Choosing Colors and Other Polyvalent Stuff

By Chris

The Polyvalent is one of our oldest projects and one I'm especially proud of. The idea was to build a bike that would do, if not everything, then most things well. It's a bike that's good as a commuter, tourer, or dirt road explorer. But making a frame that's so versatile requires some tough choices.

One of the more difficult tasks at Velo Orange is choosing frame colors. We agonize over this. It usually require endless mini-meetings and, in the end, we almost never agree. I eventually have to choose and in this case the light blue won out. The photo shows the others colors we considered.

Another choice was disc brakes. It took me a long time to come around, but after riding with them on two bikes and recently riding a bike with canti-brakes again, I simply think discs are better, especially in wet conditions. Though I'll stick to cable actuation on future builds for the sake of simplicity. While it's true that we have retro-grouch tendencies here at VO, that's only because so much of the modern bike industry is based on change for the sake of change. We are absolutely willing to adopt technology that is actually an improvement, like disc brakes. Remember that the great French constructeurs often worked to improve braking. I am absolutely convinced that they would have embraced modern disc brakes as a worthwhile innovation. I would still choose rim brakes if going somewhere remote where obtaining spares would be difficult, and I wouldn't sell a good frame just to get one with discs, but if given the choice on a new bike I'll choose discs.

Another good innovation is large bottle cages like the VO Mojave and Anything Cages. So we included three bottle cage bosses on the down tube and fork.

We also decided to keep the 1" threaded fork, which everyone at VO agreed on. Let's remember that 1-1/8" threadless forks were developed to be a stronger system for mountain bikes, strength that is overkill on road, touring, city, or gravel bikes. 1-1/8 forks are a bit stiffer, but do we actually need that stiffness? We are, after all, running wide 650b tires to make the ride softer. One the other hand threaded forks make adjusting handlebar height easier and, in my estimation, look better. I look forward to building my Polyvalent up with one of our upcoming removable faceplate quill stems. Most bike manufacturers embraced threadless forks not because they are better, but because they are cheaper to produce and one size fits most. Both threaded and threadless forks are well proven on and off road. In the end choosing a frame based solely on the fork type seems, to me, a bit silly.

We also added just a tiny bit of up-slope to the top tube to get the bars a little higher, probably not enough that you'd notice at first glance. So this frame has the classic good looks of a level top tube frame, not the modern look of a sloping top tube. I know that this decision will cause those without our taste for retro frames to scratch their heads, but that's the choice we made.

We are also working on a new fork crown, but it might not be ready in time for the first production run. In that case we'll use the same fork crown that we used on the Camargue, not a bad compromise.