A look at the gravel bike Chipps uses for his, er, style of gravel riding when he's not mountain biking.
Very nice. I always replace ugly, unused dome headed mount bolts with loctite'd grub screws, looks much better.
Screwfix do some nice stainless bolts with very slim heads that are unobtrusive but smart.. I would put a picture up if that function was working!
It's a lovely looking bike.
I remember hearing about 931 years back when it first came out, people were getting quite excited about it but then it just seemed to vanish (Pipedream did a one-off 931 Sirius I think & Cotic may have looked at but stuck with titanium).
In my purely amateurish way I came to the conclusion that 931 was almost as good as titanium at almost the same price (it's highly corrosion resistant for example, but not corrosion proof in the same was as titanium). It seemed to come with some of titanium's disadvantages too - pricey, extremely difficult to work etc. I might be misremembering but I seem to recall that 931 loses the easy weldability/reparability of conventional steels (often cited as a key consideration for the use of steel bikes for expeditions).
I also appreciate that titanium can have issues with contaminated welds & cracking, but it seems by far a more known quantity than 931.
When you get into over two and a half grand for a frame range, a couple of hundred quid either way seems fairly irrelevant. As someone who's genuinely interested (and never going to be able to afford either) what are the reasons, beyond being able to say "I've a 931 bike in my collection", for choosing 931 over titanium (the Croix de Fer can be had in both with just £200 difference)?
Love a stainless steel raw bike. But crying out for wireless AXS to remove those internal wires. Mine is red eTap titanium without the huge number of mounts, but a quick rack is all I need.
931red could be the new username 🤣
Loving the comments...
931 is a pretty hard material to work with. Someone on my framebuilding course was planning on TIG welding a 931 road frame, but after a few attempts, he ended up silver brazing it as it was just too unforgiving for him. You definitely won't be able to get a tractor repair guy in Uzbekistan to weld up a crack like you might a more conventional steel.
The £200 price gap to the CdeF Ti is tough to justify not just saying 'Buy the Ti'. Having ridden both (though not side by side) I would have to side on the Ti camp, as @pjay puts it, it's a known quantity and I know many long term happy Ti bike owners.
@TiRed - Wireless AXS would be great on this (assuming you can (and I think you can) get full blanking plates for the braze-on cable ports. Although, as I mentioned, the latest three SRAM AXS groups wouldn't work with this as they're all UDH-only, so you'd be (luxuriously) stuck with previous AXS groupsets.
