For most of us on our daily rides, the bike is a flamboyant companion. You stand on the pedals and feel it sprint underneath you. You lean into a corner and feel its reassuring steering geometry. You surge up a hill, and the bike is an eager partner. You see a pothole, you jump the bike over the pothole, and all is well.
When you add a sizable amount of touring gear, the relationship changes. The bike is still there, but it’s less flamboyant. Loaded with panniers, it’s more like a slow moving workhorse. It corners a bit more slowly (but still with that reassuring feeling) because you’re riding more slowly. It laughs if you try to sprint or climb quickly. And you can forget about jumping potholes. But the bike stays with you for thousands of miles.
The same bike can have both those personalities. A good touring bike will be your spry fun riding around home bike and your uncomplaining pack mule on an extended adventure.
If you decide you want to purchase a touring bike, you’ll probably have to order it because most shops keep zero to one touring bikes in stock, and Murphy’s Law dictates that they will not stock one in your size. Now here’s the big secret, and the reason why I’m comfortable telling you to not sweat the lack of a test ride: they all ride very similarly to one another.
That’s right! No caster-angle understeer, no divergent negative instability, no trail braking induced instability in hard cornering, no self energizing wheel flop, no way for jargon writers to make you worry about your purchase. Touring bikes don’t have quirky handling. I’ve been roadtesting touring bikes for 31 years and I’m telling you, they don’t have that. They all have neutral handling.
So how do you pick a touring bike that will do that job optimally? And why will that bike feel spry the other 340 or so days of the year when you don’t have it packedup for that long trip?
For people impatient with technical detail, here’s the short answer: Go into a shop where the sales folks like meeting customer needs and buy a real touring bike. All of them will do the job, and all of them feel quite spry when the gear is off. Put on skinny tires if you’re inclined, and the bike will handle and ride quite similarly to a racing bike. (People in bike shops generally don’t believe that, but they haven’t done as much measuring, weighing, and side-byside road testing as I have.)
Mass produced (i.e., less-expensive) bikes include offerings from many of the major brands: Surly, Salsa, Cannondale, Fuji, Kona, Rocky Mountain, Novara, Raleigh, and Jamis, among others. More expensive brands with fancier features include Co-Motion, Independent Fabrications, Bruce Gordon, Waterford, and many more. But people who want technical detail should keep reading. We’re going to walk around the bike, look at the various features, and tell you what to look for in each feature.
What a touring bike should have
We’ll start with all metal construction. Your friends who don’t actually go anywhere on their bikes will buy carbon fiber, but not you.
Your bike might get scratched by a baggage handler or have a minor fall in the outback. If the bike is steel, aluminum, or titanium, you don’t care about the scratch. If the bike is carbon, you do care, so you’ll be worrying about phrases like failure mode, crack propagation, and stress analysis. Someday, someone will design a carbonfiber bike optimized for touring. But I haven’t seen it yet.
If it makes you feel better, the weight savings of carbon are often overstated. A good steel touring frame, depending on size and other factors, will weigh about 4 to 4 and 1/2 pounds. An aluminum touring frame will be maybe a half pound lighter. A carbon frame, if you could find one made to resist the stresses of touring, would be about another half pound lighter. The difference that of emptying out a water bottle or boycotting French Fries for a couple weeks merits a yawn.
Every touring bike in our Buyers’ Guide has a metal frame, so I won’t bother with specific examples. But if a salesman tries to sell you a hybrid or mountain bike with carbon components or frame tubes, just say no.
Next we want great torsional rigidity. Again, this is a factor that is built into name brand touring bikes, but if you’ve read this far, you clearly want to know the details.
Torsional rigidity means the frame doesn’t much like to twist in response tothe loads placed upon it. And some of the loads that you put on your touring frame are much greater than the loads top athletes put on their racing frames. Specifically, the weight in your panniers tries to twist the frame. Racing frames shouldn’t have panniers attached, so they need less torsional rigidity. But if you do put panniers on a light racing frame, you may find that it likes to shimmy, as the more flexible frame’s dynamic oscillation frequency gets excited.
The most important thing that chases away shimmy is a big, stiff top tube. The oversized aluminum top tubes on Cannondale frames are as stiff as it gets, and are excellent for this. The Co-Motion Americano has a steel frame with a 1 and ¼ inch top tube, and that will clearly do the job. Most other steel frames now sold have top tubes of 1 and 1/8 inch, which is almost always fine. If you ride a pre 1990 steel frame, its top tube may only be 1 inch. At that point, shimmy may be a problem, depending on numerous other factors.
But again, new bikes have this question figured out.
Spokes. Lots of spokes
Fancy racing wheels with goofball spoking are a fashion necessity on some club rides. They are also a perilous maintenance headache on tour. If you break a spoke, the bike becomes unrideable. Replacement spokes are proprietary to that brand of wheel, expensive, sometimes hard to find,
and require far more expertise to install.
By contrast, conventionally spoked wheels are more forgiving. Lose one of your spokes and the wheel goes slightly out of true. If you didn’t bring a replacement, the next bike shop will have one for cheap.
Today’s touring wheels usually have 32 or 36 spokes arranged in a conventional tangential laced pattern. Accept no less. Avoid the “paired spoke” and other cute variations.
I’ve never seen a bike sold for touring that has goofball spoking, but plenty of people have taken quasi racing bikes on tour and discovered the hard way that goofball spokes can ruin a bike trip.
