Your Bike Is Enough Bike: There are lots of fancy bikes featured on YouTube channels and review sites. But you already have a bike and it’s probably perfectly fine. Really, it’s not the bike which is holding you back.

This is not an article trying to argue that you shouldn’t buy a new bike. I like New Bike Day just as much as the next bike nerd. Last year (2025) I had New Bike Day twice in a couple of months, after no new bike day for more than 10 years.

No, the premise of this piece is that all your bike wants is for you to ride it. Your bike — whatever type of bike it is — probably isn’t perfect. That’s fine, you’re not perfect either.

Your bike probably has some quirks. There’s a ding in the top tube, there’s quite a lot of accumulated dirt behind the fork crown, and sometimes it doesn’t shift exactly perfectly. The rear tyre profile is squaring off cos that tyre is pretty ancient and you should have replaced it a couple of years ago.

But that’s part of its charm. You have quirks too. You do and you know it.

But you know what? Any fancy new bike you buy just ends up being that old bike that sometimes you love and sometimes you hate. Regardless of whether it’s a new bike or your old faithful, you never can get away from the fact that to make your bike go somewhere, you have to pedal it. To go up a hill you gotta dig in and suffer, doesn’t matter if your bike is made entirely of carbon and you are made entirely of balsa wood. As Greg Lemond is supposed to have said: “Bike riding never gets any easier, you just go faster.” (Until you don’t go faster, you go slower).

Never let the siren call of New Bike Day deter you from getting outside and on the road, trail or path with the bikes you have now. Because each day that you spend going on a bike ride right now is exactly one million percent better than each day you spend planning your budget for how much you think you can get away with spending on your next bike.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and of course for most of us, that is absolutely true.

But I don’t think that mechanical things around us need to be very high-tech to seem like magic.

Magnets, for instance. 100% magical. I now have a helmet (POC Cularis) which has a magnetic buckle. That’s so fancy that I can barely believe how fancy I am. The sling bag in which I carry my daily essentials uses magnetics for the buckles.

Pneumatic tyres. Pneumatic tyres seem almost magical in their ability to transform the experience of moving on wheels. The tyre filled with air was an invention (thanks to Scottish vet John Boyd Dunlop!) with extraordinary consequences. The air inside our tyres, precisely pressurised to support our exact system weight acts as a natural shock absorber, cushioning impacts and smoothing out the world beneath us. It’s like we have captured a cloud and imprisoned it around our wheels. If that’s not magic, I know not what is.

Then let’s think about traction, and how a tyre interacts with the road or path. A pneumatic tyre deforms ever so slightly as it rolls. This subtle transformation of the tyre’s shape allows it to conform to the surface below, giving the rider confidence in their bike’s grip on the road. The air pressure in the tyre provides just enough rigidity to maintain structure while allowing this essential flexibility — a fine balance indeed.

And the final piece of magic is the efficiency of the good old pneumatic tyre, unchanged conceptually since 1887. By absorbing the energy that would otherwise be lost to vibration and shock, pneumatic tyres allow us to travel farther with less effort. This efficiency transforms the entire experience of riding a bike. That feeling when you are rolling along a steady descent without pedalling, and it seems possible that you could ride off the edge of the earth before you have to pedal again. Magical.

But the genius of pneumatism (not a proper word, but usage = legitimacy) is also infected by its fatal flaw.

Because the magic of pneumatic tyres is fragile, vulnerable to the smallest betrayal. A a thorn, a nail, a shard of glass—and the miracle evaporates into the disappointment of the puncture.

What was enchantment transforms into disappointment so quickly that it feels cruel. We have to face just how utterly dependent we are on that invisible cloud which until just moments ago, lived in our tyres. When the cloud departs silently and instantly like a will-o-the-wisp, it reveals just how much of our confidence was built on this delicate foundation.

Worse still, the puncture comes at the worst moments: far from home, in bad weather, or when we’re already running late. In those moments, the pneumatic tyre feels less like magic and more like a reminder that life is nasty, brutish and short. The rider is left stranded leaving them with nothing but disappointment and the long walk to the nearest train station.

May the spirit of John Boyd Dunlop ride beside you, keeping your tyres safe from the vicissitudes of the road, and may the miracle of pneumatism always be the wind beneath your wheels.

Most of the content on this site is about bike touring, and that’s because it is pretty much my favourite aspect of bike riding.

I ride to work on week days, I ride every Saturday, I try to never have a week where I don’t ride a bike. But unless I am bike touring or planning a bike tour, something’s missing in my life.

2026 has been different. I had heart issues which started to make themselves known in November-December last year, and soon after New Year I went into hospital with atrial fibrillation and symptoms which suggested imminent heart failure.

And a week or so later I emerged after having a couple of arteries widened, and since then I have had a couple more cardio procedures, to ensure my continued living presence on this planet.

So that’s nice. I’m fine to commute to work on my lovely e-bike.

What does that mean for bike touring? Well, my riding at present is somewhat restricted, not directly by my heart health, but secondarily through the medication which makes sure my heart gets an easy ride.

Of all the medications that I am currently taking (and their name is legion), the one which affects bike riding is metoprolol. It’s a beta blocker, which works by “relaxing blood vessels and slowing heart rate to improve blood flow and decrease blood pressure”.

What that means is that your heart can barely get above a canter. For me, the maximum heartrate I’ve seen lately is about 115bpm.

And if you are a bike rider, you know that if you looked at your heart rate monitor and it says 115, you are just cruising along, barely raising a sweat.

So that’s me on the bike at the moment. Just cruising along.

But Andrew, why don’t you just try harder?

The answer is that when you try to go harder you just don’t. And about 15 seconds later you sit back on the saddle and say ‘where has all my power gone?’ And there’s a dull ache in your arms and legs that seems to be related to lack of circulation of blood.

So this might not rule out touring. It just means I need to adjust my expectations around how far and how hard I can ride each day.

I am in the middle of my own self-conducted tests around that right now, with the idea that maybe I can do one gentle tour before the year 2026 slips away entirely. And how are those self-conducted tests going? To be honest, not so great.

After this ride, which was not at all a difficult ride, I got home and needed quite some couch time before Annette and I could leave the house for a social appointment with a friend.

So, maybe watch this space, but probably don’t get your hopes up. It might be a while before a “proper” tour is back on my agenda. Sorry Emma, sorry Fi, sorry to all my other touring companions.

Bikes sold since 2024: Sholto Alpine GT, and Cannondale CAAD-X. They were both great bikes for many years, that I loved riding. But with the new gravel bike, and an impending down-sizing of my house, I’ve been thinning the herd, so to speak. I am back down to six bikes!

New bikes since 2024: 2025 Merida Silex 700 gravel bike, and Kalhoff commuter e-bike.

Road bike. Frezoni made by Joe Cosgrove, a framebuilder who lives about 2 km from me in Brisbane Australia. Joe’s primarily known for doing the paintwork on Llewellyn bikes. He built the frame for me in 2004, for my 40th birthday. Seeing that I just turned 62, I’ve had this bike for 22 years. My requirement when we designed the bike was to accommodate wider tyres than most road bikes could fit. Back then a road bike mostly had 700x23 tyres, with 700x25 being a common maximum tyre width. This bike takes up to 700x30, mostly as a result of designing for “long reach” caliper brakes. And as road tyres have got wider, I now run 30s … Grand Bois Cypres, which you can get from Kumo.

Gravel bike. Merida Silex 700. I was very fortunate to get a wholesale price on Merida through Bicycle Queensland’s links with Pedal Group, the importers of Merida. My thoughts on carbon bikes vs aluminium bikes are expressed elsewhere on this site, but suffice to say this 12-speed GRX 800 mechanical, aluminium-framed gravel-eater is serving me very well indeed. Since I got it for a great price, I did not have the slightest hesitation in splurging on Rene Herse tyres for this new machine. 700x44 Snoqualmie Pass are ‘road’ tyres, but as I have also said before, wide slick tyres are my favourites for bitumen and smooth gravel duties. If the road gets gnarly I am on the wrong bike, I should brought the Carve. One odd quirk about the Merida Silex is that the sizing is super stretched out. Mine is a ‘Small’, which is the first time in my cycling history that my bike has not been a ‘Medium’.

Bikepacking bike. Based on a 2011 Specialized Carve aluminium frame. Currently has a Trifox carbon fork. Fantastic device for long steady days on a rail trail or a back road through the bush. The carbon fork with its extra carrying capacity on the forks, and the Jack’s Rack upfront for the Buffalo Bag (it’s a Big Buffalo, size small, ha) work super well. Also love the Vittoria Mezcal tyres in 29 x 2.1. The Carve was the machine of choice for my most recent big adventure, the Munda Biddi Trail in Western Australia in September/October 2024.

Mountain bike. 2016 Kona Precept. 27.5 wheels, dual suspension. Cos singletrack is the best fun. I hunted around for ages when I wanted to buy a “new” mountain bike. Geometry for mountain bikes has changed so much, and these days really focusses on the downhill experience. For that purpose, the dropper post is an integral part of what makes the geo effective, cos when you are descending you’re off the saddle but still in the middle of the bike. This bike is a few years old, and slightly out of date geometry wise. Which probably makes it perfect for me. It goes great on the trails I ride in SEQ.

Folding bike. Brompton. Cos every home needs a Brompton. Not every day, but when you have a Brompton, it makes the suburban train network so much more useful! Any destination within 5km of a train station is now somewhere I can get to under my own steam. I just love being the custodian of a Brompton, thanks to my family friend Kate.

Commuter e-bike. This is a Kalkhoff Image LB Advance, which I am showing off with my friend Sam, from Electric Bikes Brisbane. The model name is horrendous, but the bike is very pleasant and chilled to ride. I run it with just a single pannier at the back to hold my clothes and/or lunch, and put my small essentials bag in the front basket. It has bulletproof Marathon tyres, a 7-speed Shimano internal geared rear hub, and a belt drive. All of which means that the sole maintenance required in daily use is pumping the tyres up every couple of weeks. Built-in lights and quality mudguards make this a commuter for all times and all seasons.

Bike computers are crazy expensive. Garmin’s cheapest current model on their website is listed at $500, and Wahoo Element Bolt is even pricier ($530). And these are the market-leading brands.

There are budget brands, such as Bryton and IGP Sport which come in around $100-200 for the entry level device. But for some mystery reason, many bike riders seem to be OK with paying more than $500 for their bike computers. I suppose if you spent $10,000 on your bike this makes sense?

Every rider has a slightly different use case for their computer. I wear an Apple Watch, and the main thing I want a bike computer to do is record stats for my rides. So I don’t bother with a computer on the handlebars for the majority of my rides. It’s recorded by the Strava app on my watch.

A computer on the handlebars, therefore, is not very important to me. I am not interested in how fast I am going. If I am riding with the bunch and I am not dropped, then I am going fast enough. If I am riding by myself, who cares what speed I’m going?

But there is a time when a bike computer that you can view on the handlebars is indispensable. That is when you need to navigate to your destination. For me this is when I am bike touring, but also for exploratory rides around the paths and back streets of Queensland cities and towns.

I am a super-user of the website ‘Ride With GPS’, and I have literally hundreds of routes planned there, going back to 2014.

And my experience of the Garmin Edge 530 is that following GPX tracks on a Garmin absolutely sucks.

The Garmin has a habit of telling me that I am off trail, and that I should take a U-turn to return to my course. This will happen when the road or trail I am following is outside the margin of error of the GPS device or the RideWithGPS plot, but still actually following the correct trail. And this is very common.

There are lots of tricks you can try to stop the Garmin doing this as you prepare the GPS file. None of them work all the time.

I have ridden for kilometres at a time with my Garmin device telling me to make a U-turn, when I know I am still on the right trail. This is, of course, infuriating.

The display of the Garmin 530 is also configurable to the nth degree. I am a person who fiddles with their gear, so have I ever gone through and optimised the 530 to show the data fields and display items that I want? No, I tried a couple of times and it was so complicated that I gave up.

But here’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. I have left my Garmin 530 in the bedside drawer, and instead I use a Beeline Velo 2.

The Beeline Velo is a smaller device, which is made by a company in the UK. It’s round, and sits unobtrusively on handlebars or stem cap. Diameter is about 45mm, roughly the size of many sports watches, even though you mount it to bars or stem, you don’t wear it as a watch.

It does not have “buttons”, instead the body of the device and the base of the device have a defined click between them, which can be done on any of the four cardinal points of the compass. The click selects a menu item or navigates to another menu item.

And the main thing the Velo does better than any other device that I have tried, is provide clear navigation.

The device has a simple but cheerful aesthetic, all curves and bright colours. It is the most visible bike computer I have ever used. Often when navigating with the Garmin I would have to come to a stop to peer at the screen to understand what the map is saying. The on-screen map of the Garmin is usually at an attempt at accuracy, which fails by being too low-res.

That is never a problem with the Beeline. The device does not attempt a real on-screen map. Instead the Beeline shows you a stylised version of the upcoming intersection, and clearly highlights the way your route is indicating that you should go. It is much simpler and less detailed way to operate, but I find the Beeline a delight to navigate with, and the Garmin was simply painful.

OK, so the Beeline is much cheaper than the Garmin 530, and you like it better for navigation. There must be some downsides surely?

Yes, there are a couple of little quirks about the Beeline.

The first is that it does not have its own GPS chip. So it needs to be linked to your phone whenever it is operating, so that it can know where it is. And that creates a drain on your phone’s battery. If your iPhone (just as an example!) is getting to an age where the battery life is already problematic, then asking your phone to also do GPS navigation duties on behalf of the Beeline will not be a good thing.

The second downside is that the Beeline mount is not compatible with Garmin or Wahoo mounts. This is I think the only major drawback to the Beeline. I think the reason the designers have not simply used the Garmin mount is that the body-base click system used for menu selection means that the base has to be shaped accordingly. But it is still the only thing about the Beeline that I would change if given the chance.

The upside to no GPS chip is that the device is low cost (relatively). And I don’t have any occasion where I am deliberately leaving my phone at home. If I am out on a bike ride, my phone comes along too. My current iPhone is doing OK on the battery front at present.

The upside of the Beeline is just the delight of using the device, especially when compared with the frustrations of navigating on the Garmin. Battery life is adequate, not stellar. It charges via USB C. The mounting system works fine, but you need the Beeline mounts for both handlebar and stem cap mounts. Of course the 3D printing nerds are onto this.

I sold my Garmin 530 at a bargain price, because I had no further use for it.

NB: I’ve owned a Beeline Velo for a couple of years, but as of a month ago I am now an ambassador for Beeline. Upshot of that is we’ve got a Beeline Velo to give away to the Bicycle Queensland members soon. What did I get out of this deal? A second Beeline stem cap mount, so I now have one on my gravel bike and one on my bike-packing bike.

This is a regular ‘feature’ on the Internet BOB. So having prepared this on my Craft writing space, I thought I would share it here also.

Commuter/tourer. Main ride to work, also main machine for light or credit-card touring. 1994 Shogun Alpine GT, converted to 650B. Fork by Joe Cosgrove. Downtube logo says ‘Sholto’ in memory of a friend. Love this bike and ride it just about every work day.

Road bike. Frezoni made by Joe Cosgrove, a framebuilder who lives about 2 km from me in Brisbane Australia. Joe’s primarily known for doing the paintwork on Llewellyn bikes.

Cyclocross/gravel bike. 2011 Cannondale CAAD-X. Just a couple of years before cyclocross bikes switched to discs. I now run a 1x setup, and it has mini-V brakes rather than cantis.

Bikepacking bike. Based on a 2011 Specialized Carve aluminium frame. Currently has a Trifox carbon fork. Fantastic device for long steady days on a rail trail or a back road through the bush.

Mountain bike. 2016 Kona Precept. 27.5 wheels, dual suspension. Cos singletrack is the best fun.

Folding bike. Brompton. Cos every home needs a Brompton.

Trip notes from New England Cycle Trail (South)

Day 1. Armidale to Uralla, 35km

NECT day 1: Armidale to Uralla - Andrew D.’s 35.1 km bike ride

Our group of four assembled in Armidale after taking various driving options to get there. I drove down from Brisbane with a 6 am start from Salisbury giving us plenty of time for coffee stops and lunch at Armidale before the short ride to Uralla in the afternoon.

The Day 1 route into Uralla was all back roads, and stayed entirely off the New England Highway. Big tick.

Just a couple of km on gravel roads to get us across to Thunderbolts Way for the last three km into town. Good route.

I picked some poorly positioned motels for this trip, managed to select those well away from town centres, through not paying sufficient attention to the size of the towns and the positioning of likely dinner venues (i.e. pubs).

Uralla had a great cafe: the Alternate Root. And we enjoyed our dinner at the Top Pub.

Day 2. Uralla to Walcha. 62km

NECT day 1: Armidale to Uralla - Andrew D.’s 35.1 km bike ride

And this is where the story really starts. As I look back on this week of cycling, my strongest memories are of rolling countryside and smooth gravel roads. This day was cold and overcast, averaging 10 degrees Celsius for the day, but my abiding memory is of the colours of the leaves and the gentle rolling hills.

After a short climb out of Uralla, we left on Gostwyck Rd, past some roadworks which made a clay road quite sticky. All of us got chunky bits of gravel sprayed over the lower parts of our bikes. But once through the roadworks, the roads dried out and conditions were cool but near perfect.

At Gostwyck we were entranced by the avenues of elms leading to All Saints Chapel, a picture-perfect place for a wedding I’m sure. We rolled south, climbing and descending throughout the morning.

Closer to Walcha we got back on some bitumen for a nice roll into town, and some lunch at Cafe Graze. This was a great morning’s ride, with enough challenge in climbing to make us hungry for lunch, enough rolling downhill to enjoy after any climb, and plenty of amazing autumn colours of reds and yellows in the New England foliage. Lots of oaks, elms and liquid amber trees, showing off their decidousness.

Day 3. Walcha to Tamworth. 93km

NECT day 3 Walcha to Tamworth - Andrew D.’s 92.8 km bike ride

This was a highly memorable day on the bike, with a descent nearly 30km, and a loss of 600m of altitude over the whole day’s ride.

The first third of the ride was up and down out of Walcha, with a turn off onto Scrubby Gully Rd. Even early on there was a magnificent descent down to the MacDonald River. The route then climbed away, and then back down to the river a second time.

This was where we got our feet wet. The route crosses the river on Surveyors Creek Rd, just before getting to Woolbrook. Belinda lost one of her croc sandals in the river, which certainly was a tragic moment in fashion.

After Woolbrook, we cruised and hollered and grinned on our way down the valleys created by Jamiesons Creek and then the Cockburn River, all the way to a late lunch at Kootingal (72km)

My route assessments let us down at this point I think. Instead of pulling up at Kootingal, we braved the weekday afternoon traffic into Tamworth, a busy city with many trucks and buses. Our motel was on the New England Highway, which was also hard to get too.

Day 4. Tamworth to Quirindi. 115km.

NECT day 4: Tamworth to Quirindi - Andrew D.’s 115.6 km bike ride

This was the “Queen Stage” of our trip. I was a little concerned about my ability to ride the whole route and still finish in daylight, because there was a substantial amount of climbing, and because the previous day a ride just short of 100km saw us get into town with only an hour of sunlight to spare.

So we set off from Tamworth and rode a normal pace through to lunch at Nundle. On the way we rode through an historic goldmining era place with the charming name of Bowling Alley Point.

The steady climb up the Pool River valley, past Chaffey Dam, was one thing. We gained 200m of elevation.

But straight out of lunch (at the charming small town of Nundle) it was a false flat bitumen road leading to the only sustained climbing section of the whole week (for me).

Fortunately the climb on Old Wallabadah Rd was steady and pretty scenic, distracting me from the pain in my legs.

Eventually we reached Wallabadah, after a short but stimulating ride along the New England Highway. The last bitumen section riding west to Quirindi was ridden at breakneck pace, as we chased the sun going down before our eyes.

Day 5. Quirindi to Tamworth.

Route planned

NECT day 5 Quirindi to Tamworth - A bike ride in Quirindi, NSW

Our route as ridden

NECT Day 5: Quirindi to Tamworth - Andrew D.’s 67.4 km bike ride

Our day started with a little adventure. Just leaving Quirindi we turned right onto Bells Gate Rd, which our GPX route showed as a minor road which would link up to Black Gully Rd as a back roads route into Werris Creek, keeping us off the major through routes.

However, as we crossed the railway line after 7.5km of the day’s ride, we lost the trail. The road we were on became a farm driveway, and the GPX track was telling us to ride where there didn’t seem to be any road. Eventually Derek looked further along and saw a farm track which disappeared over a small rise. So we gulped hard and found a way across a small gully to link up with the double track.

It was only a couple of km later that the double track became a proper gravel road again, but for all that time I had a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The wisdom of this route at keeping us away from the main road (Werris Creek Road) was made clear to us all, after our morning tea stop in Werris Creek.

We had 26km on the main road, and it was not a nice ride. Big trucks going at 100km/h only a couple of metres from you is never fun.

We got to Duri and thankfully our route planners had found another quiet road to get us all the way into Tamworth. A bit of bike path work saw us all the way into Tamworth’s very busy CBD.

The New England Cycle Trail (south) is a great ride. If I was doing it again I would stay in Kootingal rather than Tamworth on our way south, and I would look extra hard for any connecting back roads between Werris Creek and Duri, cos that road was no fun at all.

For me, the train trip from Tamworth back up to Armidale was a delight, although the bike box supplied by NSW TrainLink was one of the smallest I’ve ever used, and required A LOT of bike disassembly.

Here is an unpopular or perhaps unwelcome thought.

Imagine you are riding along on your bike tomorrow. And for whatever reason you lose control and crash.

Firstly, I hope you’re OK, and you haven’t damaged yourself too much. Your well-being is the most important thing to consider in this scenario.

So you are OK, now what’s the damage to your bike?

Oh. That looks expensive. I’m not sure that’s fixable.

Here’s the point where my opinion becomes unpopular.

Many people ride expensive bikes. That’s fine, we have varying capacity to pay. Spending $10,000 on a bike can be absolutely fine if you can afford it.

But if you are in an accident and your bike gets wrecked, or if you are sitting at a cafe and your bike gets nicked, and you can’t afford to replace your bike, then you spent too much on your bike.

Bicycles aren’t “forever”. I’ve had my favourite bike for 29 years, but it’s still just a bike.

Yes, you can insure your bike. I recently got a quote to insure my road bike, one of my seven bikes. I don’t know what it would be worth to replace, but a new custom steel frame would be around $3500. Insurance against theft or accidental damage will cost $20 per month, or about $240 per annum.

I’ve got seven bikes, which ones should I insure? And what’s the value proposition here?

Insurance is a scam which has all of us bluffed when it comes to high-consequence items in our lives (houses, cars, medical bills).

But for bikes, it’s easy. Don’t spend more on a bike than you would be willing to pay again the very next day if it disappeared.

_2025 Update: _ Some of the minutae about bags and loading the bike up for a trip have changed over time. See the latest version, at the end of the article.

If I look at my stable of bikes, and how much each one gets used (available on Strava), you might get the feeling that my Carve 29er isn’t one that I really like.

It languishes down in fourth place with ‘only’ 4000-ish km, trailing the Sholto bike, the Frezoni, and my cyclocross/gravel bike, the CAAD-X.

But the Carve 29er occupies a very special place in my memories. It’s the bike on which I have bikepacking adventures.

Ten years ago when I started getting into this new style of cycle touring, it was only natural to fit some bags to my hardtail 29er and get rolling.

My Carve has an origin story that I’m going to suggest is unlike most other bikes, and it’s going to sound weird when I tell it.

In 2011 I had bought a Cannondale RZ OneTwenty dual-suspension mountain bike. And I really enjoyed that bike, it was great fun on all the trails around Brisbane and SEQ. And the bestest best bit of that excellent bike was its Lefty fork.

The Lefty is a strange beast, and unless you have ridden a bike with a Lefty, I don’t expect you to understand. But a well-tuned Lefty on a trail or XC-style mtb is a total joy. Super responsive, lightweight, laterally stiff, just a really cool thing to have on the front of your dually.

And one day I am idly being idle and I noticed a secondhand Lefty for sale on eBay. I put a bid on it, not really expecting that my offer would win the bid. Which it did. At this remove I don’t remember what I paid for the Lefty, but I think less than $200. And those things were very spendy back in the day.

Ok, so I’ve got a Lefty.

And it sits in my bike shed, mocking me, for about six months.

Next thing my friend JD has a Specialized Carve 29er frame for sale. JD had bought the Carve as a complete bike from Epic Cycles only a few months before, but then had been seduced by a gorgeous Ritchey P29 steel frame in red, white and blue. So JD swapped all the components off the Carve onto his new Ritchey.

And the Carve frame in basic black was left behind. It’s an aluminium 29er frame from 2011-12. The geometry of the time is very dated now (70 degree head angle anyone?) but it still works great on dirt back roads and most point-to-point style trails.

So I thought: that’s a low cost way to get the Lefty onto a bike, and perhaps get into bikepacking. Even though there are easily foreseeable downsides to having a Lefty on a bikepacking steed.

I bought a Shimano SLX groupset (drivetrain, shifters and brakes), hunted around for bits and pieces, and snagged a pair of wheels from Aiden Lefman when I approached him for help in servicing and fitting the Lefty (Aido runs a mtb suspension specialist firm, Cyclinic).

And there it was: a matte black medium sized 29er hardtail, with out-of-place Cannondale Lefty fork.

I did a few micro-adventures on it, but its first starring role was in 2014 when I rode the Munda Biddi Trail.

And ever since then, most every big adventure I’ve been on (except for two) has been on the Carve.

And as a hardtail mtb for having adventures on, it has been just about flawless.

Over time, the Lefty became slightly troublesome. Lefty forks have an issue known as ‘bearing migration’.

When the bearings migrate on your Lefty, you can go from 110mm of travel to 50mm of travel in hardly any time. Or worse.

Many Lefty owners get used to fixing this issue while out on the trail. I never got used to fixing it all, regardless of on the trail or in my shed.

Before a bike packing trip I would take the Carve to my mechanic, and ensure (among other things) that the Lefty had full travel, and off I would go. Sometimes it would lose a little bit of travel over a couple of weeks, but it never became a major concern.

But when I took the Carve to Dave (my mechanic) on my return from the Mawson Trail, he called ‘time’ on the Lefty. Too much trouble with the bearing migration, and performance in absorbing bumps had also got worse over time.

“Just find a carbon fork for this bike, you only use it for bikepacking so it doesn’t really need suspension. A carbon fork will make the bike feel lighter and more lively,” Dave said.

I agreed. He was right.

Carbon forks for 29er mountain bikes are pretty easy to find, but also can be somewhat expensive. I’m pretty wary of over-capitalising any of my bikes, and this one in particular would not gain one dollar of resale value by being shod with a fancy Whisky or Salsa fork.

So after a cautious search on AliExpress, I purchased a Trifox brand carbon fork, and Dave installed it.

So far (several quite taxing day rides, and one overnighter along the BVRT and South Burnett back roads) so good. The bike does feel lighter, although I should qualify that statement cos it has not yet had a full camping load on board.

The Trifox fork didn’t have adventure mounts, so thanks to BarYak for producing the Mule, a system for attaching mounting points. I’ve got the Blackburn Outpost cargo cages, and on a recent overnighter the BarYak - Blackburn combo worked well.

Over the years I have used a variety of bags on the Carve to carry the gear you need for travelling around by bike. I have setup routines for pub overnighters, for full-on two-week-long camping trips, and everything in-between. See the photo at the top of this post as one example.

My favourite bags for the Carve have been the two frame bags I’ve used.

My original frame bag was made for me by my friend Dean. We used two existing nylon bag, of the giveaway type. One side was a Brisbane City Council City Cycle bag, and the other was a Griffith Unversity bag. The resulting frame bag had a real ‘rasta’ flavour with green edging, yellow one side and red the other.

After a couple of years the CityCycle side gave way … it was made from a very cheap nylon. So I asked my friend Brad to make me another bag, this time from cordura, and I have been using that one ever since. It fits a water bladder with about 2.5 litres of water quite comfortably, along with a pump and a few tools.

The rest of the kit varies. I mostly use a rear rack with bags hanging off it, rather than a large seat bag, cos my short legs (I have Duck’s Disease) don’t give me all that much clearance from the seat down to the tyre. And upfront I often use a Azur handlebar roll that came my way to review for Australian MTB mag.

I like the way the Carve rides when loaded. Without a load it was a bit twitchy on singletrack in its Lefty days. These days it doesn’t have a suspension fork, so the dampening effect on the handling of all the extra load won’t be there in quite the same way.

The Carve is also I think the epitome of the idea that a bikepacking bike doesn’t need to be flashy to be good. The Carve’s aluminium frame was literally a castoff from a friend who didn’t want it.

But in the intervening 10 years it has been a brilliant machine to own and ride. We’re still on the original drivetrain (more or less), original brakes, original handlebar (a SQ Labs trekking bar). And with one tiny exception (when I buckled a rear wheel one day) the Carve has always got me where I wanted or need to go each day that I’ve set out on it.

So that’s a pretty good endorsement. I’m hoping for another 10 years of bikepacking adventures on it.

**What’s different at the start of 2025: ** I rode the Carve with Trifox fork on a rail trail tour from Ipswich to Marybrough in August 2023, and on the Munda Biddi Trail in September/October 2024. The main change from previous setups was at the front of the bike. I bought a Jack the Rack in the Kickstarter, and it gives a great platform for a front bag. My bag is from Buffalo Bags in Thailand … it is called a Big Buffalo, but mine is the smallest size. I run a couple of 1.5 Litre water bottles on the Blackburn Outpost cages on the forks, which gives me room in the frame bag for weighty stuff such as my travel CPAP machine and its battery.

Can I just post this here cos

1. It’s awesome
2. I want to remember it often
3. I agree with every single line in it.

Surly Bikes: Some answers to just about any bike forum post