So, the term “gravel” doesn’t mean much.\u00a0 The definition Seven starts with is “a drop bar bike with at least 38 mm knobby tires and lower gearing than a road bike.”<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 Everything else is open to interpretation.<\/p>\n The conversation reminded me of my late ’80s project bike, the Singularity<\/strong>; <\/em>a drop-bar mountain race bike I designed and built at Merlin Metalworks. This is the only image I can find. It’s an old photocopy of a black-and-white photo from Mountain Bike Action magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n Today, this design is called a \u201cmonster cross\u201d bike.<\/p>\n Zapata Espinoza<\/a>, editor of Mountain Bike Action<\/em>, printed a couple of pages about some of the prototypes and project bikes we had at the Merlin factory. Maybe we’ll share more of those at some point.\u00a0 As far as I can decipher, the photo is from the June 1991 issue of MBA.<\/p>\n I had two missions for this bike project:<\/p>\n I accomplished both missions with the Singularity<\/em>.\u00a0 It was way too stiff (particularly because it was the days before front suspension), but I found it race-worthy in the woods and in criteriums.\u00a0 This bike started me on the path of size-specific tubesets and the realization that tubing specification really matters quite a lot.<\/p>\n The bike was a prototype on a number of fronts, not just because of the drop bars. Here are the elements I remember that were unique or firsts back in the late ’80s:<\/p>\n I designed, machined, and welded this frame.<\/p>\n Mountain bike performance results<\/strong>:\u00a0 I think I raced and trained offroad on the drop bar setup for about a year and a half.\u00a0 Once I had the bike in the drop bar configuration, I rarely swapped it to the mountain bar setup.\u00a0 I loved drops.<\/p>\n Road bike performance results<\/strong>:\u00a0 I raced many a local training criterium on this bike.<\/p>\n The bike’s weak point was the drop bar brakes. The lever arms for drop bars were different from mountain bike levers, so it was difficult to get enough braking power from the cantilever setup. Also, the brake levers themselves were too small for my hands and, therefore, difficult to hang onto during rocky descents. Otherwise, it was a good setup that got me through many rides.<\/p>\n I don’t recall what happened to the Singularity frameset. I was never much of a keeper. Of the hundred-plus prototypes and project bikes I’ve built over the years, I kept only one.<\/p>\n Hat tip to John Tomac, one of my cycling heroes. He used to race drop-bar mountain bikes back in 1990. I think I might have first seen him race that way in 1989, but I can’t remember. The internet says 1990.<\/p>\n Photo caption explained:\u00a0 Zap had this weird thing where he’d add a second last letter to our first names. Don’t ask me why. Zap stayed at Merlin for a few days.\u00a0 When not riding and talking shop, a group of us watched some bad movies, as he mentions in the photo’s caption. I don’t recall what we watched, but I’d wager there was a Godzilla movie on the docket and probably something starring Burt Reynolds. I recall that Zap was not impressed with the humor.\u00a0 I forgave him because he was, and is, an incredible documenter of the times. No one did more for mountain biking in the early days than Zap and Mountain Bike Action.\u00a0 Here’s to Zap for documenting so much over the past 35-plus years in Mountain Bike Action, Road Bike Action, and other media.<\/p>\n +++<\/p>\n Time tracking:\u00a0 Frame build date circa mid-1988.\u00a0 I estimate that date range in part because Zap visited Merlin in the winter of 1989-1990.\u00a0 (I remember riding with him in the freezing cold.\u00a0 Fine riding weather for us Bostonians, but not great for a guy living in LA.)\u00a0 The bike was pretty beat by the time he took this photo.\u00a0 I must have had about a season of riding on it already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Words: Rob Vandermark, Seveneer The other day, a few of us were discussing the state of gravel bikes and when we first rode what we’d consider a gravel bike. What is a gravel bike, after all, other than a rig you ride on dirt roads and trails? That could be anything. We used to ride … Continue reading “Gravel Bikes in 1988”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,1203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16190"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17068,"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16190\/revisions\/17068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sevencycles.com\/7\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/vandermark-project-singularity-merlin-circa-1988.jpg\")
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