Joe and Eric— I’m not discounting tire/wheel size. Since I’ve had the Sam for years, and am still setting up the Homer, I tried to control for a few things. Both have the same Serfas 921V seats. Both had the same tires for these particular rides: 37mm Continental Tour Rides. Today I set both at 70 psi for the rides, and I rode both the same route on the Silver Comet Trail.
Maybe this set-up is not optimum for the Homer. Since I’ve sorted through the Sam gearing, tires (I usually ride Speed Rides) and pressure for what I like, this was just a totally subjective A-B comparison. But with both bikes having about the same wheelbase (a little longer for the Homer but with smaller wheels), I was trying to contribute to Leah’s questions regarding “have the chainstays gone too far?”. We plunk down our money with whatever bike company, tell them our dimensions that they ask for, and hope to get the bike of our dreams. Rivendell does pretty darn well at that, especially if you like lugged steel. Grant has had a LOT of experience, and runs a bicycle company whose employees also have a LOT of experience, and one that has avid followers. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. But Rivendell is not infallible, either in the fitting or in the design. I wish I could go to Rivendell directly and ride 20 bikes and select my dream bike. Lacking that, I have to go with the published numbers. For me it seems (and as I said before YMMV), that the Homer chain stays have gotten about as long as they could be for me to enjoy riding the bike. If I ever buy another Riv, I’ll look for shorter chainstays (among other things). As Leah says, I like my bikes. I just wanted to Love them, and I still may. I love the Sam. The Homer is my kid that I should love the same, and I'll see what develops. But it feels a little too... chainstay-ish. -- 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/55a424d2-7e48-4669-9075-26d699cb9221%40googlegroups.com.
