Category: Bikes
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Oxford Bike Works Expedition: New Upgrades For 2023
Before my recent Australia tour, I took Tom’s Expedition Bike back to its birthplace in the UK for a tune-up and a few experimental upgrades. This post details what’s changed, explores the thinking behind the upgrades, and goes deep into the specifics of why they were made. (Warning: it’s a 5,000-word long read, so maybe put the kettle on.) Continue reading →
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3 Critical Questions To Ask Before You Choose A New Touring Bike
When you’re in the market for a new touring bike, it’s important not to dive too deep until you’re clear about what kind of cycle tour you actually want to go on. Especially with the current trends towards ultralight bikepacking, gravel bikes, touring e‑bikes, etc, manufacturers will work extremely hard to sell you something you never knew you needed. They’ll even give top-of-the-range bikes to social media influencers (yep, they’ve discovered cycle touring and bikepacking too!) to promote products that for most riders are a waste of precious travel funds. If you’re not careful, before you know it you’ll have bought… Continue reading →
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A Full List Of Heavy Duty Touring Bikes For Round-The-World Rides
Following a ludicrous amount of research (by humans, not robots), I present to you a detailed spreadsheet of ultra-heavy-duty touring bikes being built and sold around the world, featuring bicycles from 44 builders in 9 countries on 3 continents, and links to each bike’s official webpage. The bikes in this list are not designed for short cycling holidays, nor for casual local bike tours (though they’d be fine for these kinds of cycle tour too). No: they’ve been designed specifically for extremely long, fully-loaded, self-sufficient bicycle journeys through remote parts of the world on challenging terrain over periods of time measured in years.… Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #7: What Should I Remember Before Handing Over My Cash?
This is #7 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? There are a few aspects of touring bike choice so utterly basic that they’re often lost in the quagmire of internet-based research. This is particularly the case when browsing websites for advice on touring bikes: features and technical specifications are a lot easier to talk about than the all-important intangibles. In this post, we’ll look at a few final checklist items you should review as a touring bike buyer before you commit… Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #6: What’s The Best Way To Avoid Buying The Wrong Bike?
This is #6 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? When it comes to actually buying the touring bike you’ve spent months researching, it can be tempting to start researching online retailers. After all, that’s how we buy everything else these days. Online-only bike retailers can often undercut high street bike shops by a large amount, for various reasons: Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #5: Derailleur Or Rohloff/Pinion Internal Gears?
This is #5 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? There are people in this world who will argue until the end of all time about whether or not a touring bike should be fitted with a Rohloff Speedhub or, more recently, a Pinion centre-mounted gearbox. I am not one of these people. You probably aren’t, either. If you’re unfamiliar with Rohloff or Pinion, they are makers of internally geared hubs and gearboxes for bicycles, each of which costs more than… Continue reading →
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21 UK Touring & Bikepacking Bike Shops To Visit In 2024
These days, there are a lot of bike shops in the UK selling touring bikes and bikepacking gear. There are far fewer, however, who are specialised in these fields. This is not surprising. Cycle touring remains a tiny and underserved niche. Bikepacking is trending, and suddenly there’s money to be made selling mountain bikes with weird-shaped bags attached to them, but for most UK bike shops, sticking an old touring bike in a corner somewhere is about as far as it goes. But a few brave shop owners and bike builders have made a name for themselves as true touring and… Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #4: Disc Brakes or Rim Brakes (V‑Brakes)?
This is #4 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? While most high-end touring bikes are nowadays fitted with disc brakes, there’s still plenty of debate over whether V‑brakes or disc brakes are actually ‘better’ for touring. And, as usual, there’s no clear-cut answer. I’m sorry about that. V‑brakes, for the purposes of this post, are a generic and misused term for the several varieties of caliper brakes that work by pinching the bicycle wheel’s rim between two brake blocks to… Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #3: Steel Or Aluminium Frame Material?
This is #3 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? Discussing the pros and cons of different metallic alloys is probably not something you ever thought you’d find yourself doing until you began researching touring bicycles. But you will undoubtedly have discovered that there is a never-ending debate over whether steel or aluminium as a frame material is a better choice for touring bike. Let’s cut to the chase: if you are planning to keep your touring relatively short term… Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #2: 26-Inch vs 700C Wheel Size?
This is #2 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? Many folk seem to think that the choice of touring bike wheel size – specifically, 26-inch (classic mountain bike) or 700C/28″ (road bike) – is a big deal. It isn’t. You can make this decision by answering two very simple questions: If the answer to either of the above questions is ‘yes’, get a bike based on the 26-inch wheel size. Regardless of what the industry would have you believe and/or which wheel size… Continue reading →