Important stuff - feature on my new touring bike

I've been super-keen to go bike touring again.  I have a couple of mates here who have been on supported tours in Asia and Europe, where you show up, are given a bike to ride from A to B, and the company who organises it all carts your stuff there for you.  They are pretty amazing, typically in very cool places (Doug Morton has recently ridden around the circumference of Iceland, which turned out to be pretty brutal by all accounts - at times 100km/h winds, which would be a total spoiler - Simon Osborne, incidentally, has walked across Iceland - which had similar hardships as I recall) - but of course are also high cost - more so than I am able to justifiably afford.  So the alternative is to get a bike (this one cost half of the cheapest Asian supported tour) and just go on your own, so-called unsupported tour, carrying all the stuff you need - which is what I used to do, 25 years ago.  In a sense I've come full circle.  So I did some serious research (interestingly, when I last did this you had to do your research in the library :-) and settled on the real deal of all touring bikes, the Surly Disk Trucker (modern incarnation of the cult Surly Long Haul Trucker).  It's a brilliantly simple formula, designed by people who deeply understand, built around a proverbial brick s-house chrome-moly 4130 frame.  Because this is your sort of thing, specifically 4130 is Molybdenum (Mb)‎: ‎15 -.25%, Manganese (Mn)‎: ‎40 -.60%, Chromium (Cr)‎: ‎80 - 1.1%, Carbon (C)‎: ‎28 -.33% - yielding an ultimate tensile strength psi of 97,200, yield strength psi of 63,100, and a Rockwell hardness of B92.  I have no idea what that means - but in the bicycle world it's long-hand for relatively cheap, relatively heavy and bloody strong. This makes for an affordable bike, that can be loaded to hell and back, and with the right components, won't fail.  If you crash it hard, it can be welded by a regular bloke with a regular welder - though of course the same does not hold true of your person.

Somewhat difficult to see, but things to note - long wheelbase achieved by a more relaxed steerer tube angle, and longer chain stays (stops your feet hitting panniers when they are on the bike, and makes it much more stable at speed and when loaded; none of your twitchy Tour de France hardware here, super-stable, straight line tracking freight train this.), plenty of space between wheels and frame (for mudguards etc), low bottom bracket, lowering the centre of gravity, and drop handlebars to give you multiple hand placements and a way to hide a bit from the touring cyclists worst enemy - the dreaded headwind.  It also has a less pronounced angle between the bars and the saddle - keeping weight off your shoulders.

The thing that makes the Surly the one to get, is that its put together by people who get cycling, actually go touring (as part of their job requirement) and have worked out that low cost in one area does not mean low cost in all.  So with the 4130 frame, you also get top of the range Deore XT hubs - because you need the hubs to be equally wicked-strong and reliable.  XT components are typically found on fifty + grand bikes; certainly I've never owned a bike with XT components before.

As with the hubs, so with the derailleur and the gears - XT.

Stopping a fully loaded touring bike, with a slab of middle aged ass porking up the saddle really matters - so the braking system is nothing less than Avid's cult BB7 mountain bike disk - the final word in mechanically operated disk brakes.  Hydraulic disks out-stop cable activated ones - but hydraulics lack the mechanical simplicity of cable brakes - and in my view if you grab a hard handful of either, the wheel stops - not always good for the rider.

Another bicycle frailty, the head-set, location of the steering bearings.  As with the gears, hubs and brakes - top of the line stuff - Cane Creek's bit of wizardry.  Also on display here is the delightfully finished box crown fork.  The welding on the bike is beautifully done, and the colour is pretty cool; harking back to early Henry Ford, the colour you don't get to choose (it's not value adding to touring durability, and the choice is a cost that can come off - so it's one colour a year, and this year it's blue :-)

The saddle that the bike comes with is nastier than hell, and this itself is smart of Surly, because anyone into biking enough to want to go touring has a view on their saddle of choice.  The first time I went touring I used a minimalist road saddle which was on my commuting bike.  It totally destroyed me, and medically left me with a bruised prostate nerve.  That in plain English is like peeing through a piece of the garden hose-pipe for 3 months; its in your hand, but feeling-wise does not belong to you.  After that I learned a bit about saddles.  The next tour I went on was on a sophisticated thing that Ange bought for me (I remember thinking initially, "odd present" - but after feeling normal 1400kms in, I became a convert).  This one is a thick leather cut-away which takes the shape of your butt after you've worn it in, and can be adjusted for tension with screw rail.

The thing that I have never ridden with before, and which bothered me somewhat were these - bar end gear shifters.  I can think of a million reasons why these should be a problem - but the people I ordered the bike from said "just use them, and you will see, they would not be on this bike if they weren't right for the job" and I'm pleased I listened.  They are mechanically super simple, indexed, but can be turned off and operated just as friction shifters.  I still find them weird to look at - but they are amazingly useable.  Also visible in this pic are the multiple mounting points on the forks, for different sorts of pannier racks.  Having previously toured on a bike without these, using pannier racks that I'd had to bend to fit, its another Surly touch that I appreciate.

At this point you get into the difference between a smart touring bike, and a cult touring bike.  What's the one thing that can easily break and which you wont find at the general dealer in Pofadder?  Spokes.  So the bike comes with a spoke holder on the frame, and a couple of spare spokes.  You have to like that level of detail.  

So how does it go?  As it turns out, really well.  Here's a summary from today's 50km route, decent average, and the long wheelbase allows you to blitz down the hills enjoying yourself thoroughly.  Of course it is MUCH harder work in the Clearwater Bay hills than a fancy road-bike - but I suspect it will still be rolling with a smile in a couple of generations, which the fancy stuff most certainly will not.

Now if I have half a chance I will find myself pounding the Shenandoa National Park's Skyline Drive, between Washington DC and Charlottesville - just like this bloke, also on a Surly (video's best at 1.12, I can feel that).  

Finally, here's my rig from the early 90s after a clean and new set of tyres at Anne and Hannelie's place in Salt River - including the saddle that did all the damage.