Titanium Gravel Race Bike

One of the perks/perils of building custom bikes is you occasionally have to build a frame to test the new widgets Big Industry has come up with. Given the rapid pace of technological developments and changing tastes in the gravel scene I felt it was time to see what all the new hype was about.

I’m no stranger to fat tires on drop bar bikes, my first titanium frame I built back in 2015 had room for 45mm tires, back when that was considered big. Since then I’ve played with 2”+ tires on my gravel bikes, though mostly in 650b. Now that everyone is running 2”+ 700c tires at the pointy end of gravel races and carbon forks have enlarged to fit them, I mounted up some 2.1” Vittoria Mezcals on my Astral rims and got to measuring.

Speaking of carbon forks, I also wanted to try out the Enve In-Route system on this build. In-Route runs all the cables and brake hoses through the handle bars and stem and ultimately through the headset for a clean aesthetic and marginal aero benefit. As someone who works on their own bike I’ve always avoided headset cable routing like the plague, but you can’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

This frame was also the first built with stays bent on the tube bender I CNC’d over the winter. This tool allows me to bend custom seat and chain stays that have the exact geometry I want for tire and chainring clearance, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. Paired with a machined titanium yoke and these custom stays I was able to get massive tire clearance with a 46t chainring and a 425mm chainstay length.

So far this bike has performed quite well under my testing protocol of riding it hard as often as possible. The massive tires make even the harshest of gravel “roads” navigable, the butted titanium tubeset is somehow super light and super responsive, and the fully internal cable routing really isn’t that hard to work on.