Custom bike fit, Part 1.

Earlier in the week I spent the day down at Baum Cycles with Darren and Nick, working on my bike fit for my custom Baum Wills touring bike. We will tell you all about the two different bikes we will be using later but let me just say that the Wills is full of titanium goodness.

Most people that ride tend to head on down to the local bike shop and pick out a bike of the rack that they like. The salesperson will generally choose the most appropriate frame size based on your height then adjust the seat and handlebars to get you as comfortable as possible, and away you go.

The advantage of a custom built bike is that every aspect from geometry to materials are personally fitted to you, rather than you being fitted to the bike.

The starting point for the custom build process involves spending time riding the fit bike, a slightly odd looking stationary bike that can be adjusted in a variety of ways to fit a person of almost any shape and size.

The contact points between the rider and bike are very important at this stage and will have an effect on the final design, therefore the fit bike will generally be set up with the handlebars, saddle, pedals and shoes that you intend to use.

We have chosen to use Salsa Woodchipper MTB drop bars on our bikes.

Once the fit is complete, Nick will gather all the data from the fit bike and transfer them into bikeCAD on the computer, producing an illustrated version of the bike in this case the Wills drop bar 29er.

From here the final design may go through a little tweaking before Darren transfers all the information to construction drawings in autoCAD. Now it’s off to manufacture.

If you want to read a little more about a custom bike fit and the process go to: http://www.baumcycles.com/custom-fit and take a look. You can also browse some of the bikes Baum have built over the years.

In part 2 of our bike fit post, Garry will talk about his personal experience of the bike fit process and getting a custom bike made to fit compared to purchasing off the shelf.
Darren and Nick will then observe you riding and adjust the fit bike on the spot to customise various aspects of its geometry and work out the optimal rider position depending on the intended use. All of this is then fed into the final design.

Leg 2: Canada and the United States

5612km

12 US States

1 Canadian Province

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I had initially began thinking about the idea behind “The Long Road Tour” in mid 2009 but had never actually sat down and seriously gone over a definite route, I enjoyed looking over options for where I would like to visit if I were to actually do this, Starting in Australia and finishing In the Netherlands opened up two options in terms of direction for us, to head west through Asia and the Middle East, or east across the USA.

Not wanting to push our luck to much while convincing friends and family that our tour was a good idea we decided the USA option was our best option and also opened up charity opportunities with Livestrong and Michael J Fox Foundation in the USA.

We were always going to be heading from the west to the east and New York seemed like the logical end point, but where to start..... I have always wanted to visit Seattle and Portland so our start locations were also settled.

Our initial route across the country had us flying in to LA and jumping on the train to get us to our start point in Portland, then up to Seattle before we head east towards New York, via Lake Michigan and Toronto but after reviewing our route we decided to make a few changes mainly to the start and end of the leg.

We will now be starting our North American leg in Vancouver Canada, and through a mix of riding and ferries will make our way to Seattle via Vancouver Island, then down to Portland before heading east. Starting in Canada eliminated the need for multiple border crossings to and from the USA which should make things a little less complicated.

Now I tend to spend a little too much time looking over various cities and towns that we may pass through or stop in, and it was this that led to changes made to the later part of the US leg, Having moved our time in Canada to the start of the leg and reading a number of unsavoury things about some of the locations we would be passing through on our way to Toronto (Now I'm sure these places are actually not that bad, maybe I should stop reading so much otherwise we may not go anywhere.), we decided to move our route a little further south bellow the great lakes and head directly east to New York.

The new route will also hopefully allow us to meet up with some people who have followed us from quite early on.

We are also hoping to hold some sort of fundraising event at the end of our American leg in New York to benefit our US charities.

From there it is off to Leg 3 of the tour..... Europe!