Tom’s Titanium Hardtail
When you ride off-road for hundreds of miles at a time, often without sleep, you need a sure-footed bike underneath you. Tom has put a lot of those hard miles on his bikes, and I designed his hardtail with that kind of abuse in mind.
The frame is constructed from my usual mix of CWSR main tubes and Columbus Hyperion stays. This was my first time using the Hyperion MTB chain stays and I was pleased to be able to use their bend profile to fit 29 x 2.6” tires and a 36t chainring without having to resort to using a yoke or an awkwardly long chainstay length.
I opted for burlier 19mm seat stays to support the custom titanium rear rack that Tom wanted to try out. I’ve built racks from stainless steel and chromoly before, but for a light load a titanium rack offers a lot of weight savings. The rack has a flat platform for 7Roads dry bag, as well as several attachment points for bottle cages and/or cargo cradles, as well as a dynamo tail light.
The front triangle also has a full complement of 7Roads bags. I was impressed at the fit of the bags given they were produced from a PDF drawing of the frame from thousands of miles away.
On the mechanical side, Tom brought a set of carbon wheels and some very light Garbaruk drivetrain bits. The shifting is wireless via SRAM AXS Blips, which are secured in prototype mounts that I designed to work to SRAM’s Match Maker clamps. These allow the user to rotate and pivot the blip to any position that is comfortable above or below the bars, and avoids having to pick between the polarizing AXS rocker paddle or pod shifters.
At the front of the bike, a Rockshox SID Ultimate 120mm suspension fork handles the big bumps while a PNW Components Loam carbon handlebar handles the small ones. There’s also a 150mm PNW dropper post for singletrack use.
Wolf Tooth Components supplied their versatile dropper lever and Fat Paw foam grips, as well as the matchy-matchy purple headset and seat collar.
SRAM’s new Level Ultimate Stealth 4P brakes keep the hoses routed close to the bars, which helps tidy up this often messy area of the bike. The brake hoses and dropper cable all run internally through the frame.
This was a really fun build, and the fact that it’s so well appointed and my size will make it hard to hand over, but I look forward to seeing what kind of adventures Tom ends up taking this rig on.