So, the bike has arrived. But all is not well…
Delivery… the bike arrived on the right day, always a bonus! The huge delivery box means the bike comes fully assembled, and I just needed to rotate the bars into the correct position. I added my saddle and pedals, and was good to go. All the documentation for each component comes in a jiffy bag, very good. Along with some touch-up paint (red and blue in my case).
The spare spokes I requested (paid for) came as a loose bundle, so I don’t know which is front and rear, nor d/s and n-d/s. A bit annoying really, as I’ll have to fit one into the wheel to find out (and that will only ever be at the side of the road while doing a repair).
Straight out of the box… The bar tape finishing is a bit of a mess, peeling off and ripped. The bar tape itself is wrapped so close to the centre it means the brake cables prevent installation of a bar-bag bracket. Now, this is a big deal for me, especially so as it’s a touring bike built up by a company specialising in touring bikes. It means I’ll have to remove the bar tape and redo it.
The steerer tube appears to be cut. I expect this from a high-street general bike shop, but didn’t expect this from Thorn. I expected we’d err on the side of caution and the steerer would be cut once I’d ridden the bike for a while, and was absolutely sure. Especially so as I’ve got the expensive MERVC fork. I just hope I don’t want to raise the bars!
There’s a nick in the head tube, and a score on the stem (both were obviously pre-shipping). Both relatively small, and don’t really affect much. Having said that, it does negatively affect any, “wow, awesome, a new bike,” feelings.
The first 10 miles… I raised the saddle height about 15mm, but I still find myself uncomfortable and pushing myself to sit on the rear-lip of the saddle to feel ‘right’. The feel at the front end (stretch to the bars) is very good, and much better than my LHT. But I’m concerned about the saddle position, as the saddle is as far back as it can go. The LHT has a lower BB, which may be the difference. It does feel that the problem is ’saddle relative to the pedals’, and horizontally rather than vertically.
The Tektro (RL540) brake levers rattle whenever the brakes are applied, it’s the little QR pin on the levers that’s making the noise. I have the same levers on the LHT and they don’t rattle. Quite annoying, and I think I’ll have to replace the levers as it’ll drive me nuts. The brakes don’t feel as powerful on the CT (rear BB7 disc, front Deore V-brake) as they do on my LHT (LX v-brake front/rear). But they are easily powerful enough. There’s a rubbing noise from the rear disc which indicates the rotor isn’t quite true, but that’s pretty common.
The Dura Ace downtube shifters (spec’d by me), oh my, these are very ugly from the top-side. The online pictures show the underside, all nice and sleek looking, but the top-side (the side you see all the time) are agricultural. And boy oh boy does that agricultural theme continue when you use them. About 20 years ago I had some Deore thumb shifters on a mountain bike, and they clunk-clicked every shift. These Dura Ace shifters remind me of them; very, very far from finesse. I have second-hand Suntour Radius friction shifters on my LHT, and they are silent and silky smooth. I think the Dura Ace shifters are for the bin, unless I can find a way to disable the indexing.
Which brings me to the 10-speed wide gears. I didn’t want this system, I am perfectly happy with 8-speed, but 10 speed is what the manufacturers want us to buy. To my absolute horror (really!) it turns out that on the middle chain-ring the chain will rub when using the left-most couple or right-most couple of sprockets. So, I’m riding along up a hill which flattens out, and shift up a few sprockets and then the chain rub starts and I have to trim the front mech. I’d expect this from the granny-ring on the smaller sprockets, or the outer ring and the larger sprockets. But the middle-ring, really? Do you guys trim with STIs too? I suspect I’ll junk the lot and revert to 8-speed, which also means I can get my silky smooth Sun Tour shifters too.
The MERVC fork is an interesting thing. Coming down a 35mph hill, of not-super-smooth tarmac, it started sort of bouncing a little. It never felt dangerous at all (I was going straight), but is was something a bit more than a vibration. It just felt like there was not enough weight over the front end to dampen it down. It was absolutely fine on smooth downhills. Maybe I just need to lean over the front wheel on descents? It’s another annoyance, as the steerer has been cut it’s going to be difficult to sell on the fork should I wish to revert to the standard fork. I am really hoping that this is just a slight ‘live with it’ thing, in return for all day comfort (though my Trucker has all day comfort without the bounce).
Finally the bars. They trail back past the head tube, which means my knees hit the bar-ends if I lean forward in the saddle, or stand up on the pedals. It doesn’t happen often, but really it shouldn’t happen at all. I think the bars are excessively long. But they are wide enough (44cm), which I like. Although I think I would need to replace them with some a bit shorter in the trailing part.
What do I actually like…? Well, I can easily bend the axle of a square-taper bottom bracket (causing chain rub), so the external bearing system on the CT is very welcome as it’s much stiffer. The rear triangle of the frame feels smoother over the bumps than the Trucker, which is welcome too. The whole bike (11kg) is lighter than the Trucker (14kg), but it felt no different on the hills; only climbing the three flights of stairs to my flat!
serious things to think about:
1. the MERVC fork being too springy
2. saddle position not being comfortable
component changes to improve things (£££):
1. replace the drop-bars
2. replace the brake levers
3. replace the shifters
4. replace the bar-tape
5. probably change the whole chain-set to 8-speed
6. replace the Deore v-brake (when it wears out) with an LX or higher
Unfortunately, for now, the (slightly too big for me) Long Haul Trucker is a better riding bike than the Club Tour. I’ll take the CT out tomorrow for 80km or so and see how things go. I have a 200km Audax ride on Sunday and I’d like to take the CT to give it a thorough test ride, see how tomorrow goes first though. At the moment it feels like I should have just bought the frame and forks on their own, as most of the components I’ll probably end up throwing away.
Currently I’m pretty disappointed, as it doesn’t feel any sort of ‘step up’ from a Long Haul Trucker; though it was more expensive and more fuss is made of Thorn’s. I could certainly ride around the problems, and those problems may well be peculiar to me. It’s also quite likely that the component changes may make the bike feel much better, thought at some further cost. However, the fundamental frame questions (fork and saddle position) are not really solvable.
thisdougb 