Category: Touring Bike FAQ

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

This is #1 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re researching touring bikes online, chances are you don’t yet have a touring bike of your own – or if you do, you may be unsure of whether it’s really fit for the cycle tour you’re planning. In this case, it’s useful to have a working definition of the thing you want to buy. I don’t mean a boring dictionary definition; more like a set of criteria that distinguishes a touring bike from other subcategories of bicycle. This is important because choosing a touring bike is something people invest… Continue reading →