 Hey there, it's your buddy Ryan Van Duzer, and this is video number two in a series about how we are creating a low-maintenance budget-friendly bike packing bike with my friends at Priority Bicycles. Now if you watch my channel, you know that I ride the Priority 600X. We created that bike about three years ago, and it is a bomb-proof adventure machine. I've ridden that baby all over the world on some of the toughest terrain, and it is awesome. The thing about that bike is that the price point at $3,500 is out of reach for a lot of people. So we got together and we said we should make something more budget-friendly so that beginners can get into the sport of traveling by bicycle. So I made a video about three weeks ago about our initial design concepts and what type of Componentry should be on this bicycle, and we asked for your feedback. And you gave us a lot of feedback. And the two main points of contention are should this bicycle have the opinion gearbox, which is totally bomb-proof and has a range of gears that will get you through any situation, but it's pretty expensive. Or should this bike have the Shimano Alphine 11, which is solid as a rock, but it doesn't quite have the same gear range? You gave us your answers. We read them all. And in this video, I'm going to chat with Dave and Eddie at Priority about what we're going to do next. What's up, my friends? How you doing? What's up, Ryan? Good to see you. We asked for feedback, and we got it over 750 comments on that video. I think it's really cool that we're opening this process up to the world. And I think something really good is going to come from this. So exciting that so many people engaged and gave you that feedback and gave us that feedback. Lots of really thoughtful comments, well thought out and well pitched. We have some pretty informed, you guys are pretty informed followers. I'm really happy to see that. Do you want to go over some of the feedback you have? Sure. I picked a couple of highlights. This one's from Vincent Olivier. Pinyon it is in my opinion. I love puns, so that was great. He does to everybody else's pain, unfortunately, I can't help myself. But insufficient gear ratio discourages most untrained people in the beginning. I struggled to climb the hills around my house until I looked into the gear ratio. And it is my understanding that the Alpine Gearboxes are not appropriate to tackle big climbs. So I think the USD 2000 option would make for a more useful product in the market despite the higher price. The world is full of cheap pretend mountain bikes that are not equipped to go up mountains. I mean, that's that's pretty straight up. And I I kind of agree with Vincent here. You know, what I don't want to happen is we put a bike out and tell people they can go bikepacking on it and then the first hill they try to get up, they can't make it. And they say, I hate this bike. I hate priority. Now, we don't want to pretend our bike for sure. This is some feedback from a 600 X owner, Dean OV AZ 6586. As a 600 X owner, I say you must keep the pinion system. A bikepacking rig in a ballpark of two thousand dollars would be very acceptable in my humble opinion, especially with the pinion. You have to have the gearing in my humble opinion. A new owner can always upgrade wheels, tires, brakes or even a suspension fork. But as a surly ECR and salsa cutthroat owner, there is not a lot wrong with a rigid that decent size tires can't help. So pinion and the ability to upgrade if someone desires to spend more. I think we saw similar feedback across some other comments, too, that says, you know, if you give the great bones of the bike, then people can kind of take it in their own direction and upgrade components where they, Dean, they need it. This is from Jason Friar 9888. First and foremost, the burrito bruiser. Secondly, the pinion is great. But as someone who is currently looking to get on a thousand dollar mountain bike, I think the 11 speeder will for sure get the job done. If it's a two thousand dollar bike with a pinion, I think I just want to save up and get a 600 X at that point. On that note, thank you. I've said for a while the 600 X is my dream bike, but wasn't in the cards financially. Bringing this down gets riders like me in the game, and that's a good thing for everyone. I can't imagine how much work this is for you and the team at priority. So to all of you, I say, thank you. I can't wait to see what you dream up. You rock. No, you rock, Jason. Thank you. Love it. I actually met him in real life once. He came through Boulder. He's a really good guy. Really thoughtful comment and, you know, justification for doing a more budget friendly bike. I mean, that's why we're doing this, right? I didn't keep a tally. I should have. It definitely felt like, did you keep a tally? I didn't make a note, but in my mind, I think you're going to the same place I am where it was kind of split between pinion and the Alphine 11. I would say, in my opinion, it was probably 60 40, but I expected it to be a lot more one sided. So I did feel that it was a little heavier pinion, but. It wasn't that heavy either direction. There is something that I want to address, which was that a lot of the Alphine comments say just speck it with an Alphine hub and gear it down because the range isn't as important overall as having the low gears. And there's something that I want to talk about in that. That's an important technical detail of doing an internally geared hub or specifically an Alphine hub, which is that there is a recommended limit to how low you can make that gearing because if you go too low, then you can be putting too much torque into the internals of the hub. So Shimano recommends no lower than a 1.8, a 1 to 1.8 gear ratio, which is equivalent to a 50 28. And if you were going to put that on a 29 or bike, you would have a gear inches of about 27 gear inches in your lowest gear. So to kind of contextualize that, Ali Denim, who from cycling about is considered one of the foremost authorities in the technical information around bike packing and off-road touring. And he recommends having at least about 18 gear inches lowest gear for off-road touring, off-road bike packing. For on-road touring with a relatively low amount of weight, 25 gear inches is totally what he recommends. But for off-road touring, below 20 gear inches is the recommendation. So there's really no way to achieve below 20 gear inches with an Alphine hub and a reasonably sized wheel. So I think it's important that people know you can't just gear down the Alphine hub and expect it to work because, well, not only will Shimano not honor your warranty if you have an issue, you might be asking for an issue. That's a really good point, because for me, as somebody who's been up steep mountains and through sand and Baja, that easy gear is vital, especially when your bike weighs 70 pounds and you're carrying a lot of water. You need to have that easy gear so you can spin through the hard stuff. And that's the issue with the Alphine. On the other side, the whole vision of this bike was to have an affordable bike packing bike. And so it's a tricky trade off because once you go opinion, all of a sudden, whatever you're working on is a thousand dollars more expensive. Yeah, so what do we do? I don't know. Yeah, I think, you know, what you're mentioning about having to fight through sand with the load is is a really good point, too, because I was just thinking, well, all right, well, we can say that sure, it's still a bike packing bike. It's not for really hilly rides, but it'll handle, you know, 80 percent of the terrain out there for 100 or 90 percent of the riders. You know what I mean? So, you know, I think what people, a lot of our 600 X riders is a lot of them do take it by packing, but a lot of them use it for other stuff, too. So, you know, even 50, 70, 80 percent of their rides are on packed gravel, you know, even paved terrain or some, you know, kind of flowier mountain bike trails where you don't necessarily need that super low gear. So, you know, I think the question, ultimately, is do we want to offer a bike that is more affordable and can satisfy this? Like, let's say it's 80 percent of the rides that you might want to do on this type of bike or do we really want to offer a as capable of bike packing bike as there is, you know, for as low as we can offer? Because I think if we go and sell an Alphine bike, we can't say that it's, we can't, I can't with 100 percent confidence say that you can go do whatever bike packing trip you want on it, right? But if we make a pinion bike, even if it's a rigid bike, I think I would have confidence saying you can go go take this on whatever bike packing route you want to take. And you're, you know, you're going to be able to get up stuff. You're not really going to have to worry about the gearbox at all. Like this thing's going to work for bike packing. So I think when it comes when it comes down to what I would be more confident with selling to a customer or putting putting under my favorite bike packer and saying go for it, it would have to be a pinion bike. You know, and I totally agree with all that. And I also was looking at some of the comments this morning from some students or younger people who who don't have the budget for a two thousand dollar bike, which is probably where this would land if it did have pinion. And they're like, you know what? I just want a bike that I can take on most terrain. I can commute with it. I can put bags on it and ride a few hundred miles. And that's going to be good enough for me. And then, you know, maybe many years down the line, that that person will someday buy a different bike with pinion or something. Because, you know, the whole like when we go back to the the goal of this was to make a more budget friendly bike packing bike for beginners who want to just like try it out. You know, I make my videos, I tell everybody to get out there, you know, and I want them to also be able to get out there in an affordable way, which is which is tricky because gear costs a lot of money. And not only are we talking about the bike, but all the bags that go on the bike and the other costs associated with bike packing. It can add up pretty quickly. So I don't I don't know if I quite know the answer. I mean, pinion obviously is a winner. We know that Alphine is also a great bike. We use it on the Apollo. People have ridden across the country on the Apollo many times, going up and down the Rocky Mountains. But they're on pavement, which is much different than dirt. Do we make two bikes? I think I think we have the formula for two bikes. It's true. But I'm not sure. I think that's, you know, the exercise of you asking your followers. I think that's what we got back with. I can say, you know, in my opinion, it wasn't 50 50, but it was pretty close. And it does sound like, you know, as we go through this process, we're realizing that for that off road bike, we really do want the pinion gearbox. But we also do want a bike that everybody else can ride. And it's something that we can all be really proud of, but maybe just has a little more limitations. So I think that that is the that is the way to go about it is to make two bikes, make them both and just have a different bike for a different use, which is very much recycling. Yeah, absolutely. And if we want to pivot a teeny bit here, we've only talked about the gearing system. Eddie, do you want to talk about a bit more of the frame geometry on this bike? Well, I think where where we started was with the 600X. And, you know, that bike is really designed to be stable, comfortable, but can also kind of get you out of some tough situations if you need it. So that means basically chain stays right around 450 millimeters, 68 degrees, 68 and a half degree head tube angle. I think it would make sense to have that a suspension corrected fork on this to allow people to upgrade to a suspension fork if they want it to in the future. You know, having a reasonable amount of standovers, a good idea and having a bunch of brazons on the frame so that people can bolt on whatever fun thing they want to bring along with them, whether it's a bag or water or something else. And yeah, I mean, that's those are the frame, those are the highlights. Also, as far as tire width, is it going to be similar to the 600X? Well, I think that a lot of the feedback we get is about tire width and tire choice because that is a big defining feature of this style of bike, you know, being able to fit a nice, comfortable and capable tire is part of what it's all about. So, you know, definitely we want to be able to fit as big a tire as we can within reason. So, you know, like 600X can comfortably fit a 2.6 up to even like 2.8. So we're aiming for something like that. All right. So we talked about it. We did it. Let's make them both, right? After having read 750 comments, I did come out of that thinking. We probably have an excuse to make both. And so let's do it. Let's give everybody the bike they want and bikes that we can be proud of. I'm very confident that the pinion bike is going to be a go everywhere bike. And the Alfine bike will be a go most places bike, but still very bike packing ready and reliable and low maintenance like all the bikes that we put it out. So I think we have to do both. We have a work cut out for us. It's just it's an honor to be able to do this with you. So I thank you guys for allowing my audience to have so much input in this. I don't know many other bike brands that do this. And that's why I love you in priority and you're so innovative and you're open to feedback. So this is pretty exciting. And I think we're actually going to create some bikes that are going to help people get out there. We love working with you, Ryan, and we love working with your audience to your audience. They do give us a lot of feedback. You know, we do support 365 days a year. Everyone in our New York office is talking to all of our customers and a lot of your followers and they are vocal with us. And we appreciate that. We appreciate the feedback. We've always aimed to make bikes that our riders love riding. And this feedback has been invaluable and we will make sure and work with you hand in hand to make two bikes that we can all be really proud of. I really like what Dave said there. Two bikes that we can all be really proud of. This is the main goal. We want to be proud of it. Me, the team at priority. And I want you to be proud of this creation as well because you are helping us. Your input is invaluable and we still want more. So make sure to give us more input down there. We're creating these bikes for you. And my dream is that someday down the road once we get these things out into the market that people go out with their friends and they have the time of their lives challenging themselves, riding up and down mountains, camping in beautiful locations, sleeping under the stars. You know, I just want everybody to experience the magic of traveling by bicycle. So thank you so much again for everything, for watching this video. Stay tuned. We will still be creating videos in this series as we create prototypes and we ride them and we test them. And again, we want you with us all along the way. So thanks so much for watching. 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