My size Small tester has a 75 degree seat tube and 72 degree headtube angles – both adding to its ‘quick but stable’ overall feel. It has a slightly sloping top tube – enough to look cool without being too aggressive. The frame angles are Tom’s “classic” geometry – which is a fairly ‘neutral’ design – and based on his 40 years of frame building, he knows what he likes. The downtube is big and round – an efficient and economic use of the world’s simplest all-round tube shape – Tom says that a round tube is the stiffest and most efficient shape under torsion. The head tube uses 1.125 bearings on top and on the bottom, and connects to the top- and down-tubes via carbon lug. Tube shapes are traditional round carbon tubes, and chosen for each frame size. Ritchey is one of these, and while their own carbon materials selection and layup schedules are proprietary, they’ve chosen the best mix of stiffness and comfort for the ride Tom wants you to experience. From a consumer perspective, fierce competition in the cycling biz has pushed carbon production to the highest levels of quality ever – which means that there are a lot of bikes made to very good standards from very good quality processes and materials. The frames are made overseas in a facility that also produces for some very high end brands, and Ritchey’s been developing its carbon production for several years now to find the best suppliers for Ritchey branded gear. The frame is a bonded lugged carbon design, using a moulded carbon lug at the headtube, and inserted aluminum lugs at the seat tube and bottom bracket to best handle the clamping stresses of the breakaway coupling system. It’s about taking a proven platform and tweaking small parts to Tom’s personal tastes, then sharing this with the rest of us. One of Tom’s design strengths is his traditional approach to making things better, or maybe it’s his approach to improving a traditional design, but this bike is not about fancy angles or tube shapes. Fully built, it comes apart in a couple of minutes, and goes back together in just a few more – less if you practise a few times. The frame separates (and joins) at the seat collar, and in the down tube just above the bottom bracket – held together with just three bolts. The costs to develop additional moulds for a run of multi-sized carbon frames are not cheap either, so in keeping with the long standing Ritchey value proposition, this one makes sense on all fronts.Īs a breakaway travel bike, this frame was one of the most interesting, and one of the most fun to ride bikes I’ve tested.
RITCHEY BREAKAWAY FULL
Ritchey’s road line now includes a full steel road frame, a carbon-titanium frameset, a steel break-away frameset, and this full carbon break-away – further evidence that Tom likes to keep things simple, and improve only where he knows he can make a difference.īefore I got into this bike’s tech, I had to know “why no full carbon road frame?” The answer was simple – Tom believes his Carbon Break-Away frame fully delivers the ride qualities he wants, and is as good as a one-piece road frame would be. His designs have always been known for high quality, good value, and very often ingenious thinking. He started a company that’s evolved into developing specialized components for off-road, and road cycling. As a cyclist, and as an inventor, Tom Ritchey fully pursued his passion and began first building some of the best mountain bikes around (in the mid-1980’s I saved up about $1000 to buy a top of the line Ritchey Montare in cherry red painted full chromoly steel – it was also offered in a forest green -). There’s nothing as pretty as a freshly built bike, just waiting for that first ride.Īnyone who’s been around cycling since the 80’s pretty much knows about Tom Ritchey – he was part of that small crop of adventurers along with Joe Breeze, Charlie Kelly, Gary Fisher and few others who basically invented mountain biking.
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