The High Spark of Low Trail Bikes - Part 2

As all three of my regular readers will have noticed, I took a long break from posting on this blog. I have various reasons (or excuses) for taking the break, but none of them have anything to do with a loss of interest in randonneuring, cycling or anything vaguely bicycle related. I'm still as cycling obsessed as ever, though admittedly a complete neophyte compared to some of my riding partners. Anyway, it's time to jump back into the blog world.

Many months ago, I wrote a post about "low trail" front geometry and my Trek 311. Since then I've completed an SR series on that bike, not to mention countless just-for-fun rides and literally thousands of commuting miles, so I now have a lot more experience with the handling, both with and without front loads. With that additional experience, I thought I'd write some follow-up thoughts on the old Trek 311 and its low trail front end geometry.

But before I say any more I should warn you, I’m a lousy bike reviewer. There’s nothing rigorous or scientific about my reviews. These are just my thoughts on a bike I own, and I find that I almost always like the bikes I own. Even when they are $75 Craig's List finds (which the Trek 311 is). I may not like everything about them, but I usually find something to like because… well, because they’re mine and because in most cases I built them up myself from a bare frame and a bunch of parts. Furthermore, I tend to ride old “junkers,” so what do I know about good bikes, right? I've ridden a few nicer modern bikes here and there, but for the most part I ride bikes that are either old (Treks from the 80s) or new-ish, but using old designs and technology (VO Randonneur). I love combining an old steel frame with a mix of old and new parts to make a bike that is comfortable and highly functional for me. My bikes aren't vintage museum pieces and they aren't state of the art racing machines, they’re just my vision of good, useful and relatively inexpensive bikes. So, if you’re interested in a thorough and objective review of a bike that’s relevant in today’s market place, you may want to go here or here or maybe even here. But if you’re interested in one randonneur’s esoteric equipment choices and what he thinks about them, please read on.

I reread that last post from February and realized that after a lot more riding, my first impressions haven’t changed much at all. Specifically, I find that the 311 has stable, yet responsive handling both with and without a light to moderate front load. Without a load it’s a little quicker to respond to input, but barely. I prefer the handling with some weight on the front. For commuting, I often take the handlebar bag off altogether (so I don’t have to worry about the bag being stolen while the bike’s parked at work), and it’s just a bit twitchier than I like that way. The couple of pounds of tools, tubes and other crap I usually have in the handlebar bag for most rides seem to stabilize the ride just enough so I’m less likely to swerve off course when looking over my shoulder to make a lane change, for instance. Even with heavier loads like the 7 – 8 lbs I typically carry on a long brevet, the steering is still responsive when I need to avoid an obstacle, but extremely easy to ride in a straight line or hold steady through a fast turn. I almost never carry more than a few lbs in my handlebar bag, so I can't say much about how the bike handles a heavy load on the front.

Early on when I started riding the Trek with a front load I noticed it had a slight tendency to shimmy under certain circumstances. I've read a fair amount about shimmy being a common problem with low trail front geometry, and my Trek seems to support that. But to put it in perspective, after nearly six thousand miles I've only experienced shimmy a few times. It seems to happen when: a) the handlebar bag is very heavily loaded, like maybe more than 10 lbs, and b) I'm cold. No, really! If I'm cold and especially if I'm shivering, the frequency of my shivers seem to match the bike's oscillations and together we get into a shiver/shimmy feedback loop. Talk about being in sync with your bike... It's never been so bad that I felt at all out of control, and trying to relax my upper body and pressing a knee against the top tube does a good job of dampening the shimmy. I've read that a roller bearing headset can fix the problem, but honestly it's never bothered me enough to do anything about it. But, if you're the kind of person who gets freaked by any shimmy at all (and I wouldn't blame you if you were) then you may want to steer clear of the old low trail Treks.

In the earlier post, I talked about the Trek having a trail measurement of about 45 mm. While that’s lower than the typical mainstream road bike trail number by 10 mm or so, I should point out that it's not as low as most of the true French constructeur influenced randonneuring bikes that often have trail measurements in the 30s*. So, perhaps it would be more accurate to describe the Trek as "mid-low trail". Whatever you want to call it, the trail of my Trek is considerably less than almost any modern mainstream road bike you can buy.

My Velo Orange Randonneur (which I no longer own) had very similar front-end geometry to the Trek. Both bikes have a head tube angle of 73 degrees. The Trek's fork offset is 55mm, while the VO's is 53mm. That works out to about 2mm more trail for the VO than the Trek. For the metrically impaired, 2mm is about the thickness of a US nickle, or in other words, not much at all. The Trek and VO feel somewhat different on the road, but they both handle well with or without a light to moderate front load. My guess is that the differences in handling characteristics can be attributed more to other differences in geometry (chainstay length being the most significant), and differences in set up (stem length, handlebar width) than to the slight difference in trail.

Speaking of differences in setup, I've experimented a little with handlebars of different widths over the past year and was surprised to find that handlebar width seems to affect handling at least as much if not more than differences in trail. The extra leverage provided by a 44 cm wide handlebar vs. say a 39 cm handlebar makes the steering feel much more responsive. On some bikes that's a good thing, but I find that my Trek 311 feels better with narrower handlebars. It just seems much easier to ride smoothly in a straight line, or to hold a steady line through a turn with the narrower bars.

Conclusion
Yeah, well I'm not sure I have much of a conclusion (I told you I'm not much of a reviewer) other than: I really like the way my Trek 311 handles. So much so, that I bought another similar old Trek with the exact same front-end geometry to replace my VO as my main geared randonneuring bike (more on that in another post). But does the Trek's low-ish trail really make a significant difference in the way the bike handles a front load? It helps, but I don't find the difference to be huge. Overall, I think some of the old steel Treks from the 80s make outstanding randonneuring bikes, but it's much more than just front-end geometry that make these old bikes work so well. Tubing choices, quality of construction, overall geometry and design all contribute to make for a fun, smooth riding, well mannered and high performing bike.

* Here are a few modern production bikes to check out that have true low trail geometry:

• Boulder Bicycles All-Road and Brevet
• Ocean Air Cycles Rambler
• Soma Grand Randonneur
• Rawland rSogn/Stag and Nordavinden