Do you like the idea of a custom Rohloff touring bike build? Well, a Rohloff frame may not be as expensive as you think – you can get yourself a Rohloff-specific frame for under US $500 (399€).
I really like touring with a Rohloff hub as they offer a nice range of gears, minimal maintenance and surprisingly they run really...
Gearbox systems are becoming more and more popular on touring bikes. The most common form of gearbox is the internally geared rear hub, which has actually been available since the late-1800s. The earlier ones were a two-speed design, but these days we have the 14-speed Rohloff hub as our benchmark.
More recently you will find internal...
This is the first touring bike I ever bought! It started life as a Surly Long Haul Trucker, but these days this custom touring bike is barely a semblance of the bike it once was.
Not only has it travelled well over 100,000km, but it's been built with:
- Road handlebars, butterfly handlebars, flat handlebars, riser handlebars and...
Near the Swiss and Italian borders in France you'll find Julien Fritsch building his stunning custom bikes. While there's not a lot of information available about Jolie Rouge Cycles, the details on this fillet-brazed Jolie Rouge touring bike say enough! Here are some words from Julien:
Each of my bikes is an individual experience. Step...
I first heard of Geekhouse bikes when I was teenager and was into launching myself off dirt jumps. Back in those days Marty (Geekhouse founder) was designing Taiwanese-built bikes while he learned the craft of framebuilding. By 2008 he had acquired all of the skills necessary to open his own framebuilding shop in...
Internally geared hubs have been available in bikes for over a century now, offering cyclists a simple and almost maintenance-free gear system due to a reduction in external parts. They are pretty well impervious to water, mud, dust, sand, rocks and branches. Although they appear complex when you look at the sheer quantity of...
The modern derailleur system is a simple and efficient way to provide gears on a bike. You certainly can't beat it for price, weight, availability or repairability. But there are a few gearbox alternatives which reduce overall maintenance by enclosing a series of cogs within an oil-bath chamber. They're pretty fancy – people who use...
Off-road touring bikes are gracing the rough trails of the world more than ever before, as people discover just how great it feels to get lost in the wilderness. We're seeing more and more off-road specific touring bikes (and fat bikes) with wide tyre carcusses as standard, as well as their fair share of off-road specific alt...
The 14-speed Rohloff hub is a wonderful bit of touring kit - there is no disputing that - but the Rohloff shifter has always been a polarising item for two reasons: it isn't available as a trigger shifter, and it's generally hard to fit to a bike with a road handlebar.
I've always kept resources which help you with Rohloff shifter...
Cycle Monkey are the USA distributor for high-end touring components like Rohloff hubs, Gates Carbon Drive and SP-Dynamo hubs, as well as touring bikes by Tout Terrain and Shand. Their bike build blog (The Monkey Lab) features some nice custom builds using some of my favourite touring parts.
For this Surly Troll build, or "Trohloff"...
