Touring Bike

Almost any kind of bike can be used for touring, but for comfort and relability a special bike is a good idea. There's more information about touring in our new Touring pages. More tourers are in this bit of the Gallery.

The classic touring bike looks much like a sports bike, but has a longer wheelbase, more clearance for slightly bigger tyres and lower gearing. Some have cantilever brakes. Most have drop handlebars.

A trekking bike is the German version, which has flat or butterfly handbars (like on this bike) and V-brakes. These are a bit overspecified but will perform adequately.  One of our best touring bikes is here.

Here is a 1970s Claude Butler touring bike, modified with some more recent parts. Note the high stem, putting the bars up to a comfortable height, the full mudguards, rack and flat pedals. This one has bar end gear levers, which offer almost as much ease of use as STI-Ergopower and last far, far longer.

A bike to this specification would cost about £500, including powder coating.

A bike like the one above is a "do it all machine". It will work well for everyday use, and take you round Scotland or to Turkmenistan and back. It will go a long way off-road, as long as you take it gently. The 28 mm tyres will cut through thick mud to solid ground underneath. It is almost as fast as a racing bike, but much more comfortable.

This is possibly the ultimate touring bike. It's an old Condor frame, made of Reynolds 525 tubing, lugged, with all the braze-ons for racks and so forth. It's been retro fitted with a Rohloff 14 speed hub gear. The control is mounted on a bar-end stub on the handlebar stem, which is what the cables along the top tube are for. At the time this picture was taken, it had just been in to have a new Schwalbe marathon plus tyre fitted to the rear, whose retro reflective band is shining brightly in the camera flash. 

This another hub geared touring bike, this time to 1950 specification. It's an old Carlton, with a Sturmey Archer 3 speed, 27" wheels, a front dynohub and a saddlebag. Again, this bike will go anywhere, though you will have to push up more hills. People used to be able to fit all they needed for a two week camping trip into the one saddlebag, rather than the four panniers used these days.

This bike was sold to a young lady for £200.

There's a Mountain bike we converted to a touring bike here. The reason for doing this is that with touring bikes the weight of the bike is not all that important, but stiffness is. Traditional steel tubes are not quite stiff enough to cope with the modern low rider pannier racks, so the best makers use slightly larger tubes, originally made for mountainbikes.