Pacenti 650B vs 29er
Is history repeating itself?
Kirk Pacenti relishes the same things as you and I: a stable family life, great coffee, and a sweet ride. The difference between Pacenti and most people is his definition of a sweet ride.
Pacenti has built and designed framesets for Bontrager, Schwinn, Rivendell, Merlin and Lightspeed, so he knows his way around the bike. He's also one of those responsible for helping get more exquisitely lugged steel bikes back on the market, thanks to his supermarket of custom lugsets, bottom bracket shells, fork crowns and other frame bits.
But what Pacenti has cooked up recently will do more than appease the chat-roomers seeking stylistic reinforcement: he's pushing a new mountain bike wheel diameter known simpy as 650B. This has already rocked the chat-roomers who just got used to the 29er movement, now 10 years on the market.
What's 650B all about, and how does this fit in with MTBs?
According to a recent online posting, "650B (which is pretty much 27.5 inches) has already been done. Tom Ritchey made 12 bikes with this size wheel (one of which the poster owns), right at the point when purpose-built mountain bikes started to be built. Ritchey had heard about the `Marin klunker thing' going on north of the Golden Gate Bridge on 26-inch wheels, and he thought 650B would do the trick and built a few up. Rumor has it Gary Fisher got one too. Ritchey said he really liked that size and since at that point there were no aluminum 26-inch rims available it was a huge improvement.
"The only problem was the tires were a little hard to get and only about in 1.75-inch widths or so. They imported Nokian Hakkapalita tires from Finland, but sometime soon after the mountain bike movement started happening, Russia ordered Nokian's entire production of the tire and that was the end of it. Then 26-inch aluminum rims happened with Ukiah and Araya and that was that."
Pacenti firmly believes in the riding characteristics of 650B vs. 26-inch (he was part of the crowd designing 29ers 10 years ago), and feels the 650B size is a great no-compromise fir best for ideal geometry off-road, especially for full suspension bikes.
Stay tuned - Pacenti has sold out of his first production run of 650B tires made for him by Panaracer. For more information, visit his website .
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