Waltly ‘Innovation’ custom gravel frame review – the bike
Hi all, I wanted to share my experiences working with Waltly to design and build my new Ti gravel bike frame and fork. There’s a lot to say, so I’ll do two posts – this one on the frame/fork themselves, and another one later on my experience working with Waltly.
My design goal was for a versatile bike that could handle long road training miles as well as survive technical mountain bike trails. I designed the frame around two distinct setups – rigid fork with 35mm road tyres, and suspension fork with 2.2” mountain bike tyres. I opted for a Ti rigid fork over carbon so I could customise it to ‘suspension correct’, to maintain geometry when I switch between setups.
I chose the ‘Innovation’ model as I really liked the look of the 3D printed head tube and top tube/seat tube junction. Tubing is all straight gauge, frame weight is 1.8kg. I’ll cover the logos in my second post. Waltly also supplied the Fibertek handlebar, T47 BB, FSA headset, spare axles and spare UDH derailleur hanger.
My geometry was informed by a dynamic bike fit along with handling preferences from nearly 30 years of racing bikes. I am 184cm tall, and I prefer a steepish seat angle and slackish head angle on all my bikes (MTB, road and tri).
I’ve now ridden about 3 hours in road mode and 4.5 hours in off-road mode. The frame, fork and wide tyres are buttery smooth – a refreshing change from my horrendously stiff Felt AR road bike. Despite not being especially aero, it is surprisingly quick on the road – maybe only ~1km/h slower than my road bike with deep carbon wheels at Zone 2 effort. The road handling is quite ‘lazy’ when standing to climb, but otherwise feels very calm particularly at high speeds.
Off road, the bike excels! I was surprised just how well it performs in singletrack – agile, planted and predictable. The Ti frame and 40mm suspension fork soak up bumps and maintain traction far better than expected. It’s definitely not a 'mountain bike', but I can ride blue XC trails on it without fearing for my life.
Overall I’m very pleased with how the bike performs. My only regret is the very long (442mm) chainstays, which make it difficult to unweight the front end. I wanted shorter, however this was the minimum length to achieve 57mm tyre clearance with an external bearing T47 BB shell. In retrospect, I should have opted for an internal-bearing BB as this would have allowed the chainstay yokes to be welded further apart, allowing more lateral clearance and shorter chainstays.