Rivs have always undergone fairly frequent change. Part of that is a
result of the production scheme (all fab is outsourced, which leads to
changes in price and availability) and part is due to new ideas
occurring to the designer or being brought to his attention. As he has
often said, the RBW ethos stays in every bike they make. I don;t think
any of them is a "bad" bike or a "Edsel" of the bike world. Some are
better suited to some riders or conditions than others.
Tailwinds
On 1/19/2014 1:20 PM, James Warren wrote:
Another little detail is that the name All Rounder only had definition
in a capital-letter sense in the time before the bikes marked
"Rivendell" were considered custom.
The very first Riv offerings in the 90's (Road, All-Rounder, the rare
Mountain, and later the Longlow) were all their fanciest frames and
all had standard geometry charts. They were not custom.
The All Rounder, non-custom bike had a geometry chart that eventually
said 700C for the bigger sizes, 26" inch for the smaller sizes (59 cm
being the cutoff I think.) There were set sizes and it wasn't
advertised to be customizable.
Then came the Atlantis, and that's really when the
Rivs-with-fun-names-on-the-downtube-that-didn't-say-Rivendell started
to become the norm. Sometime around this, Grant announced that the
bikes called Rivendell are all considered custom now and it became
clear that there would be two tiers of Riv frame offereings.
Henceforth with the fancier pure Rivendells, you could still get
something that met all the characteristics of an all rounder but there
was now no geometry chart to give it that name as a model name. And as
a custom, I'm guessing the wheel-size was determined on a case-by-case
basis (with some limitations imposed by Rivendell.)
So all-rounders still exist in the same way that Bombadils still
exist. (You have to be willing to go custom.)
-Jim W.
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