Loose Chain

The problem (one of several) with taking a bike designed for flat bars and putting drop bars on it is that the effective top tube length is often different. Bikes designed for drop bars are likely to have a shorter top tube in a given frame size range.

tjspiel

That's exactly right. With a drop bar riding on the hoods puts your hands a few inches in front of the handlebar clamp. On a flat bar your hands are about even with the clamp or slightly behind it (since flat bars are often swept back at least a little).

So when converting to drops, you'll typically need a shorter stem in order to compensate. This might change the handling of the bike in unpleasant ways. On my bike it seemed to work out fine but I doubt a professional fitter would find my setup to be very ideal.

edit: getting the stem right was one of the more challenging parts of the conversion. Road bars have a different diameter than flat bars. This means you need a stem designed for road bikes. Short road stems with a lot of rise do exist but aren't common. To get the bars in the right position you might even need an extension for the steerer.

PaulRivers

I don't believe most of this is true. Road bike frames generally trickle down from race frames. Race frames are designed to handle some guy with quads the size of tree trunks, going all-out downhill. That puts a LOT of stress on the frame. A lot more than you're likely to.

I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone on here say they hit a pothole and their frame broke. Wheels are a different matter -

You don't need 26" wheels - even mountain bikers have started to go to road bike size (700c - 29ers in mountain bike talk) wheels. Wheel size isn't going to make any difference.

It's definitely true, though that the wheel and tire durability is going to matter MUCH more than the frame. Larger tires (fatter ones) make potholes and bad road much, much more comfortable. And while a road frame is more than capable of handling potholes, it's the wheel itself that sometimes is not - totally depends on the wheel. I have $1,000 wheels that I have ridden over pothole after pothole and they're fine - but a lot of $1,000 wheels would not be. I have cheap wheel that have gotten the crap beat out of them and gotten a little messed up.

If you're putting a bike together, you could look for a cyclocross wheel. There are plenty of good road wheels which would be fine, but sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference, and cyclocross wheels are always built sturdy.

I personally have puncture resistant tires on all my bikes, but if you buy a new bike sometimes they come with puncture resistant tires so it's hard to say if you should replace them or not.

A road bike with plenty of clearance between the bike frame and the tires (so you can put larger tires on) would be the way to go for sure, in my opinion.

PaulRivers

And converting a bike to drops would also require replacing the shifters, and road bike shifters can be one of the most expensive parts on the bike. And installation costs money to, unless you know how to do it yourself already, which it doesn't sound like you do (and replacing certain parts requires certain specialized bike tools, which also add to the expense).

PaulRivers

Oops, I missed this on my first read through.

Like the other guy said - craigslist, or someone who wants to sell you their road bike from the 80's or something is about your only bet. Around me there are shops that accept donated bikes and fix them up - maybe that's the way to go. Or maybe you can find an old used "mountain bike" (the kind when mountain bikes didn't have suspension, just had fat tires).

If you want something new, solid, reliable and new for minimum money, your best bet would be to buy a "hybrid" from a bike shop - $400-$500. Decent entry level road bikes are priced more at the $700-$950 mark (new), but even there sometimes they come with some crappy wheels that might not survive lots of pothole hits.

When I was younger, $900 would buy you a good, solid, midlevel road bike. $1500 would buy you something top end. Also, $5 would get you into a movie in a theater during regular (non-matinee) hours. But prices have gone up, sadly.

If you buy a $200 bike from walmart or target, whether it's a road bike or mountain bike is unlikely to matter - it's probably not going to last that long. Sometimes they do - but it's a crap shoot. And I've read threads where someone has bought one, replaced one or two inexpensive parts, tuned it up themselves, and gotten it to work. But I'm just warning you - in the forums at least, they have a reputation for only being built to go about 100 or 200 miles before they break.

coffeecake

Sixty Fiver has good advice and he's the guy to talk to about building a bike on a budget. Sub $200 means you're gonna have to hit up the Craigslist/Kijiji and do your homework. If you have a bike co-op, even better. Some bike shops may have some tuned up beaters but I doubt they'll be less than $200. Do not buy a department store bike.

kaliayev

This is not necessarily correct. A lot of the newer performance oriented hybrids such as the Trek FX series are basically road bikes with flat bars. Many of the first hybrids also had road geometries. Take a look at the pic of the Trek 750 I posted. It has the same geometry of the Trek 520 with a mere 1cm difference in the chain length.

tjspiel

The post I was referring to stated that the effective top tube length is often different which is very true and poses the problem I stated. Even if the bike has a road geometry, drops and straight bars put your hands in different places. Without changing the stem length, drop bars aren't going to be comfortable unless the bike didn't fit in the first place and you just get lucky.

Though getting a different stem isn't necessarily a big deal, it's possible that you'd never be able to get the fit right when you switch to drops even if the bike has a road geometry. Just something to consider. I'm not against conversions. I've done my own but it can get tricky and often isn't worth it in the end.

Here's maybe a simpler way to state the same thing. Just because a manufacturer sells both drop bar and straight bar bikes using the same frame doesn't mean the same size frame will work for a given rider for both models. A 56 cm might fit great on the straight bar version but stretch the rider out too much on the drop bar version.

neil

By definition, hybrids have flat bars, with drop bars it ceases to be a hybrid. However, similarly sturdy bikes with drop bars are widely available, including common touring models such as the Jamis Aurora, Surly LHT and Trek 520, or Cyclo-cross ("Cross") bikes such as the Surly Crosscheck, Rocky Mountain Solo, and Jamis Nova.

At a low price point, buying used is the way to go. 10-speeds and similar bikes from the 70s and 80s are popular commuter bikes, look for ones that had better builds in the first place (they're pretty much all steel frames), and adequate clearance for the larger tires it sounds like you want to put on.

njkayaker

It's pretty easy to trash a road bike frame. They aren't designed to take the hits that other bicycles (like mountain bikes) are.

PaulRivers

I don't agree, and I don't think anyone who regularly rides road bike on streets in any sort of conditions would agree either. The frames are sturdy, fine, and aren't going to break from anything short of going off several-foot high jumps and slamming onto the ground - even then the frame would probably be fine, it's the wheel that would bust. They're designed to be ridden on the road. They're also designed, as I mentioned, to handle the kind of forces that racers exert on them while pedaling full out - can you imagine the kind of force Lance Armstrong or whoever can generate while sprinting towards the finish line? Or screaming down the side of a mountain at 40-60mph? They're not "delicate flowers" who "have to be ridden in pristine conditions".

njkayaker

No one is suggesting that they "have to be ridden in pristine conditions" (a strawman argument).

Road bikes are designed to sufficiently strong to ride on the road (obviously). That doesn't mean road frames are necessarily stronger than other frame types.

Cyclocross bike frames are not built much differently than standard road frames but cyclocross riders typically use much wider tires than road riders use. It would be interesting to see statistics on the frequency of frame damage in cyclocross races.

Non-suspension mountain bikes (from a few years ago) had much beefier frames than road frames (and wider/stronger wheels too). Such a frame would likely fair better for crashing into/over things, by design, than a road bike frame would, since such crashes are typical for mountain biking and not for road biking.

You indicated that "JeremyZ" (quoted below) was incorrect. But he isn't.

jsmonet

so what this all boils down to is the OP is looking for a cx-setup bike on fatties with drops and well-built wheels. under 200 means you're finding someone desperate and ripping them off. good luck... for some odd reason bf'ers have this crazy knack for finding awesome deals

tjspiel

Actually crashes in road bike races are very common. Most people who race are also relatively young amateurs with less disposable income than a lot of people in the commuting forum. It's not like they can go out and get a new bike every other week.

Still, there's a lot of different types of road bikes and I know back when steel was still common in racing bikes they were really pushing the envelope in terms having a sufficiently strong frame while still being as light as possible. Many frames had very strict limits on the weight of the rider.

So I don't think you can argue that a road bike is going to be as tough as a mountain bike of equal quality. However, road bikes take far more abuse than people often realize so it's not hard for me to believe that a given road bike might be tougher than a given hybrid since hybrids are often the cheapest bikes a manufacturer offers.

sauerwald

Bicycles are like anything else - below a certain price, you are just throwing your money away - consider buying a car for under $1000, they exist, but they are probably not going to be sturdy, reliable transportation like you are looking for. Similarly you can go to the other end of the spectrum - it is easy to spend over $50,000 on a car, but is it going to be any more reliable and sturdy than one for 1/10 the price - in my opinion, that is doubtful. In my opinion, the sweet spot for pricing on a commuting bicycle is probably from $500 to $1800 - at the lower end of that is what you will pay for a decent used bike on Craigslist, and then upgrading it with what it needs to turn it into a reliable commuter. At the upper end of the range are things like a Surly Long Haul Trucker (once you add fenders, rack, bags, lights etc).

Sixty Fiver

I work on a lot of bikes and the ratios of damaged road bike frames and frames of other types is pretty much the same and damaging a frame usually requires one to hit something head on at great speed or being hit by something moving at great speed.

You would be hard pressed to damage the frame on my hand built Cooper road bike through normal use and my hybrid has been pretty much bombprof over the last 15,000 km and it once had drop bars.

Shown here it was also fitted out with my cross wheels and I was out enjoying some single track and trail riding... the conversion required a stem, drop bars, conventional levers, bar end shifters, and canti brakes.

I do these types of conversions in my shop and prices can range widely depending on what components are used.



What I have been riding a lot is my old Peugeot UO8 road / touring bike which I built up from a frame and fork with spare parts... and it would kick the crap out of most new hybrids.



A nice used road bike in decent running shape could be had for a few hundred dollars or if you were handy, you could rebuild one.

PaulRivers

That seems to be exactly what you were suggesting. If you weren't, then great. We both agree that road frames with decent wheels and wider tires are more than capable of handling riding on roads, roads with potholes in Boston, and sidewalks without any sort of silly worrying about the "durability" of a road frame.

And I certainly never said road frames were tougher than other frames. I simply said they were more than sturdy enough to handle roads, potholes, and sidewalks.

I have no doubt riding a cyclocross frame through a road race might warrant some durability concerns.

But when applied directly to the OP's question about riding in Boston, that itself is a red herring - he is not racing cyclocross, he/she is concerned about potholes and sidewalks, which a road frame is built more than strong enough to handle.

As tjspiel pointed out, crashes are actually very typical for road racing. In fact, those are often worse because the rate of speed is noteably higher than mountain biking.

However, to your point, road frames often don't survive the big crashes. Mountain bikes are indeed built stronger, because everyday forces on them include going off jumps 3 to 10 feet tall and slamming into the ground, which it needs to be able to withstand.

If you're planning on slamming your bike into a tree several times a year, a mountain bike would be a more durable choice, thought frankly it still might not survive either. However, if you're planning on biking on roads, encountering some potholes, and maybe biking on the sidewalk, asking which frame would be needed is like asking if you should use a 2x4 or a 4x4 to hold up a spoon - they're both going to be just fine.

I don't agree. He said "It's pretty easy to trash a road bike frame. They aren't designed to take the hits that other bicycles (like mountain bikes) are. "

It is actually very, very difficult to trash a road frame (without crashing) by riding it on the road, even with terrible terrible potholes (you far more easily kill the wheels though). As a matter of fact, the resale value of used road bikes is much higher than used mountain bikes. If road frames were fragile creatures as was implied, that wouldn't be the case.

If you somehow ignore the entire rest of the conversation, then you might say that yes - it is technically easier to trash a road frame than it is a moutain bike frame, if you slam frames against a tree, or hit them with a sledgehammer, etc.

But in the context of road riding, it is not all all "pretty easy to trash a road frame" with any sort of road riding, including potholes.

*sigh* Not that any of this matters, as with a $200 budget neither a road or a mountain bike is going to be built very well at all.

karrar

i bought a normal kona dew and put drop bars on it, so technically its not what i bought, but now that they sell it that way it might have well been. but true

BarracksSi

Depends. The Bianchi Valle that I have is a flat bar bike, and their Volpe is a drop bar/cyclocross bike. Both are listed as having the exact same frame geometries; I'll bet that they're the same frames, just with different paint. Once I found this out, I decided that it would be even easier to convert my Valle to drops.

*add-on* I've got stems to spare, and can probably get others from my LBS if none of mine are the right length.

gulfcoast

Check out : Kona Dew Drop

spence89

Wow, didn't know I would stir up such a big turn debate here. Found a few options. Would love to hear you all's in put:

Option 1:
https://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/bik/1767936602.html

Option 2:
https://boston.craigslist.org/bmw/bik/1767760395.html

Option 3:
https://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/bik/1763000574.html

Option 4:
https://boston.craigslist.org/bmw/bik/1773946610.html

Option 5:
https://boston.craigslist.org/nos/bik/1771897474.html

frpax

Of those, I really like that Lotus. Shogun would be my #2 pick. Lose the turkey levers on either one and put some real brake levers on there, though.

spence89

Remember you're talking to a newbie. I don't know the difference.


Do any of these look sturdy enough for commuting?

frpax

Any of those would be fine. I particularly like steel frames...

Look for eyelets on the rear drop outs and on the fork. To these, you can attach a rack and fenders if you want. That's a plus for commuting.

spence89

I went ahead and got the lotus. Thanks for your help. So what about these brake levers are you talking about?