Looking for Gravel bike under £1000

[battered]

Me?
I'd go for a bike with something like 9 speed 44/32/22 on front and 12-36 on the back.
Stuff whether it's fashionable or not - supremely practical - bits cheap - of course there is a certain near duplication on some gears but I see that as a plus - built-in redundancy for any ontour problems until you can find a (cheap) spare ring.

Wow, 22 x 36 will get you up the North Face of the Eiger. With a gear to spare. I tend to agree though, big hills, rough terrain, poor surfaces etc all make 3 x 9 a great choice. 44 x 12 top will top out about 35mph, but who's still pushing the pedals at speeds higher than that? If you do, go for a bigger ring. The draw with 3 x 9, better still 3 x 8, is the bits are just for nothing. My town commuter was something like £12 for an 8 speed 11-30, or 11-32, I forget. You know you always have exactly the right gear too, if you can eventually find it before the gradient changes.

 

[DRM]

Consider as well a new cassette will cost between £75 to £110 ! compared with a 105 11 speed cassette for about £50, 10 speed Tiagra & 9 speed Sora will be even less, for a loaded tourer I think you would need a more even spread of gears to avoid going from spinning too easily to struggling to keep the cadence up as the next gear is a tad too high

 

[SkipdiverJohn]

It's all about the marketing!

 

[battered]

no great trouble to clean a 2 or even 3 x as long as you are talking about functional cleaning.
I was riding with someone the other week who had just bought a long haul trucker sold as a gravel bike (came as a bit of a surprise to me - I thought they always billed it as an exped tourer) - it was a triple. 9 speed. I think the front triple was probably 44/32/22 and probably had a 36T big cog at the back.

Exped tourer, CX, gravel bike, we all know it's just the latest marketing drive to persuade us we need n+1. Time was that we were junking road bikes, In the 90s you could not give them away. We all needed MTBs and those "old fashioned ones with curly handlebars" were for old men. 10 years on and road bikes came back. Then hardcore road bikes were a bit, well, uncomfortable on a long trip, how about a flat bar hybrid, best of all worlds. Of course by now your old 26" MTB isn't really cutting it, you need a 29Dr or something with proper bike trail ability. Tourers didn't much catch on, CX certainly didn't, and how many people noticed that the new CX bikes had mudguard eyelets and pannier hangers? Well, you need them for a race round a park in Cleckheaton, don't you? Then 4 or 5 years ago someone came up with the gravel bike, because nobody had ever come up with a rigid bike having light off road ability, had they? No, of course it wasn't anything like a CX bike or a tourer. This time the idea's got legs. Long may it last.

 

[T4tomo]

Me?
I'd go for a bike with something like 9 speed 44/32/22 on front and 12-36 on the back.
Stuff whether it's fashionable or not - supremely practical - bits cheap - of course there is a certain near duplication on some gears but I see that as a plus - built-in redundancy for any ontour problems until you can find a (cheap) spare ring.

Wow, 22 x 36 will get you up the North Face of the Eiger. With a gear to spare. I tend to agree though, big hills, rough terrain, poor surfaces etc all make 3 x 9 a great choice.

Agree with that.

@Blue Hills I assume that is for a flat bar set up as 44/32/22 is a very much mountain bike territory, as the very few drop bar triples you can actually buy new, thinking about relevance to the OP, is Sora which is 50-39-30. Mated with a standard-ish 11-34 is still a pretty low bottom gear for most applications, with the option of 36 if needed.

I don't think the op will consider anything with more rings than a double though.

 

[Cycleops]

Haven’t heard back from the OP. I hope he hasn’t been frightened off by the nasty remarks at the beginning of the thread

 

[Baldy]

Haven’t heard back from the OP. I hope he hasn’t been frightened off by the nasty remarks at the beginning of the thread

I'd be very surprised if he hasn't.

 

[Blue Hills]

Agree with that.

@Blue Hills I assume that is for a flat bar set up as 44/32/22 is a very much mountain bike territory, as the very few drop bar triples you can actually buy new, thinking about relevance to the OP, is Sora which is 50-39-30. Mated with a standard-ish 11-34 is still a pretty low bottom gear for most applications, with the option of 36 if needed.

I don't think the op will consider anything with more rings than a double though.

True re flat bar, though I put the suggestion in as I rather had the idea that the OP might have ended up thinking of drops because that's what is heavily promoted for a "gravel bike" at the mo rather than having a real fondness for them. (as per a certain idea that 1x is the approved path)
The long haul trucker i mentioned upthread which had been sold as a gravel bike had drops and I think had gearing very similar to my flatbar build - I didn't peer at the gear shifting system - will check out when I next ride with him.
Things are pretty much always simpler with flatbar of course - opens the door to all sorts of useful bodgery

 

[battered]

the very few drop bar triples you can actually buy new, thinking about relevance to the OP, is Sora which is 50-39-30. Mated with a standard-ish 11-34 is still a pretty low bottom gear for most applications, with the option of 36 if needed.

I don't think the op will consider anything with more rings than a double though.

My road triple is an old bike now but I think without checking it's 50-39-30 as you say and 12-23. I'll be honest, the 50 ring is largely superfluous, I generally give it a run out once a ride so it doesn't feel left out but without it I wouldn't feel aggrieved, so a double offering something in the 40-odds as a top ring and 11-30ish would be fine. I find 30-23 a rather stiff bottom gear at the end of long days and repeated climbs, another gear or two would be nice so I could just spin my way up. Once a MTBer...

Of course if you are Lance Armstrong and live for time trials in the Cambridgeshire Fens then a 50 top ring will be indispensable, in which case be my guest.

 

[battered]

The long haul trucker i mentioned upthread which had been sold as a gravel bike had drops and I think had gearing very similar to my flatbar build

I think it came with a MTB derailleur and 9 speed 11-30 or 32, 34, etc. MTB gearing was very popular on tourer type bikes of 10 years ago or so, the bigger wheels and 3x9 made very good sense if you had to haul a load of kit and yourself over big hills and big distances for hours on end. Which is what the LHT is made for.

 

[goldcoastjon]

Lauris,

Almost *any* older (1960s-1980s) lugged-steel-framed bicycle that accommodates wider tires and both front and rear racks will work for you -- and can be ridden off-road, too. Look at entry-level Peugeot lugged- and steel-framed bikes like UO-8s, UO-10s, UO-18s, etc: they can take wide (35+mm) tires on 700C or 27-inch wheels and can be had for 300 GBP ($300-500 USD) or so, allowing a lot of upgrading of the components. These frames have higher BBs and handle very nicely for their price.

 

[Punkawallah]

Ribble Cycles? They offer 'go anywhere' bikes in a variety of materials & prices. GCN had a recent video showcasing them.

Or a second hand Galaxy . . .