Frame – Lugged Roadini

Rivendell LEO ROADINI

The Roadini is an all-around, all-weather road bike. It gives up nothing to modern extreme bikes on smooth, ideal roads, and is far better in every way when conditions are crappy. It has way more tire clearances of the oldies, higher quality overall construction, is more comfortable, and rides like a Rivendell.

BUILT FOR: Road riding of all kinds. Fitness rides, club rides, solo local loops, riding with friends who are also riding road bikes. 

ALL WEATHER: Easily fendered, so you can ride it all year long.

Frame Specification:

• 650b wheels in size 47cm
• 700c wheels in sizes 50cm and up
• Fits tires up to 43mm, or 38 with a fender.
• Long reach sidepulls
• 27.2mm seat post, included. If you want to upgrade to a NITTO, OK!
• 130mm rear spacing
• 1″ threaded fork – FSA Duron headset included
• Geometry chart here.

Recommended PBHs andSTANDOVER HEIGHTS at mid-top tube with 40mm tire:

-47cm = 74.5-77.5cm PBH, 74.2cm standover
-50cm = 78-83cm PBH, 78cm standover
-54cm = 82-87cm PBH, 81.7cm standover
-57cm = 85-90cm PBH, 84.5cm standover

-61cm = 89-96cm PBH, 88.5cm standover

If you’re reading this you know that although we have a peaceful coexistence with modern bikes, but they copy one another and make all the same mistakes:

• They’re too short (wheelbase), steep (frame angles), and jumpy.

• They make it hard to impossible to get comfortable, because they don’t allow you to raise the handlebars up where they should be. They assume that it’s more important for you to ride leaned over like a racer than to be comfortable (and efficient).

• They limit your tires to too-skinny. Gravel bikes are an exception, but road bikes, no.

• They are increasingly bland-techy-not so attractive. They’re generally dark gray or black, with detail-less joints and barely legible and unattractive graphics.

• They’re made of a material that is light but brittle, that fails often and suddenly, that at best has a practical lifespan of 6 years, and is unrecyclable.

The Roadini fixes each of these. It’s longer in the wheelbase, and more stable and safe because of it. You’re safer on any road and at any speed. It handles just the way you want a road bike to handle, minus the twitchiness.

It fits tires to 43mm, or 38mm with fenders. We recommend 38mm to 42mm tires to start. If that sounds too much, go as skinny as 35. There’s no reason to go skinnier than that.

The Roadini, like all of our bikes, comes in nice colors and has pleasing graphics that aren’t afterthoughts. Bikes should look friendly, not mean, serious, and generic.

The Roadini is CrMo steel, frame and fork. Steel allows pleasing-to-the-eye proportions, is tough and cannot fail suddenly (and is safe for that reason). Steel weighs more, but the frame weight is a tiny percentage of the rider+bicycle weight. Your Roadini frame should last you 30 years. We make no claims, but that’s the idea, and we have lots of experience going into it.

The Roadini is now fully lugged and the fork is as nicely curved, crowned, and detailed as any Rivendell fork.

The Roadini uses rim brakes, which are more powerful and more sensitive than disc brakes. It has a quill stem that allows handlebar height adjustments with one tool  in ten seconds. It uses quick-release hubs, which simplify and speed-up wheel removals and installation.

It is the most well-designed road bike we’ve ever made. Comfortable, versatile, safe, gorgeous, and great-riding. We’re quite proud of it, and are ready to answer you any questions you have that aren’t addressed here.

The front height of this crown happens to be 19mm. With a std vertically centered hole, both numbers would be 9.5mm. You want that extra 3.5mm to be air, not fork crown, so when you try to stuff a slightly bigger tire or a fender under there, it hits air and fits and rolls on through. it’s not jammed up against the underside of the fork crown. It’s basic, not so hard to understand, but I’ve never seen a low-offset hole on any crown that wasn’t ours, and that is insane.

The ball-and-socket seat stay joint eliminates shear forces and adds strength. The main shoreline of the seat lug is familiarly Rivendell, the same-ish swirls and all, and like all Rivendell seat lugs, it has other details that are worth a glance.

The large, raised and reinforced stress relief hole reduced eliminates any chance of repeated tightenings causing a stress crack at the bottom of the slot. Admittedly, it’s not a common occurrence, but we’ve seen it happen on other bikes half a dozen times. We make it maximally crack-resistant on our seat lugs because our showroom bikes get tightened and loosened and retightened with ever test ride, every slight difference in saddle height. On your bike, maybe you’ll do it a few times in the fussing, so our O-hole is overkill, but it’s also a nice visual detail.

The seat binder area is reinforced with unpinchable steel. As with the O-hole, it makes our lug impervious to repetitive stress. And if for whatever act-of-god reason you lose your seat binder bolt, you can easily (even you) rig one up using hardware store hardware –a threaded bold M6 or M5 diamters, a mating nut, and perhaps a few washers. Or you can clamp the binder shut with a Vise Grip, with (perhaps) minor damage to the paint, but none to the metal.

We use the same binder on all of our bicycles, and it is the best and most practical in the world.