 What's up, my friends? We're making a new bike and we need your help. Welcome to the Build a Bike Workshop. I'm creating this bicycle in conjunction with my friends at Priority Bicycles. If you watch my channel, you hear me talk about them all the time, but if you're new to my channel, I thought I'd give a really quick intro to who they are. They started only 10 years ago. Hi, my name's Dave and I'm the founder of Priority Bicycles. And since day number one, their main goal was to create bicycles that are low maintenance, bicycles that just work. What does low maintenance mean? Well, every single one of their bicycles has the Gates Carbon Drive. These things never need to be lubed and last three times longer than a chain. Every one of their bikes also has some sort of internal gearing system. That means that all the gears are enclosed in either a hub or the pinion and protected from outside elements like snow and mud that would usually wreak havoc on a traditional drive train. Their bikes are aluminum so they don't rust and they're really known for their city street commuter style bikes. That's how they got their start. But in the past few years, they've been building up their adventure line. And if you watch my videos, you know that I talk about one bike in particular all the time, the 600X. That's the bike that I designed in conjunction with Eddie and the team over there. And that bike is my dream adventure bike. At the heart of the 600X is the pinion and gates drive train. Pinion was designed by Porsche transmission engineers who said, hey, you know what? Bikes should be like cars and we should have all of our gears enclosed in a protective box. It's called the 600X because it has a 600% gear ratio, which is a larger ratio than any other drive train on the market. The easy gear on this bike, you could seriously almost ride it up a wall. The bike is a hard tail with front suspension. I have ridden it all over the world and some of my biggest adventures. And I absolutely love this thing. But I'm not the only one who seems to love this bike. You do too. We started taking orders for this bike in 2020. It got shipped in early 2021. And since then, I have seen photos of all of you out there riding your 600Xs all over the world. And it just warms my heart to see my creation out there allowing you to achieve your adventure dreams. The goal with this channel and all of the content that I create is to hopefully inspire you to get out there and challenge yourself. And now that I have a bike to offer, I have a tool that can help you achieve those dreams. And while the 600X is an incredible value at $3,500 for what you get, I realize that it's still a hefty price point and way out of the budget for a lot of people. And I want bike packing to be accessible to the masses. So I got together with guys at priority and I'm like, let's create a cheaper version of the 600X. It won't be called that. We're gonna come up with some cool name. Maybe the bruiser? Get it? We wanna make a bike that is more budget friendly but can still handle the rigors of adventure. Now, this is where you come in. I really value your opinions. And sometimes you give me a lot of opinions down there in the comments section. Well, now is your chance to go nuts. We are designing this bike. We're gonna open up the design process to you. And as always, I am working with my good friend Eddie at priority. He is the mastermind behind a lot of the new releases of the priority bicycles. Here is an initial drawing of the bicycle. It's gonna be similar in geometry to the 600X with a comfortable upright riding style. Yet it's still a mountain bike. You're gonna take this thing on dirt. It's all aluminum. We've got 29 inch wheels right here. We're gonna have room for, I think, up to 2.6 inch wide tires. A big change from the 600X is we are not gonna have a suspension fork on this thing. And this is where the big question is, right? In this area. And that's where I need your help. During our initial conversations about what component treats you put on this bike, we thought the Alphine 8, the Shimano Alphine 8 would be a great gearing system. It'll give you plenty of gears to bomb this bike around town at your local bike park on rail trails, for service roads, it's still low maintenance, it's solid. But then I started thinking, you know what? Eight speeds might not be quite enough for the rigors of bike packing. Especially if you wanna ride this bike up steep mountains on a bike that's loaded down with 20 or 30 pounds of beans. So then Eddie sent me the Shimano Alphine 11 hub, which is what the Apollo has, the Apollo gravel bike. And I tried that out. And it has a bigger gear range, but still not quite enough of that easy gear to ride up the really steep stuff. So this is the conundrum. Do we put on a hub like that, which is good for most people, the eight or the 11? Or do we bounce up and go back to pinion, which is the ultimate in reliability and gear range? But the cons to the pinion are that you take a $1,000 bike and it all of a sudden becomes a $2,000 bike, which is still $1,500 less than the 600X. And it achieves some of the goals of creating a cheaper bike, more budget friendly. Or do we go with the eight speed or 11 speed hubs, knowing that it's awesome for probably 90% of the people out there, but it's gonna be limited if you wanna take this bike on the Colorado Trail or to Baja. Hmm, this is where we need your help. What is more important to you? A cheaper bike with a limited gear range or a more expensive bike that has the gear range of the 600X. Okay, I wanna clear something up that might be confusing now. You're probably thinking to yourself, well, if this new bike has the same geometry as the 600X, and if they end up going with pinion, does this mean that the only difference is a lack of a suspension fork? Well, no, in order to bring the price down, we'll use different componentry. It'll be a little less performance and off-road friendly while still keeping the high level of low maintenance needed for bike packing. But one thing that will definitely stay the same is this epic get out there logo. Are you ready for a dad joke? Even though I'm not a dad, but I am a cool uncle, we need your opinion about the pinion. Seriously, we need your help. Write it all down below. If you could write anything else you want to know or what you'd like to see on this bicycle, we essentially want to build a fun adventure machine that is more budget friendly, so more people can be riding their bikes and experiencing the magic of bike packing and sleeping under the stars and connecting with awesome humans all over the world. Look at that sweet thing. I can't wait for it to come to fruition and I can't wait for you to help us make this happen. I mean, you're gonna be in on this, how cool is this? You know, and I really love the people at priority. It's not just a business relationship, it's more like family. I seriously love all the people that work over there and I'm just so grateful that they're giving me the opportunity to do this. Create something that's of value to the world and to you and to get more people on bikes. So thanks for watching this video. Stay tuned for the process. We'll probably make some more videos as we move along but we truly value your opinion. That's why we're making this video because we want your input on this and maybe here's a crazy idea. Maybe we make both of the bikes. We make one pinion version, one eight speed version. I don't know. Dave, can we do that? Is that okay? I'm talking to you, Dave at priority and Eddie. Anyway, I will see you guys down the road and next time maybe we'll have a prototype for me to show off to you. Cheers.