KTM Lucky Country touring bike restoration - 02

Do I need another bike? Couldn't the Rockrider do the touring-bike job as well? 

No and yes.... But then, where is the fun, right??

The 20€ all-rounder touring bike build project starts with...

... with the recompilation of data. 

So I started by the guide provided by Alee Denham from CyclingAbout. The guy is a real pro on this of riding the globe around, and although my touring intentions are infinitesimally smaller, I found his videos and guidelines very useful. Particularly this "12 best touring bikes for 2020"

here are the links to Alee channels:

CYCLINGABOUT - YouTube

Alee Denham / CyclingAbout.com (@cyclingabout) • Instagram photos and videos

CyclingAbout. Bikepacking, Touring & Travel - CyclingAbout

So I checked some of the bikes he mentions, plus some others, by looking at the climbing gear measured in "gear inches" as shown in the minute 1:50 of this video from above. 

And I put together the research I did by comparing some of these bikes at all components.

Here is the list I made.

The first thing I noticed is that the climbing gear of my 2017 BTWIN Rockrider 900 was not bad when compared with some of these bikes, something that makes totally sense considering that the Rockrider is a XC (cross country) bike, which is supposed to be used to go uphill quite often. 

Also it helped me to understand what was the target in the gear ratio I should look for. As I said in the previous entry, I love to ride the Rockrider, and I love the 1x11 setup with the 30t chainring and the 10-42t SRAM cassette, and I find it perfect for the typical rides I do (nothing too hard). And I had the feeling that with such gear ration I would do more than fine when touring. Apparently, this feeling is now confirmed with numbers, and according to this table I should be targeting the 19 to 21 "gear inch" ratio.

So if something works why change it, right? I could go for a 1x11 setup like in the Rockrider... but the 1x11 or 1x12 cassettes and derailleurs are really expensive, and it would have forced me to change the chainring as well... so in order to keep the costs down in the build, I was somehow forced to keep the Tourney crankset with the 3 chainrings in 48/36/26 teeth and go only for the replacement of the original Shimano MF-HG20 6 speed 11-24t freewheel.

So I ended up buying a rear wheel hub for shimano cassettes (a deore hub I think, less than 16€), a 8 speed shimano Altus RD-M370 rear derailleur (12€) and a Chinese Sunshine-SZ 11-42t cassette (15€), which only God knows how long will last. But I needed to cut costs somewhere 😒

I'm still waiting for these to arrive... so I started with the disassembly of the KTM and with the process of removing the original paint.

But that's for the next entry!