Franken-Pig.
This bike has been a labor of love, and has undergone many different iterations, finally ending up in it’s current state with a 26″ frame, 650b fork, and 700c wheels. Thus, the frankenbike was born.
I bought the Ragley Blue Pig frame when I just started college and started working at a bike shop, and have kept it ever since. All of the other bikes that I’ve owned have come and gone, but this frame has stayed. It started out as an aggressive All-Mountain hardtail build, with a Manitou Sherman 130mm fork and fat 26″ tires. The geometry on the bike was quite modern for it’s time, and still holds it’s own even today. Slack head angle, longer top tube, steep seat tube angle. The rear triangle design is great, and can accomodate up to a 700x38c tire, a regular 27.5×2.2″ mountain bike tire, or 26×2.8″ plus bike tire.
The bike went through a few iterations of modifications to it’s components during this time.
Of course, 26″ mountain bikes eventually became outdated, so I originally started by swapping the 26″ suspension fork with a rigid Salsa Cromoto Grande suspension-corrected 29″ rigid fork, adding some Soma Clarence alt-bars, and swapping to 26″ plus-bike 3.0″/2.8″ tires, just to make things a little weirder. The taller rigid fork was supposed to compensate for the original design of the bike being for long-travel 26″ forks.
Those plus-sized tires were fun in the winter, but just too slow. So I swapped in some 29″/27.5″ front/rear wheels with regular mountain bike tires to try and maintain the original angles. However, that raised the bottom bracket up way too high to be comfortable.
Some time afterwards, I had sold the road bikes that I owned, so in an effort to make this bike more street-oriented, the “97.5” mountain bike setup was swapped to 700x32c road wheels and tires. The issue with the high bottom bracket continued to bother me with this new setup, my feet couldn’t touch the ground at all with the seat up. There wasn’t enough weight on the front either, and the front tire wanted to wash out.
Switched the bike back to 650b mountain bike tires and wheels eventually in an effort to chase more grip.
Eventually I ended up swapping in the On-One Bootzipper fork, which is much shorter. 483mm Axle-to-Crown on the Cromoto Grande vs 405mm on the Bootzipper. I didn’t want to alter the angles of the frame quite that much, so a +10mm crown race from Reverse Components was added to raise the front up just a little bit.
With the much shorter fork, the bike ended up with a ~71.5 degree head tube angle, still well within modern gravel/cross bike norms, and a 76 degree seat tube angle, a similar seat tube angle to my mountain bike. This increases the relative bottom bracket drop, and makes for a much more comfortable geometry.
However, the shorter fork also lowered the front end a little too much. I also wanted to swap to dirt drops from the alt-bars, so I swapped in the Soma Junebug bars along with an Analog Cycles Discord 0mm stem. This dramatically shortens the reach to compensate for the drop bars, and this stem also has the benefit of raising the front end up as well. Add in some fancy accessories, like front and rear racks, a Wald basket, and bottle cages, and you have this monstrosity:
This didn’t last long. Too much junk, too much weight on the bike. Switched to a carbon Lauf fork, carbon 650B Hunt wheels with some fast XC tires, and lighter weight bags in an effort to chase the reduction of weight. A Works component -2 degree angleset was also added, bringing the head tube angle down to a more respectable 69.5 degrees.
Now this thing is pretty much perfect. So the build is complete. For now.
Andrew Liu 