Rando frame shopping list
The mlcm is pretty well suited for randonneuring, but there are a few things I’d like to change/add for a less chaotic bicycle.
- There are too many zipties on the thing; I’d love to have ports in the frame so I could internally route all of the wiring that’s currently ziptied all over the thing.
- A third pair of bottle cage mounts would be nice (the pipe clamps add a touch of elegance, but bottle cage mounts would weigh less and not be a potential source of things moving around and fouling the crankset.
- braze-ons for the front rack; the stupid p-clamps keep migrating southwards and tipping the front rack to one side or another.
- More clearance under the fork crown – Ideally, I’d like to have a frame where I could fit 33mm tires and fenders, not so much so I could run out and get fatter tires (though I would like to try the 35mm Nomads on the MLCM so I can compare them to the 28s that are on it right now) but so that I would have enough room to fit the fenders without having to do heroic efforts to wedge them in (and still have them foul the brakes, sigh)
- canti posts, not for canti brakes but so I can put v-brakes onto the bicycle.
- a mountpoint for the rear dynolight.
- a pump peg on the DS seat stay.
- a light mount for a battery blinky on the NDS seat stay.
- a steel stem with a mountpoint for a bell.
- a fork crown mountpoint for bolting the fender in, so I don’t have to mess around with some stupid tire-fouling daruma.
- vertical dropouts (or slightly forward facing dropouts) so that I don’t have to pull out the fender line so I can get the rear wheel in and out.
- an elevated mountpoint on the chainstays for the fender – mountpoints that sit between the chainstays mean that wide fenders foul on them (the mlcm and the project bike both use steel strapping to elevate the fender mountpoint above the chain stays, because both of them use wide fenders that don’t fit between them.
- Three sets of mounts on the rear dropouts, so I have room to fit a rear rack if I lose my mind and decide to do bike camping instead of bike camping plus have the ability to fit two fender stays back there for fender stability.
- Two sets of mounts on the fork dropouts for the same reason – I’d love a longer fender in the front, but I’d not feel comfortable with it unless I could put a fender stay on the front extension.
- A proper kickstand plate, so I can horrify my friends and acquaintances by putting a kickstand on a rando bike.
In my perfect fantasy world I’d also like to get a pair of forks, one high-trail (like the one that’s on the mlcm today) and one that’s low-trail, so I can swap them in and out and compare the ride characteristics of the two.
Alas, this will cost me money and time (I’d need to buy a torch and spend a few weeks killing practice lugs, then spend a few months mangling a tubeset to shape, then brazing it all together; Torches are kind of expensive, as is steel tubing, though the latter is cheaper if I scrounge junk frames and cut them apart for the tubing) and I don’t know how I’d even fit this in given that I’m currently unable to do more than one project at a time.
Maybe next summer when I’ve got a functional right shoulder again.
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Well, I guess it’s still too early. I read the headline as “Rando frame shoplifting.”