Well, Leah I am glad you broached the subject not me! When I've mentioned it in the past it's been treated as some sort of sacrilege.
Having a long wheelbase whether it be a longer top tube, longer chainstays, or both. Does get you some good things. Increased tire, fender, mud clearance. Decreased tendency for toe overlap, etc. And in general, increases to top tube lengths and chainstay lengths for larger frames makes perfect sense, no argument there. Certainly, the contrary. I think the main thing is it's basically uncharted territory; bicycle frame building has a century plus of evolution and whereas I am sure many people have experimented over the years, it's likely few if any have digested & recorded their findings for those that have come after them and as Grant has stated before there so many factors that go into a frame design you can't boil it down to one dimension or another. Increase the top tube, but slacken the head tube angle and you could end up with two frames that "feel" very similar. So then the question is: how long is too long? What sort of standard do you use to determine these new longer dimensions. Logic would dictate that there be some sort of % . Something along the lines of: Top tube = seat tube X 110% and/or Chainstay = seat tube X 90% Certainly, these numbers could change depending on wheel/tire size and the end use of the bike. It would just be one of those numbers that's thrown into the into the recipe/ blender, a benchmark, a starting point. In much the same way as 72° seat & head angles are their benchmarks respectively. When I bought my Clementine, I actually bought 2; mine a 52 and another Small to fit my wife, son & ultimately my daughter. But to tell the truth I am sort of in between sizes myself and I can ride either. The small feels just totally normal to me; wrenching on it riding it etc. Nothing really stood out. The 52 felt big to me; although not in a bad way. Where I had issues was out of the seat pedaling, that comfortable ride everyone talks about comes at a price (which is totally fine as long as you know what it is). The ride is smooth and comfortable, because long wheelbases tend to smooth out road irregularities, but also because the frame becomes one big leaf spring, gently flexing over those same road irregularities. This is where things start to go sideways, because if it's flexing over bumps, it's also flexing when you try to sprint, when you wanna climb hills, etc. A certain amount of this springyness is a desirable thing, but as I said earlier where is the line? If you've been buying/riding bikes as long as I have, to a certain extent every bike is the next on that search for the perfect bike! So far I haven't found it, but I have a few that are very close. Unfortunately, maybe Grant's still trying to find the sweet spot and maybe it'll take some experimenting? He's kinda gone off the standard frame designers script so some edits are to be expected. We'll have to see. PS: if my posts have grammatical error, they could be intentional, but could also be because I generally post here from my phone & the spell checker is overzealous. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/d9f7940e-17dc-448a-b618-380ad62de25b%40googlegroups.com.
