To introduce Eroica’s answer to gravel bike racing – the NOVA Eroica – Stan Engelbrecht, from Eroica South Africa, sat down with Cape Town frame builder, David Mercer to discuss how he saw the evolution of the gravel bike progress in the South African cycling context. And whether a gravel bike is the perfect bike to explore our beautiful roads on.
I wanted to talk to you about gravel bikes. When you and I met they didn’t exist. That was just a few years ago.
No. We were still trying to figure out all sorts of things to call them. We started calling them cyclocross tourers.
CX tourers yes.
And then shortly after that there was the whole Road Plus thing that happened, where people were putting 650b wheelsets on road bikes with sort of big, fat tyres on there. That definitely paved the way for the gravel thing.
When you started building frames, did you ever think that you would be building gravel bikes. Was it an idea that existed in your head – this thing that was something between a mountain bike and a road bike?
No, no, no. When I started building I suppose I imagined only building hardtail mountain bike frames. And yet the second frame that I built was a road frame. The third frame I built was a kind of cyclocross track frame.
So when did you build your first gravel bike?
My first true gravel bike? Hmmm. That’s a good question. In 2016 I was asked whether I would like to send a frame to Columbus in Milan, to be a part of their new framebuilding craft exhibition at the Milan Triennale. I built myself a lugged all-road bike that could take 32c tyres, with caliper brakes, which I cheekily called a gravel bike. Because “gravel bikes” were juuuuuust starting to be a thing. A classic horizontal top tube road bike, albeit with slightly modern diameters, but classic looking. That was kinda the first… Well, I called it a “gravel bike”, but tongue in cheek. But I suppose these days it wouldn’t even qualify as an all-road bike.
Nowadays that’s just a road bike.
Gravel bikes have come a long way. In fact, gravel bikes that are built now have more in common with the hardtails that I thought I would be building through and through when I started this whole adventure.
And your hardtails are more like downhill bikes?
Yes, I guess. But my hardtails look relatively conservative to people who follow the geometry trend. The geometry that they’re building hardtails to these days would have seemed barney when I started building! Hardtails now days just look so bananas next to the hardtails from 2014. Personally I think that hardtail geometry is going a little crazy. I am sure that we will see everything turn around and reign itself in just a little bit.
The angles will come back up again.
Yes, and everything will just get a little bit shorter. I think the current crop of super long, super slack,long reach, ultra, ultra short stems… They make a lot of sense for high speed descending, but they quickly become a handful on tight, twisty trails. And we have a lot of tight twisty trails here. One of my favourite ones is tight and twisty. And negotiating those kinds of trails on the pantechnicons that are today’s hardtails is a task.
So, talking about the South African landscape, was there a moment when you realised, “Wait, hang on, a gravel bike is actually the perfect bicycle for South African roads”?
Yah. We’ve got so much here. Heading out on a road ride you kind of look out wistfully at the paths through the parks, and the short cuts that run down the greenbelt. Especially when your elbow is being buzzed by taxis screaming past. And suddenly jumping onto those little detours looks incredibly appealing. And then likewise, a mountain bike just frequently feels like the wrong tool for the job. Like, getting around the peninsula for instance, there is a lot of extra tyre to drag around a loop like that. But a gravel bike mixes everything up quite nicely. So I think gravel bikes really are the ideal solution.
Hmm. And further afield? Our countryside is full of beautiful dirt roads.
We have amazing dirt roads!
Where a mountain bike is maybe too much, and where a road bike is maybe too little.
Absolutely. But I think the whole gravel bike category has expanded so much that to try and to put in a nutshell is becoming harder and harder. There’s no single definition. For some people it’s an adventure bike to go out exploring. For other people it’s something that is literally for racing on gravel. And there’s so many different permutations in between, but I suppose the beauty of that is that there really is a bicycle to suit anyone.
Considering all the variations of what a gravel bike can be, what is your technical definition of the perfect South African bike?
Um… That’s a tough question. And no matter what answer I spit out, there are going to be nay-sayers on either side of the fence pointing out all the things I’ve left off. But I think ultimately any and every bike is going to be a compromise. There are going to be things they do well, and things they are not going to do well. And I think a gravel bike aims to try and minimise those compromises. You would want something that would be equally at home on, smooth-ish roads, and as at home on gravel roads. I think for the purposes of this, we will leave out exciting, plunging singletrack, because that might not necessarily be everyone’s cup of tea. And we will focus on the roads and public by-ways that we have here. So, I think that ultimately, most gravel bikes these days could benefit from having two different wheel sizes.
You mean one bike, two wheel sets?
Yes. I think that really helps to expand the versatility. You can have something that for all intents and purposes is an all road bike, with its 700c wheels and up to 38c, or a 40c knobbly tyre. But that could happily wear 32c or 35c for Peninsula laps. And that same bike could wear some 650b wheels with 2.1, or 2.2 inch tyres, so you could take this thing out on some rougher roads.
Having said that, I think people frequently want bigger tyres, but don’t actually need them. I have been surprised with what I can get out of my own road bike riding down the greenbelt, on 32c Gatorskins. And I think that most people that see me belting down the greenbelt on my road bike have been surprised at what it can do. And then also my own cyclocross tourer, that can take a 38 or 40C tyre – it’s amazing what you can get away with. So… hmmm. There’s no easy way to answer this question, I would tend to go with something that’s more of an all-road-ish gravel bike. I don’t you want it to be too slack, and not too geared towards the adventure side of things, otherwise it feels like a dog on the road. So I would say head angle of around 72 degrees, seat angle 74 degrees, um…
Don’t give your secrets away now!
Yaaah… Haha! So, low-ish BB. Long-ish chainstays. And tyre clearance up to a 40c front and rear, with the option of putting big 650b wheels on with 2.1s if you really have to have that extra cush.
Sounds a lot like my bike.
Yes it does. Your bike was very much ahead of the curve. I don’t even know what you decided to call it in the beginning.
I think we just started calling it the CX tourer. That was in 2014. Actually, a lot of the standards that we have now didn’t exist then, like the through axle. I remember you being quite resistant to the through axle idea when it started becoming a standard recently.
Yah! I was. I’m very slow to adopt new things. I remember even when V-brakes came out I was dragging my heels about these new fangled things. I got my first proper mountain bike for my 16th birthday. It was a Kona Fire Mountain, with a lovely Kona Project Two rigid fork, and it had cantilever brakes. Not even V-brakes. And with every single improvement along the way, I feel like I’ve been an old curmudgeon, and really, really resistant to change. So it took me ages to get my first suspension fork. I was persevering with my rigid fork for a long, long time. And it took me ages to get disk brakes. In 2005 I went to Vancouver, and I did a lot of riding on the North Shore on my Kona Explosif hardtail with a 3-inch travel fork up front, and V-brakes! I mean, disc brakes were out but I didn’t think I needed these. V-brakes were plenty for me. Again I waited a long time to get discs. But when I did, I wondered why I had waited so long – they were amazing!
Haha!
Same thing happened with dropper posts – why did I wait so long? Amazing! And I suppose I’m coming around too with through axles. And my time will come with flat mounts too.
But you’re already building with through-axles and flat mounts all the time?
I have to. Otherwise, people wouldn’t want to buy my bikes.
Ok. So you’re not completely sold on the standard yet?
No. Not entirely. It takes a little while for me to wrap my head around it.
Haha!
It just feels like as soon as I wrap my head around something the industry goes and gets itself a new standard. Well at least some of these new standards look nice, like flat mounts. But if you were thinking about ways to attach a caliper onto a steel frame the whole flat mount thing seems like an awfully tricky way to do it. There’s a lot of material that needs to be ground away by hand. I suppose it’s also about finding ways to accommodate these new standards while still staying true to what I want to build, what I want to do. So I don’t feel like a sell out. I have my own take on things.
What do you think is the next new fad that’s going to ruin frame building for you in the next couple of years?
Hmmm. I think the whole internal cable routing thing is starting to get a little bananas. Routing everything through the handle bars, through the stem, through the steerer, or having it slip through the headset bearing… There’s no doubt it looks great in photos. But I think that’s where the greatness ends. Because every other aspect of it is a total ball-ache. Threading the housing, the cables through, taking the brakes off, bleeding the brakes every single time you want to service your headset. Feels like a bit of a step backwards to me. It does look really clean, but, why do bikes have to look so clean, I mean…
For the photos man! For the photos.
Hahahaha! So that… I do roll my eyes a little bit when I get asked to do crazy cable routing.
Have you done any yet?
Not to that extent. I make a big song and dance about how silly it is. And then people relent, or they stop emailing me. So either way… I haven’t had to get there.
I think another thing that makes me roll my eyes is that people get very worked up about a particular tube set. They have this idea about a particular tube set in their mind, and they just don’t want to consider any alternatives. Even though that particular tube set may not even come in the diameter and butting profiles that make sense for their build. At times cyclists can get caught up in the hype around a particular tube set. And yet a lot of the time the name of the tube set only refers to that particular combination of diameters and butt lengths. And the exact same material is used for other tube sets.
So what is your most requested tube set?
I have had quite a few requests for Columbus Spirit tubing. Columbus Spirit is one of their omicron tube sets. And the composition of it is actually the same as the Columbus Life tubing. Although the Spirit is available in very modern diameters, with very large, oversized tubing, especially appealing to people who have come from riding carbon fibre bikes with their massively oversized, bloated profiles. So I suppose they want to replicate something like that on a steel bike. But, going that huge doesn’t always make sense. Especially for smaller, shorter riders. And butt lengths don’t make sense either. You end up cutting away all the butt, which you need. So, frequently there just aren’t options that work. And then when you start mentioning using an alternative – with exactly the same steel, tube thicknesses, and diameters that are slightly more appropriate – that’s a big disappointment for a lot of people.
I can just imagine.
So most of the time my frames don’t actually get tubing stickers. They get a little badge on them. A cast Columbus brass dove badge. The very first frame we used one of those on was your Buitestander. And even that – I remember when you came to me with the brass badge idea… I was like ‘Oooh… this sounds like a ball-ache! Argh!’
And now look at me. Now I can’t even imagine building frames without sticking one of those cast brass dove badges on. I suppose it’s just kind of a motto for life for me, it’s all a ball-ache until it isn’t. And then I can’t imagine doing it any differently.
That might be the title of the interview!
Hahaha!
What is the most common bike you’re building at the moment?
Most common bike is a gravel bike. At least half of what I build are gravel bikes. And the remainder of what I build encompasses all of my hardtails, road bikes, the odd dirt jump bikes, kids bikes. And the odd track bike.
And what do you think about gravel bikes and suspension?
Well, gravel bikes are becoming increasingly difficult to define. A gravel bike used to look like a road bike with bloated knobbly tyres. Now there’s a new crop of gravel bikes coming out with flat bars, big, almost mountain bike tyres, and they’re running suspension forks. And increasingly they’re looking more and more like hardtail mountain bikes. I suppose there’s a tendency to think that we have come full circle. That we are re-inventing the mountain bike all over again. And yet, we’ve kind of been there. I mean those Paris-Roubaix bikes that started coming out in the 90s with their suspension forks, and a couple of them that even went as far as being full suspension. I suppose that’s where the seed was planted.
They looked cool. They still look cool! The photos. There it comes back – it’s all about the photos at the end of the day. Has anyone asked you to build one yet?
No. I haven’t had to build one of those yet. But I have had a few conversations with people who’ve started out asking me for a hardtail and then after chatting about what it is that they’re actually looking for, it turns out they want a hardtail with a very short travel suspension fork, and flat bars, and they’re going to run skinnier tyres, and they going use it predominantly for gravel riding. So I suppose even without putting a name on it, we are already having discussions that will create bikes that will look very much like a gravel bike with suspension.
What do you think about gravel racing, and all these gravel specific races that are popping up all over the place?
I think that it’s exciting that there are these gravel racing events. That there’s more options for people out there. It’s no longer just mountain biking, or road racing, or BMX, or track, or trail riding, or downhill, or dirt jumping, or artistic cycling, or dual slalom, or… there must be quite a few that I’ve left out.
Hahaha! When you say it like that, it’s all kind of stupid right. Just get a bicycle and ride!
Hahahaha. But I think that’s also one of the beautiful things about cycling. It’s like this massive, huge dysfunctional family. You can have all these huge crazy misfit nutters all under the same roof. All united by the fact that they are on two wheels and pedalling themselves about. There is just so much variation. You’ve got weird Uncle Bob, and crazy jack-face, jerk-nut whatever. And they’re all part of the same family. There are not a lot of sports that enjoy the same kind of diversity and vitality that we have. And we’ve got everything from the disciplines that really require everyone to fit in and other ones where one needs to stand out.
Very good. Nicely said. Ok, last question. What’s your most favourite thing you’ve ever built?
Hmmmm… Hmmm… I think. I think. I think the favourite thing I’ve built, and has given me the most kicks for the longest time, and surprised me the most was my full suspension frame – the Gangly Gibbon.
When I built it I had zero experience with full suspension bikes. I never spent much time riding one, and when it came to building one for myself I spent a very long time thinking about what it was that I wanted out of a full suspension bike. And how that set of criteria would look in terms of how the suspension kinematics were going to work.
That meant lot of reading. A lot of learning. I felt like a bit of a mad scientist trying to distil all these ideas, and coming up with theories on suspension curves, and stuff that I could really call my own. Right up to the point until this thing was built, I had absolutely no idea whether it would actually feel right. And the first ride was a total revelation. It felt astounding!
Then I kept waiting for it to break. And it didn’t. It kept going. So, from a purely selfish point of view, I love riding my own Gangly Gibbon, so that’s still my favourite thing that I’ve built. And mine looks like a piece of shit these days. It’s the rattiest looking bouncy bike out there. Initially I left it raw, because I was convinced I would have to cut it up and rebuild it and modify things. People keep looking at it saying, ‘Shouldn’t you give it a paint job?’ But I never did. And it just started to get rustier and rustier, and at one point I figured I would have to preserve it somehow, so I gave it a rattle can paint job. Which is now starting to look very tatty. But I just can’t actually… every time I think about painting it, I just can’t. I just can’t bring myself to do it. I feel like I might mess with its mojo… It does look like a piece of shit. But it’s my piece of shit. And I love that piece of shit. And you can’t paint a piece of shit.
So just get on your bike – and join us for NOVA Eroica in Montagu. 22 April. Register here.
Thank you to Dane Zijlstra of Killat, and Hailey Moore for the use of some of their images above.
