The annual Builder Round-Up and Grodeo gravel ride took place this weekend at Enve’s HQ in Ogden, Utah. This year I flew instead of driving, which gave me a chance to use the functionality of my folding gravel bike. For full door-to-door travel I used my old Bike Friday trailer frame to convert the travel case to tow mode and pedaled the 40 miles from the airport – in 102°, which made it seem a bit further….
This year there were 17 custom bikes on display, from various parts of the world. The material selection was heavy on titanium, with 10 ti bikes, four in steel, one in steel/carbon and two carbon. Time for photographing bikes and interviewing builders was limited, so I couldn’t cover everything, but tried to get a bit deeper into each story.
We got lucky with cooler temperatures for the 92 mile ride on Saturday – challenging as ever, especially with the altitude for me, but a great day out in the mountains.
For round one we have a quartet of custom titanium builds, each taking a different construction approach and philosophy.
Moots Routt CRD
Nate Bradley, the president of Moots, got my craziness award for the weekend – he raced (and won) a six hour mountain bike race on Friday evening (that finished at midnight), and then was ready to roll out for the 92-mile gravel ride at 7AM on Saturday.
Moots continue to produce titanium frames in Steamboat Springs, with an operations team of 12 producing around 1,000 frames a year. About 90% are sold through their dealer network, with the rest being direct to customer. Everything is built to order. Roughly 60% of the output is gravel, with the remainder split between road and mountain. Moots use a third party testing facility in California for destructive fatigue testing. This helps identify any weaknesses, and then both the design and process can be critiqued for improvements – whether for example that is a wall thickness change or a modification of the tacking sequence.
Buying a custom or boutique bike for road/all-road/gravel/adventure can get a little confusing for the rider to figure out what they need for their riding. I know that I generally start by asking about tire size and terrain – Bradley made an interesting point that sometimes it can feel like a disadvantage that Moots has model designations, as the customer might need to be directed differently than they were thinking initially, depending on what they need for rider positioning and tire volume.
Did we do a good job with this story?
