He's also wrong. There's 650b Mtn bikes now. It's spreading. I think it will remain a niche product, but so what? I don't worship at the altar of mass manufacturing.
I have said it before, I will say it again. 650b is terrific. I gambled that Grant was right, and won. My wife loves her bike to death.

We both owned Bridgestone XO bikes way back when. So we've tried going that route with 26 inch tires. Ain't da same ting at all....

No it's not; and you know that by comparison, rather than simple, unfounded prejudice.

;) is grant still going to make 26" touring bikes? what gives?

did you not read my other post at all? The Riv site says nothing about the Atlantis going away and it has 26" wheels....

From an interview with Grant Peterson:

"Anyway, if I were 30 and starting out and for some reason had to have my own bike company, I'd pick something that was unattractive to big companies, and something that small companies who want to get big wouldn't copy or pay attention to. I'd pick something that most people thought was dumb, or didn't understand, and I'd sign in blood an oath to may family to never veer from that, to not be tempted by bigness or growth to do anything else. It would be one KIND of product. It might be more than one product, but it would be one KIND of product, and I'll even tell you what it would be: It would be a new wheels size, halfway between 650B and 700C. Right off the bat big companies have no interest, and small companies likewise just go, "huh?" ''

there's two sizes of tires grant could repopularize between 650b and 700c. one of them 650A- 590 ISO is a very common tire size in Japan - a blood oath from which to never veer, jeepers!

but it appears he wants to be a contrarian about wheel size. nice quote, bengeboy. I suspect this echoes the drive behind his dogged advancement of the 650b.

As I mentioned earlier, I checked European webshops and there are only tires available, both from the UK (high shipping costs), of of them NOS and $65. Can you point me to a European source for tires? None of the many webshops I use carry them.

Like Thomas Friedman talked about in "The World is Flat" now that Taiwan, China, India, Mexico, etc are getting larger middle classes, labor rates are going up. A big result of this, in the US, is that we will see companies that get products manufactured in those countries go through a lot of shifts in what they offer due to the cost of production. Not to say that any of the changes are predictible, but only that we will see a lot of changes in what they can and cannot offer for the prices we are used to. Lugged steel is only a bit more difficult to make, but at 100 dollars per hour (the skilled labor average rate in California, soon to be that in many of the before mentioned countries), if that lugged steel frame takes five hours more to make, we can expect to see probably a 200 per hour increase in retail price.