So by now you’ve witnessed the unveiling of the worst kept secret in bike launch history. Those with a keen eye to the ground will have been aware of a new Surly model on the horizon for quite some time now. You can read their blog piece which has some ref to that here – surlybikes.com/blog  That’s where you’ll find all the info about the framesets and complete bikes too.

A few weeks before the launch date a few select Surly dealers in the UK were handed a frameset to build up in their own way, an insight into their bike building soul if you like. Maybe a hint of what, how and why…

We got our medium sized example and got to work.  If you’re even vaguely aware of what we’re about and what we like to sell here in Manchester you’d probably guess we’d pop a Rohloff on there and you’d be right! Our demo Speedhub got paired up with an SP dynamo boost front hub and we laced them to some Velocity Blunt35 650b rims, these work great with tyres up to around 2.8″, we stuck a little smaller with some 2.4″ Teravail Honcho’s for a bit more trail bike feel. Wider rims give tyres a better profile.

We got a little funky with the Surly Corner Bars. We were lucky to snag a set for this build as more stock won’t be arriving into the UK until May.  The bend in the lower portion of the bar meant that we had to get a little creative with some tools to persuade the shifter around the corner, possibly not something we’d be encouraging but it’s working fine out on the trail, so let’s leave it at that.

You’ll see other examples built up with more usual drop / flared bars, maybe we’ll try that soon – or even some Jones Loop bars? As the Corner Bars use flat bar hardware this might just be the next thing. The Paul Component levers and Klamper cable operated brakes will swap straight over. There’ll be some out of the box complete bikes here soon enough so you can take your pick of a ‘standard’ build. You could, of course, go wild with a frameset and make it your own, as they say.

We also used some Redshift finishing kit for the seat post and bartop Cruise Control padding, for added comfort. The Jones Kraton grips are great on the lower bar portion too. Tried and tested Brooks Cambium of course.  There is room for seven bottle cages ( count ’em! ) We made use of the new rear seat stay mounts for a pair of our in-house Cerakote King cages and just one huge Widefoot Liter cage in the centre for our Nalgene.

With that super sized head tube there’s plenty of room for a large bag without restricting the use of a crown mounted dyno light    ( Sinewave Beacon in our case )  There’s internal cable routing for that down the right and side of the fork too.

You can check out the Bikepacking.com review and the discussion below here – bikepacking.com

and what other’s did with their framesets here – UK customs

You can also keep an eye on our Instagram feed for the bikes as they roll out into the wild  – Ghost Grappler