A gravel bike built to a budget

The brief

Canal towpaths, rough farm lanes, and the road in between. About thirty miles at a time, mostly at weekends, in all weathers. A budget of a thousand pounds that they were firm about.

They arrived having already decided they wanted a hand built wheelset, and had costed it at around £480 of the budget. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and we build wheels for a living, so it would have been easy money.

We talked them out of it. This page is mostly about why.

What we chose, and why

Why we said no to custom wheels

Hand built wheels are worth it when you are hard on wheels, heavy, carrying loads, or riding somewhere that punishes them. A rider doing thirty mile weekend rides on towpaths is none of those things.

A good stock wheelset does that job indefinitely. The £180 difference bought better tyres, a wider range cassette and a proper set of mudguards, all of which they notice on every single ride. The wheels they would have noticed once, on the day we handed it over.

If you are genuinely hard on wheels, our wheel building page explains when it is worth the money. This rider was not, and we would rather say so.

Tyres are the whole bike on rough surfaces

42mm, tubeless, with a supple casing and a light file tread. This is the single biggest change per pound you can make to how a bike feels on a towpath.

Wide tyres at low pressure do what suspension does, for a fraction of the money and none of the maintenance. We wrote the reasoning up in choosing tyres for mixed roads because we have this conversation constantly.

Mechanical disc brakes, not hydraulic

Slightly less powerful, noticeably cheaper, and adjustable with a screwdriver at the side of a canal. On a bike that will spend its life covered in grit, being able to fix the brakes without a bleed kit is worth more than the last ten percent of lever feel.

One chainring, eleven gears

A single chainring with a very wide cassette. Simpler, quieter, nothing to drop the chain off on a rough descent, and one less cable to fill with mud. The range was slightly narrower than a double would have given and it has never once been a problem on the terrain they ride.

Aluminium frame, and no apology for it

The budget did not stretch to steel or carbon and it did not need to. An aluminium frame with clearance for 45mm tyres and mounts for mudguards and a rack does this job perfectly well. Spending more on the frame would have meant spending less on tyres, and that is the wrong trade.

What it cost

Parts came to £580 to £720. Our labour was £280 for the build. We set both wheels up tubeless without charging the usual £12 a wheel, because they were going onto a bike we were already building.

Total, £860 to £1,000. It came in at or just under the thousand they had set, which was the point.

How long it took

Four weeks, almost entirely waiting on the frame. The build was three days including the tubeless setup, which always takes longer than anyone expects.

What we would tell the next person

Ask the workshop what they would take off the bike if the budget dropped by two hundred pounds. The answer tells you what they actually think matters, and whether they are designing the bike or selling you parts.

On rough surfaces, spend on tyres before anything else. Then gearing. Then, a long way behind, wheels. We say this to nearly everyone and it is nearly always the right order.

The touring build is the counterexample, where hand built wheels genuinely were the right call. The difference was load and distance, not preference.