with a 9cm Technomic stem so I could outfit the bike with the black Paul Motolites and Love Levers I had set aside for the build. It rode nice enough. Then I put an Albatross bar on it with 11cm Tallux stem, and suddenly the bike came alive – the bike just feels right with this bar for me.

    So this bike is expected to be a few things: comfortable, safe, but also zippy and road-ish in its manners. It’s clearly the progression of Grant’s idea of what a road bike could be if we avoid the influence of competitive cycling.

    Rivendell is carrying the torch of modern-made but timeless-inspired steel bikes, with almost 30 years of geometry progression that has occurred with almost no influence from popular trends. It’s one person’s evolved belief in what the bicycle should be after over decades of focus based on personal experience rather than market projections. It’s a bit like observing a species of animal that evolved in completely different conditions than what we typically observe.

    I’m totally smitten by this evolution as is already clear, just as many other are. That said, Grant is one individual, not some deity, and the fact he’s making bikes the way he wants instead of the way the market dictates shouldn’t be as rare as it is – but welcome to capitalism, I suppose.

    Okay, so – is it comfortable? Yes, of course it is, how could a bike with 50cm chainstays not be. Interestingly, I don’t find it quite as smooth riding as my Hillborne (with paltry 455mm chainstays), but I chalk this up to the tires. The Charlie has Soma Shikoro 700x42mm tires, while the Hillborne has Rene Herse Babyshoe standards – the latter are notably more comfortable. The latter are also more susceptible to flats, but I haven’t had many flats on any tire.

    What surprised me about the Charlie is that despite fairly stout tubing (ranging from 1.1 to 0.8mm thickness throughout the frame, as far as I know), it has quite a lot of flex! I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised given the length of the frame and the standard diameter top tube (albeit squished to 22.2 x 28.6 oval). It has a subtle but enjoyable spring while pedaling, but if you put some weight both front and rear (ie, when I have one pannier with my work laptop and stuff on the rear rack, and a couple 4-packs of beer in the front basket), the frame flex becomes very pronounced. It is almost as if there is a flexible joint between the front and rear halves of the frame. In a way it’s kind of fun, but it’s not optimal. This bike is not made to carry more than a light load and it shows. The single pannier on the rear causes an imbalance side to side that a stiff aluminum frame wouldn’t notice, but the Charlie H Gallop notices. Don’t buy the Charlie H Gallop for touring. It will ride like a wet noodle in that scenario.

    The handling is very typical Rivendell these days: the steering feel is light, but yet the bike tracks straight very easily and is totally stable at any speed. They tend to carve turns. Grant pays attention to ensuring a consistent trail across his bikes and each size within so that this steering feel is always there.

    So it’s comfortable and stable. Is it quick? Well, it’s not a sprinting bike. The geometry is pretty relaxed, as is the fit. The bike puts your weight squarely between the wheels, which provides the comfort and stability Rivendells are known for. The built-in flex feels good for a certain level of output; beyond that and you probably want something “higher performance”. That said, it glides up to speed quite effortlessly. The bike feels like its working with you when you push a bit harder on the pedals.

    My first 700km has been on a variety of surfaces, but mostly paved and hardpack trails. I would say the limitation is going to be the tires, not the frameset, when it comes to what the bike can tackle. The Charlie will ride sure-footed on just about anything outside of steep technical descents.

    Okay, let’s get negative for a change. What would I change if I could? To be honest, not a lot, but I do wish it was 650B in my size. If it were up to me, the largest sizes would be 700c but the middle sizes would be 650B. The smallest size or two might even be 26″. I find the 700x42mm tires to be a little too yacht-like for me, and will try a lighter set of 700×38 once I wear these out. The rotating interia of a 650×42-48 tire just feels right, in my opinion, and would give this bike a bit more of a sporty personality. Also, if I didn’t have canti studs, I’d be mad about it. I know it’s a road-ish bike, but let’s separate it a little bit from the Roadini and allow cantilever brakes or mini-V’s, both of which work with typical road levers and therefore should be a non-issue.

    The Charlie H Gallop is marketed as a road bike, which appears to be an evolution from the Roadini. Its longer chainstays, more ample tire clearance, and swoopy top tube are all indicative of where Rivendell is headed, breaking barriers between sporty and stable. Despite this, what I see it as is a lightweight alternative to the Clem for those who want an everyday bike that don’t need to carry a lot. This is what I bought it for, and it’s why I think my size should be 650B, and they should keep the canti studs. Maybe this isn’t what was envisioned for the Charlie H Gallop, and maybe I’m just projecting based on what I want to see out of Rivendell (an every-person’s bike that’s more sporty than the Clem Smith, but still immensely versatile), but it’s what the bike is to me.

  • Charlie H Gallop

    I told the folks at Rivendell if they ever sold the silver Charlie prototype, I would love to buy it. The Charlie evolved into caliper brakes, which I wasn’t interested in, so this was quite literally the only Charlie H Gallop frame I was interested in. I also loved that it was silver, because that played perfectly into my plans for the bike: an ordinary looking commuter bike that rode like a dream and had an “if you know, you know” vibe about it.

    Well, about 18 months after I sowed that seed, I got my opportunity – they decided to sell the v1 prototypes when the v2’s arrived, and they called me to offer me the bike!

    However, I missed that phone call. And I missed that they had called altogether.

    A few days later they listed it on the “garage sale” section of their web store and a blessed stranger on Instagram DM’d me to tell me it was on the site. I didn’t even get this message for about two hours – but when I frantically navigated to the web shop, there it was, still available. I think I stared for less than two seconds before clicking ‘add to cart’ and calmly but quickly checking out to make sure I didn’t lose out.

    A few minutes later, Will’s email update went out – and mention that it sold while he typed the description for this bike was included. If that email had gone out before I bought, well, I wouldn’t have had the chance to buy it. Serendipitous if you ask me!

    It came “as is, where is” with a build that wasn’t exactly what I had planned, but had a lot of very good parts. It had the saddle I would have bought for it anyway, already included. It had the right length crank arms. The tires are basically ideal for my purposes. I swapped some parts from my Bridgestone and parts bin, and I was almost where I wanted to be already.

    It’ll evolve a bit more before finding its final form, but I’m pretty darn confident that when it gets there, it’ll be a bike I don’t fuss with often. And hopefully, it’ll be a bike I ride a lot. I plan to commute 100+ days a year on this bike, 32km each day. That will add up!

    In summer of 2022 I bought a Brompton, which served perfectly as a commuter especially since I could either ride the whole way, or take the train part way to work. It largely overlapped with the Charlie, and the Hillborne overlapped on the other end of the spectrum. So in November 2022, I sold the frameset with select parts to a friend.

    In April 2023, I bought it back, having realized my mistake (and changing jobs that resulted in a long, hilly commute without a train option). I built it back up similar to before, but with a few differences – and I think it’s better than ever!

    Comically, I once again sold it in July 2023, this time to someone in Oakland CA. The reason for the (second) sale was because ultimately the Crust Wombat won the battle for the final available spot in my quiver.

    My 700km review of the Charlie can be found here. In the end I had put just over 1500km on it, and certainly loved every bit of it. If I had the space I’d have kept it, but alas.

  • 2022-01-15 Bombadil rebirth ride

    Most owners of the clearcoat-over-raw Bombadils have long since repainted their rides, spooked at the first indication of surface rust from the coating’s lackluster corrosion resistance.

    I came to own my Bombadil after it had lived a decade in the PNW, and honestly, the corrosion situation didn’t seem too bad. However, the somewhat yellowed tint of the clearcoat didn’t really spark joy, and I knew that if this was going to be a lifetime bike, I should start anew with a fresh coat of paint sooner than later. That’s more time for me to add my own beausage to the new paint, after all!

    The frame spent a couple months with Chris Dekerf, and no corners were cut. The result was a stiff bill but a beautiful frame. In addition to the new paint, I redecorated the bike with a host of new parts such as a nine-speed, friction shifted drivetrain and big Rene Herse knobbies under Velo Orange fenders.

    The new green paint really blends into the landscapes its most at home in

    I expect that most people take a spin around the block as a shakedown ride, but my first ride on this bike back when I got it was an ambitious 50km mountainous singletrack ride, so I felt compelled to at least get out into the woods so long as the bike felt more or less operational.

    And more or less, it was. The initial brake installation left a lot to be desired, and even touching the rear brake was embarrassingly loud. Turns out I had the pads in backwards (don’t worry – not cartridge!) so that probably didn’t help. I have a list of other things I need to fix.. but the bike propels.

    I chose to venture into the Seymour valley where this bike often calls home. I should note that we had a big dump of snow a couples weeks ago but temperatures have been well above freezing lately, and the snow is gone around town. I crossed the bridge into North Vancouver and climbed up residential streets to a trail network I knew would be good for photos, which is where the photo above was taken. No snow to be seen, and this was higher elevation than where I was headed, so I was good!

    Narrator: He was not.

    Near the bottom of the singletrack descent to Fisherman’s trail

    To my surprise, when I popped out of this completely snow-free trail, I was met with a packed snow and ice concoction blanketing the main trail. The lack of tree cover plus the packing of snow from this trail’s higher use meant that it stuck around during the recent rains, and those rains only served to encrust this snow and make it hard to walk on, let alone ride.

    Stubbornly, I continued on with a mix of careful riding and walking as necessary. I made my way down Fisherman’s for a bit, even though my Strava had quit at this point so it didn’t even count!

    I didn’t make it very far though, and instead climbed up a connector to the hill on the other side of this valley to visit a friend. Thankfully, once out of the valley, the snow relented.

    Well – mostly.

    It went back and forth.

    I then was out on roads again, and any trace of snow disappeared. I didn’t take any photos of those roads because they weren’t interesting. As soon as I got back onto a trail though, I took the following shot. This trail took me down near the bridge which brought me back to my neighbourhood.

  • Deathbike

    A buddy’s dad, who worked at construction sites, had a handful of abandoned bikes that he took home from a site because he didn’t want to see them go to scrap.

    So we did what any reasonable person would do. We cut them apart, found unique and ridiculous ways to weld them together using an oxy-acetylene torch, coat hangers, and absolutely no welding experience whatsoever.

    Video of it in action

    I came up with the concept and basically cut apart bikes and tried fitting tubes together until it made sense. Once it it was together, it took me more time to work up the courage to actually mount it than I expected. But it worked!

    I was going to college at the time so I brought it to campus. Once I’d shown off my silly creation to my peers, I just left it un-locked at the bike rack. Each day I’d ride it a little bit and leave it somewhere else on campus. It moved around from other people trying it. This went on for probably a month, but one day I found it in the bike rack like below – it finally broke.

  • Knolly Chilcotin

    So as you may have noticed from my bike history page, mountain bikes were front and center when it came to my interest in bikes basically from my teenage years through to my thirties, when I started to diversify a little – but MTB remains an important thing to me.

    For all of my twenties, basically, I was a hardtail diehard. Then, in 2010 or 2011 I tried a buddy’s full-suspension Banshee and was immediately sold. I went through a few bikes but the Knolly was the first “dream build”, made possible by a very generous bonus at work that year. The frame I found used, and the build centered around the just-released SRAM XX1 drivetrain, which was the first 1×11 to market – kind of wild to think now, but this was a brand new concept at the time and only available as a top-end spec.

    The bike was built by Matt at North Shore Bike Shop, after hours while I sat and watched drinking beer (I had brought him a 6-pack not realizing he doesn’t drink). My first ride on the bike was Ladies Only on Fromme, and the bike performed admirably – this is a pretty hectic trail to ride on an unfamiliar bike (at least at my moderate skill level) but it felt comfortable straight away.

    This bike consolidated my MTB quiver to one, from previously owning a Bandit 29er and a TR250 park / shuttle bike. It survived many Whistler bike park trips, slabs of Squamish, and many north shore days both pedaling up and shuttling.

    Notably it also carried me through a three-day bike-packing trip in the South Chilcotin mountain range, fittingly its namesake. I rode this with one buddy, and the fact that this is grizzly country never left our minds for a moment. We were fortunate (unfortunate?) to see a group of grizzlies hunting marmots on the final ascent to Windy Pass – which meant we didn’t spend a lot of time on the summit. Too bad too, because it was the most picturesque point of the whole trip.

  • Soma Rush

    Going back to the mid 2000’s, I was really only into mountain biking and biketrials. Mountain biking had been a part of my life from childhood, while biketrials was something I picked up in my early 20’s. Riding on pavement was never something I was interested in – it was a means to an end only.

    Then I test rode a Giant Bowery singlespeed road bike and was blown away by the pure speed. That test ride changed my perspective entirely. However, it wasn’t until this bike, my Soma Rush, that I really felt a deeper connection to a pavement-oriented bike.

    Even brakeless, I rode this bike all over the place. This was a time before strava but I’d love to see my mileage and heatmap from these days – I lived in Pitt Meadows at the time but rode this bike all over Vancouver, North Vancouver, New West, and beyond – including a number of 100+ km days in preparation for the 2009 Ride to Conquer Cancer which yes, I rode on this bike.

    The fact I rode that 230km event on a fixed gear with 49-17 gearing is a bit baffling in retrospect – the weather was absolutely terrible, I remember that, but otherwise I had no concerns about the bike or my fitness. Weird!

  • Surly LHT

    This was a Craigslist score for $1200 in 2013. The previous owner did a great job with the build, and I’m afraid all my changes over the two years or so that I owned it only drew it away from the balance it had, which is likely why I sold it. Below is mostly as-purchased form but all the racks and panniers were my additions.

    The above was a test fit for a tour that is depicted perfectly in the following photo – the farmer’s market on Mayne Island.

    I wasn’t convinced about the moustache bars at the time, and tried drops .. and they didn’t spark joy either. Then I fitted some Jones loop bars which were pretty good, but never really felt like things were exactly right.

  • Soma Grand Randonneur

    My second custom build from Dream Cycle, five years after my Salsa Vaya build. In the couple years prior I bounced between 700c (the Vaya, a Surly Ogre) and 26″ (Surly LHT) and finally landed on the goldilocks 650B wheel size, which, in retrospect, is pretty obviously the optimal size for my stature. I wish I realized about three bikes ago.

    Days after bringing it home, Feb 2016

    This was a bit of a higher end build than my Salsa Vaya spec, essentially my dream build at the time – a Campy Athena groupset, Compass Babyshoe tires, White Industries hubs, and so on. Sadly I wasn’t enlightened enough to go dynamo at the time, but that upgrade came later.

    This bike brought me a lot of places, above is at Persephone brewing on a credit card style tour to visit my mom. It was a good bike, I liked it a lot but never quite felt fully satisfied with it either. All these parts were transferred to a Sam Hillborne frameset and that’s when the magic happened for me.

  • Raleigh Twenty

    Of all the bikes I’ve owned, this is the one I’ve had the longest at this point: about 12 years and counting. I bought it off a friend for $100 and it was completely stock. It was 2009 and I was immersed in the teachings of Sheldon Brown, which led me to spend more on this modest base than I might otherwise have.

    The most annoying thing about a stock Twenty is the friction of the headset, which uses a plastic bushing in place of bearings on the upper race, to facilitate the folding mechanism. Pretty cool tech for 1969, but not ideal. Me being me, I decided to address this by having a new steerer welded into the original fork, and fitted a 1″ threadless Chris King headset to the frame. This eliminated the folding function but it steered smooth as butter with a headset that can last a lifetime.

    Well heck, if I’m in this far, I might as well upgrade the cotter-pin crankset; the bottom bracket is unfortunately non-standard and the only drop-in replacement was the pricey (but unparalleled in quality) Phil Wood. These two modifications were the catalyst for a full rebuild with little regard for the purchase price (and typical value) of the bike.

    The result is above – at the time I was in college and this was a pretty optimal means of transportation. The wheelset was an oddball find in the QBP catalog at the time; a 406 wheelset with alloy rims, 32h, and a SS rear hub which I fitted with a White Industries freewheel cog.

    As I built up other “nice” bikes, a few choice parts were stripped off this modest bike, such as the Thompson stem and Brooks saddle. Nonetheless it remained a staple in my collection through the 2010’s, even though there were years it was barely used. Even with a lot of the visibly expensive parts removed, the bike remained too high an investment to part with. Plus, how cool is it!

    Fast-forward to 2020, and for the first time in a decade I made a second large capital investment into the bike: a new wheelset, consisting of a pair of Sturmey Archer hubs (drum brake all around, dynamo front, and 5spd rear). This breathed new life into the bike as an extremely practical all-weather bike that could still be locked up downtown for hours at a time without too much concern it’ll draw attention.

    December 2023 Update: Last week I put 80km on the Twenty; one commute (about 28km round trip), some errands, and also taking me to my work holiday party (44km round trip with a 4.5 hour lockup on the street). I’ve swapped the bars to some hand-me-downs from my partner’s Raleigh e-bike as she upgraded to Jones bars, and put some Ergons on that I had in my bin.

    Oh, also I have switched the tires to Marathon ‘GT365’ which are not studded but have winter tire siping and a pretty aggressive tread. They are still pretty quiet, so I might run them year-round!

  • Salsa Vaya

    This was my first full custom, shop-built bike that wasn’t a mountain or trials bike. It was built in 2011 by Dream Cycle, and if I had just realized that I could do 650B on this bike, I might have kept it a lot longer (I sold it in 2013 or 2014).

    I never did any long-distance touring, but as you can see above, it saw some great loaded tours of the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island.

    In 2012 I did the Ride to Conquer Cancer for the second time on this bike; the first time was in 2009 on my fixed gear Soma Rush. Despite the fact the ride was fully supported I chose to carry my own gear, I suppose because I was such a biketouring keener?