Getting the green light to build my dream bike wasn't all I imagined it would be.
I have always been more of a forager, building up bikes from other people's discards, as my reintroduction to cycling came at the same time as our first mortgage and a young family, about 35 years ago. Spending money on myself has always been hard. The stress of picking each and every component without boundaries was really getting to me and I could see my financier getting annoyed at the time I was spending on research.
I had initially been talking to Dimitry at Triton about a custom titanium frame when I ended up chatting to Kashi Leuchs at Black Seal, the local importer for Open. I was Kashi's webmaster back in the day when he rode with Cadel Evans, Tinker Juarez, and Christoph Sauser on the Volvo Cannondale team. This was my only source of fruity parts way back then; contra deals with Kashi. He offered me his demonstrator Open Up carbon gravel bike for a good price and my problem was solved. Or was it ...?
Undoing the modern
There were some issues. I wasn't a fan of many of the features that modern bikes come with out of the box. Internal cable routing, 1x shifting, press-fit bottom brackets, and SRAM hydraulic brakes were all things I had managed to avoid up until then or had bad experiences with previously.
In what turned out to be a process of continual change, my first step was to locate some left-hand shifter internals to convert the bike into a 2x drivetrain. The good news is that SRAM cable shifters are incredibly easy to work on, assuming you can source the replacement parts. A friend of a friend found some for me in Australia and away I went.
I replaced the 1x rear derailleur with a WiFli Force 2x variant, a WolfTooth road-link expander, an 11-42T cassette, and a 46/34 chainring combo on the front. Ideally, an early model SRAM 10-speed Exact-Actuation mountain bike derailleur would have been great, but the cable exit port position for the Open wasn't compatible. This was pretty common at the time, but I see a lot of the more recently designed bikes that support cable shifting have the cables exiting mid-chainstay rather than from the very endpoint of the frame which really “opens up” (wink wink) derailleur choice.
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