It appears that GCN has taken a pair of Nimbus 36 inch wheels and made a road bike with them:
It’s an entertaining video.
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So funny to load this up and see it is filmed in my home city of Bath. The first shot I just rode today on my Oregon! It felt a little weird. Shame they didn’t say where the rims came from!
For being avid cyclists with their own youtube channel, they were surprisingly mediocre riders once they left the pavement. Road bikes aren’t designed for offroading, but a good rider can still easily ride those trails and obstacles on one.
I was going to say. That would have in fact been easier on a 36er, one wheel. Aka: unicycle.
But still it was nice to see those big rims in b*ke world!
Those wheels seem pointless on a road bike, but apparently they’re pretty great for mountain bikes. I saw an interview with Travis Brown from Trek, who said he would choose a 36" if he was only allowed one bike - if only he could find better tires.
I wonder whether they tried to get a DirtySixer but couldn’t.
The big wheels mean that you can actually get frame geometry correct for tall riders. They make very little sense on a bike for shorter riders.
Edit: I see now they built it and did a whole feature on that so I’m sure it’s discussed heavily on that if you have GCN+
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OK after watching it, two thoughts - I wonder whether they’ll upgrade to carbon rims in the future (and DirtySixer for that matter), but why do they both have such knackered/badly adjusted disk brakes?
If my brakes honked when I used them I’d either fix it or swap them immediately.
I was also really hoping they were going to try going up the steps rather than down them.
I was told they were great for seven foot tall riders.
The rotors also look tiny. If they set it up with better brakes and MTB handlebars it would likely be better both on and off road.
This thread reminds me of a prototype 36" bike review on Bikepacking.com:
https://bikepacking.com/bikes/curve-titanosaur-36er/
Apparently, that one was designed with the rough corrugated roads in Austrailia in mind, with the idea that the 36" wheels will more easily maintain speed for long expanses of very rough road.
This was how they described the conditions they had in mind when building this bike, “The inland thoroughfares in Australia are 1,000 to 2,000 kilometers long with barely a single turn with deep corrugations. This means that riding them at speed is very similar to being trapped in a washing machine for five days… or perhaps a clothes dryer, as that would better reflect the temperatures.”
or the Qu-Ax Monsterbike
a more relaxed 36er Touring B*ke
Much more relaxed!