The Surly Initiative
SINCE taking up cycling a few years ago as an antidote to arthritic feet, knackered knees and general joint disfunction, the results of 40 years or so of climbing hills and mountains, I’ve been enjoying most disciplines within the two-wheeled world.
Like many hill-goers I’ve ridden a mountain bike fairly regularly over the years but the acquisition of an all carbon road bike saw me swathed in lycra bashing out the road miles like a twenty-something year old. I’ve also gone down the road touring route, some quite big touring routes too, including a Land’s End to John O’Groats, La Manche to the Med through France and last year, a very memorable trip from Mizen Head to Malin Head in Ireland.
I haven’t tried track racing yet and I suspect I won’t and I’ve never been fond of crowds so the sportive scene hasn’t really appealed to me but what I’ve ideally wanted to do is re-create what I’ve done as a backpacker, that is, take off for a few days or weeks on end and travel through relatively wild and remote areas.
My touring bike, a Ridgeback Panorama, is a fantastic road touring bike but on the bumpy, pot-holed tow paths of the Canal du Midi on our French trip it felt a bit too thoroughbred, indeed I broke a spoke on that trip. And while my mountain bike is great on singletrack and forest trails it’s depressingly slow on tarmac.
I really needed a hybrid that I could use on forest tracks and trails, a bike that felt equally comfortable and slick on the roads, a tourer that could carry me and a full load for days or weeks at a time on a variety of surfaces. For advice I turned to the adventure cycling community.
You’ll read very little of this community in the glossy, race and fitness oriented cycling magazines. To be honest most of the guys within the adventure cycling community have little interest in gear. Their raison d’etre for cycling is in the travelling aspect, the moving even more than the destination, and for the more hairy-arsed amongst that community, the world travellers, much of the kit is picked up along the way.
However, most of these guys know about bikes, especially the heavier, on/off road types, the bikes that will get you there with minimum fuss and breakdown. And 9 out of 10 of them told me to look across the Atlantic at a Bloomington, Minnesota-based company called Surly.
Surly make steel bikes, top quality steel bikes mainly from 4130 chromoly steel, and their Long Haul Trucker has become a popular touring bike, particularly amongst the round-the-word aficionados. They describe it as ‘a cross country tourer, heavy duty commuter, practically begs you to bring the kitchen sink. All the bells and whistles. Low BB and long stays make it good for racks and bags but not as good for technical off-road trails.’
More recently, as more and more travellers requested disc brakes, the company introduced the Disc Trucker, which is essentially the same frame as the Long Haul Trucker. This is the model I chose.
Last year I had use of a Revolution Country Premier bike from Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative, which came fitted with disc brakes and I just loved them. I had become a little fed up with grasping brake levers with white knuckles trying to slow down a loaded touring bike on long downhills. Disc brakes seemed like magic, although I’m well aware it’s not as simple to maintain them, or repair them, on a long trip but hey, I’m not going to be cycling around the world days, or weeks, away from a bike shop.
The Surly Disc Trucker is fitted with Avid BB7 cable actuated disc brakes.
I also decided to go with 26inch wheels. In some ways this is where the compromise kicks in. I wanted slightly stronger, tougher wheels than normal 700C wheels, wheels that would carry me along forest tracks, which may or may not be pot-holed and rutted. I also wanted wheels which were capable of taking wider, fatter tyres, but not so fat that they would slow me down on the roads.
Although the 26-inch wheels look a little odd on a bike with dropped handlelbars, once the bike is fitted out with mudguards, racks and panniers it looks OK.
I could probably write screeds on why I chose 26-inch wheels but I think adventure cyclist Tom Allen sums up the advantages pretty well here http://tomsbiketrip.com/touring-bike-faq-2-26-inch-or-700c-wheel-size/
I picked the bike up a week ago and first thing I did was fit some Shimano M324 pedals. These double sided pedals have been my pedal of choice for a while now. I like the fact that they have a clipless mechanism on one side and a flat pedal on the other, an ideal sitation for what I was going to use my new Surly for, ie a combination of on and off road cycling.
I also changed the saddle, removing the custom Surly saddle for my Brooks B17. I’ve invested well over 1500 miles breaking this bloody thing in so I’m not going to dump it now. Having said that, it’s now as comfortable as anything I’ve got and I’ve realized over time that the most important factor with a Brooks saddle is making sure you get the height, tilt and fit absolutely spot on.
Tilt it a tad forward and you put a lot of pressure on your arms and shoulders. Tilt it too far back and the prong does all kinds of horrible things to your manhood. You gotta get it just right…
It’s a bit early to give a full appraisal of the Surly Disc Trucker but I’m not expecting miracle rides – I’m expecting a compromised performance.
After a couple of road rides of about 20 miles and then 35 miles I was a little disappointed with what I thought was quite a sluggish performance. I reckon I was probably at least 1-2 mph slower than with my Ridgeback Panorama with 700c wheels, but when I took the bike off-road I really enjoyed its lively feel and how the 3x9 mountain-bike gearing helped me climb the steeper tracks like a good ‘un. And to be fair, who cares about speed when you're touring, especially off-road bikepacking.
I haven’t used the bike loaded up with camping gear yet but I will be soon, probably using a combination of Wildcat, Revelate and Alpkit bikepacking harnesses and bags. And for that first bikepacking trip I might change the Continental Comfort Contact tyres that came with the bike (an odd choice I thought) with some Schwalbe Marathon Plus Tours I’ve just ordered. These are a bit fatter and chunkier and will be more suited to the type of forest track surfaces I’ll be using.
At the moment most of our forest trails are still snow covered but it looks as though things might warm up a little next week. If it does, and the snow vanish’s from the trails, then I’ll head out for a couple of nights on my new Surley Disc Trucker, fully loaded and newly tred with the Schwalbe tyres.
Just have to decide what camping gear to take, and how best to carry it?
