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.
Of course, 26″ mountain bikes are dated now, so I originally started by swapping the Sherman 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.
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.
Now the geometry is pretty much perfect for me, and this thing rides sweet. The high-trail design is super stable with and without a load, and the longer top tube with a 0mm stem means no toe overlap issues. The steeper seat tube angle also puts plenty of weight over the front tire to offset the longer top tube. The bike feels very well balanced.
Add in some fancy accessories, like front and rear racks, a Wald basket, and bottle cages, and the build is complete. For now.
Specs:
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- 2011 Ragley Blue Pig frame, size M (originally designed for 26″ wheels)
- On-One Bootzipper 650b fork (405mm A-C, 47mm rake), with +10mm Reverse Adapters Angle spacer crown race
- 700c/29″ wheelset, WTB SX19 rims/Novatec hubs
- Continental GP5000 700x32c tires
- TRP Spyre 160mm brakes
- Shimano LX crankset
- SRAM X7 10spd. shifter
- SRAM X9 front/rear derailleur
- Race Face 32/22T chainrings
- SRAM 11-28T 10spd. cassette
- Race Face Chester pedals
- BrandX Ascend 120mm dropper post
- Brooks Cambium C15 saddle
- Analog Cycles Discord 0mm stem
- Soma Junebug bars double wrapped with cork then cotton tape
- Blackburn EX-1 Disc rear rack
- Rawland Raidoverks Rando rack
- Wald 137 front basket
- Bugle horn from a random thrift stand in China.
- Delta Inox + Salsa Nickless bottle cages
- Road Runner Bags Burrito handlebar bag
- Road Runner Bags tool roll
- RAM handlebar phone mount
Andrew Liu 