new bike! part two: selection

With a fairly good idea of what I wanted, I started scouring web sites and forums for clues of what's out there. Here are the bikes I considered:

Bianchi Volpe
Surly Cross-check
Surly Long Haul Trucker
Rivendell A. Homer Hilsen

The Bianchi is a beautiful bike, well-designed, with plenty of clearances in the right places. The olive-drab with red decals is a color scheme I particularly adore, with a welcome minimum of fussy details. Unfortunately, the largest size it comes in is a 61cm center-to-top. Not big enough for me at all, so it wound up a non-starter. But had it been available 2cm larger, I would have given it a serious look.

The Rivendell was almost perfect. Lots of commuters who favor all-around performance and practicality swear by them, and I won't offer much of an argument. I had loved my RB-1 for 13 years, so it made sense to look at the bikes its designer is creating today. In the case of his Homer Hilsen, I swooned. The Art Nouveau lettering! The randonneur geometry! The support for fat tires! The eccentric charm! And oh, that atomic-age headtube badge! I primed to open my checkbook when three things stopped me. First, the bike isn't available until January, and I need something now. Not insurmountable, but gave me a moment to stop and think. Second, the $1500 price tag for frame/fork would eat up a lot of my budget. I'm not averse to spending the money; I figure I save at easily $1000 a year in car and subway expenses by commuting on a bicycle, and I take care of my bikes well enough to get 15 years out of them if they don't get stolen. You do the math. But for $1500, I could purchase, modify, and almost completely outfit any of the other bikes on my list. So that came down as a second strike against Homer. Finally, the choice of long-reach sidepull brakes seemed a bit risky. Rivendell can tend towards the quirky; for a guy who rails against non-standard specs, Grant Petersen tends to include a lot of them (650B wheels, anyone?). Sometimes they pan out, sometimes they don't. In this case, there's only one manufacturer (Tektro) currently making decent brakes that fit this bike. Not sure what would have been so bad about spec'ing cantilevers (thus offering almost unlimited choices). So, Homer, so close. But not this time.

That left the two Surlys. I'd had my eye on Surly bikes for a couple of years, since someone often parked a candy-red Cross-Check in front of my office. It looked good, solid, and like a remarkably sensible, no-bullshit bike. Lots of braze-ons, a minimum of fussy design affectations, and smart chainstays that advertised "fatties fit fine" on a sticker. No, that's not referring rudely to your waistline... that means fat tires can fit in this road-ish frame with plenty of clearance left over for fenders. My second exposure to the Surly was, amusingly enough, reading the Ditty Bops' blog on their pedal-powered USA tour last year. This charmingly awesome band rode a pair of Cross-Checks from Santa Monica to NYC, while playing shows along the way. So I had confirmation that this was a bike that could make it from coast to coast, at least.

The Cross-Check bills itself as a race-ready cyclocross bike, but copious braze-ons belie its true capabilities. The bike seems plenty solid for moderate-duty loaded touring, and is plenty sprightly with narrow tires. It's also available as a pretty inexpensive frameset or a decently spec'd complete bike. Long horizontal rear drop-outs also allow a lot of flexibility to build the bike as a single speed, or vary the wheelbase by up to an inch for performance tweaks (or tire fitting).

The Long-Haul Trucker is the Cross-Check's heavy-duty younger brother, with heavier tubing, every braze-on you can think of, and a longer wheelbase. This is a true trekking machine, designed to be loaded like a burro and ridden across continents. Also, it's available in the ugliest shade of green in the Pantone book.

Ultimately, I chose the Cross-Check. I figure it's plenty capable of being loaded with my touring gear, and if I need the extra durability on offer from the Trucker, that probably means I'm going on a trek so outlandish that I should buy a special bike for it anyway. Also, the main job of this bike is going to be COMMUTING IN NEW YORK CITY. I need to preserve a modicum of lateral handling, since going in straight lines all the time is not always an option in the land of crazy taxis and clueless pedestrians. I don't need the tippiness of a messenger's keirin track bike, but the Cross-Check seems at least partially designed for nimbleness. The Trucker's loooong chainstays seem like they'd require an oil-tanker sized turning radius.

SO: Cross-Check it is. I went over to Bicycle Habitat, ordered me up a brand new 62cm one in Gray, and picked it up the day before Thanksgiving. I then promptly took it apart. Tune in for Part Three, when we put it all back together.