![\"Enve](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/rizzo4-1.jpg\")
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Tech features<\/a><\/p>\n Everything from an exotic all-road from a solo builder in Spain to a drop-bar mountain bike built for the Tour Divide.<\/p>\n Rob English<\/p>\n The annual Builder Round-Up and Grodeo<\/a> gravel ride took place this weekend at Enve\u2019s HQ in Ogden, Utah. This year I flew instead of driving, which gave me a chance to use the functionality of my folding gravel bike<\/a>. For full door-to-door travel I used my old Bike Friday trailer frame to convert the travel case to tow mode and pedaled the 40 miles from the airport \u2013\u00a0in 102\u00b0, which made it seem a bit further\u2026.<\/p>\n This year there were 17 custom bikes on display, from various parts of the world. The material selection was heavy on titanium, with 10 ti bikes, four in steel, one in steel\/carbon and two carbon. Time for photographing bikes and interviewing builders was limited, so I couldn\u2019t cover everything, but tried to get a bit deeper into each story.<\/p>\n We got lucky with cooler temperatures for the 92 mile ride on Saturday \u2013 challenging as ever, especially with the altitude for me, but a great day out in the mountains.<\/p>\n For round one we have a quartet of custom titanium builds, each taking a different construction approach and philosophy.<\/p>\n Moots Routt CRD Nate Bradley, the president of Moots<\/a>, got my craziness award for the weekend \u2013 he raced (and won) a six hour mountain bike race on Friday evening (that finished at midnight), and then was ready to roll out for the 92-mile gravel ride at 7AM on Saturday.<\/p>\n Moots continue to produce titanium frames in Steamboat Springs, with an operations team of 12 producing around 1,000 frames a year. About 90% are sold through their dealer network, with the rest being direct to customer. Everything is built to order. Roughly 60% of the output is gravel, with the remainder split between road and mountain. Moots use a third party testing facility in California for destructive fatigue testing. This helps identify any weaknesses, and then both the design and process can be critiqued for improvements \u2013 whether for example that is a wall thickness change or a modification of the tacking sequence.\u00a0<\/p>\n Buying a custom or boutique bike for road\/all-road\/gravel\/adventure can get a little confusing for the rider to figure out what they need for their riding. I know that I generally start by asking about tire size and terrain \u2013 Bradley made an interesting point that sometimes it can feel like a disadvantage that Moots has model designations, as the customer might need to be directed differently than they were thinking initially, depending on what they need for rider positioning and tire volume.\u00a0<\/p>\n This post is for paying subscribers only Already have an account? Sign in<\/a><\/p>\n Did we do a good job with this story?<\/p>\n \n \ud83d\udc4dYep![\"Rob](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/English-PaulSkilbeck-104-aspect-ratio-99-99-1-150x150.jpg\")
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CRD stands for Complete Race Design, which takes the Routt gravel bike and optimizes it for fast riding. The top tube and down tube use butted tubes from Reynolds, with the rest of the frame being US-sourced straight gauge tubing from Alleima (formerly Sandvik). The geometry gets a bit tighter than the standard Routt, with 7 mm shorter chainstays (down to 430 mm), and a slightly steeper (71.25\u00b0 on a size 55 cm) head tube angle. Tubes are all round with the exception of the shaping of the chainstays and a slight ovalisation of the top tube where it meets the seat tube. The butted tubes can be trimmed from both ends, so the butt profile can be varied over frame sizes \u2013 for example increasing the butted section at the front of the down tube to compensate for the added leverage of a longer head tube.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/moots2-1.jpg\")
The wishbone seatstay is primarily an aesthetic choice \u2013 it comes from the YBB (why be beat) model that integrates a small shock into this frame section, and in earlier times, that frame shape would match the curve of a rim brake. It also allows for seatstay sub-assemblies to be welded independently, then dropped into the fixture as a single unit.<\/p>\n
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