Brian asked: “I'm genuinely interested in what else, if anything, you hope to achieve with the Boots over the Hunqabeam aside from maybe the obvious additional stand-over and tire clearance considering your terrain?”
Och! Aye. You’ve hit on the core of my inner convolutions, Brian. My Hunqapiller is the first iteration geometry, so 2.1” tires and shorter chainstays from the newer iterations of the Hunqapillar. BB clearence for fixed gear is a bigger issue than for freewheel. Thus, Boots offers: longer wheelbase/chainstays, fatter tires, higher BB clearence, and Grant’s full take on an 80’s era mountain bike, aka hillybike. That is hard to say no to. Grin. That said, with the shift to the bullmoose bars on my Hunqabeam, which has dialed in the sweetspot of positioning for me, I’ve gotten the Hunqabeam as close to a Boots as I can. This simultaniously has me delighted that the Hunqabeam can do all I want, with some compromise to BB clearence, tire width, and wheelbase/chainstay length. On the Hunqabeam, with less weight forward on my front wheel, I am easily rolling over rougher stuff, both climbing and descending, than I did with more weight forward (but not as far up/back as with the Albatross bars I first had). Thus, regarding Boots, I am puzzling out what the initial build is, to get an imagined, educated guess, as to how much more/better the Boots would be vs. my Hunqabeam. Now that I’ve figured out 90% of the Boots build, and all of the fixed gear drivetrain w/ vertical dropout questions, I’ll be riding the Hunqabeam pondering the question of delta between it and the Boots for the riding I do. My dilemma is this: I don’t need the Boots, and getting a Boots would be the first Rivendell that didn’t fit into the “need” category (the QB added a second bike for having time to work on one bike while having one to ride, as well as extended range of use). My wife is adamant that the “want” is worth the purchase, but I remain on the fense. I see the benifits of Boots for the riding I do, and passing up on Grant’s quinticential take on a bike purposebuilt for the riding I do would be hard to do. Still, all said, that’s a fair chunk-o-change that could go to needs, of which there are plenty. Yes, if I get the Boots, I would have three bikes and would set them up as Boots for my AllWays adventure bikepacking bike, Hunqabeam as a go-fast AllWays bike, and the QB as a gofast allroad bike with fenders. This has the added attraction of keeping panniers always on the Boots, making errands ect much easier. At the moment, I put them on/off the Hunqabeam based on what I’ll be doing on a given day. Jon asked about Phil Wood’s Eccentric BB. Thank you for the suggestion, Jon! I’ve just talked with Phil and the trail-side changing of gears is much more involved (loosening the BB cups on both sides, using a special tool for side to side alignment, rotating the BB to adjust tension, and tightening all things up again) than the WI ENO eccentric hub shift would be. If I didn’t need trail-side gear changes, it may be the way to go, but I do, so it isn’t. Shrug. With abandon, Patrick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
