When it comes to road and gravel bikes, I’m in the privileged position of being spoilt for choice. The nature of my job means I’m never without a test bike or two, but even discounting those, there’s the ones I’ve bought and built up myself over the years. Between them they cover the full gamut of riding I do, but all have one thing in common: curly handlebars.
Drop bars are great and all but they don’t half make life tricky in certain circumstances. For example, I commute into Cyclist’s London office and while the multiplanar curves of drop bars may create plenty of comfortable hand positions out on the road, on the train that same shape generates seemingly hundreds of different ways for your bike to snag on other bikes/people/bags/carriage infrastructure. They aren’t really the right vibe for a relaxed pootle with my wife and kids either – I don’t (often) have the desire to hunker down and try to ride any of them off my wheel, so drops are largely redundant there too.
As my self-control when it comes to new build projects is ludicrously low, it was on the basis of these justifications that I decided I needed a flat-bar bike, and the seeds for this project were sown.
A cheap, stock XC mountain bike or hybrid would of course have been the simplest solution to my needs, but there would have been no fun in that (and it would have made this feature very short). Besides, I’m #teamdropbars at heart, so the flat-bar conversion of a geometry and frame design I had more affinity with was a clear initial direction.
The frameset I chose for this build is eye-rollingly boring, being black and made by Specialized, but the 2018 Diverge E5 model ticks a lot of boxes for me in practical sense. Despite the newer, higher-end versions of the Diverge platform being known for their ‘FutureShock’ steerer suspension unit and damped ‘frame post’, this older, cheaper version is as conventional as bikes get these days, using a round 1 1/8” steerer and 27.2mm seatpost. This meant I had plenty of flexibility in what parts I built the bike up with.
What’s more, cabling the bike up was a piece of cake. They run externally from the shifters, and while the derailleur and rear brake cables go inside the frame at the top of the down UEStube, there’s a huge port in front of the bottom bracket where they exit and run externally along the underside of their respective chainstays.
The simple experience of plumbing this bike in was worlds apart from the hours-long process of fishing and swearing I’ve grown accustomed to on more modern designs. The way the Diverge routes the rear derailleur cable necessitates full-length housing too, which I like because while it may stiffen up the shift lever action a touch, it’s better for cable durability as the inner is better protected.
Being an early generation gravel bike, the Diverge’s tyre clearance is usefully wide for this bike’s jack-of-all-trades remit without being unnecessarily large, and it has mudguard mounts too. It could do with a top tube mount, but otherwise its utilitarian design was exactly what I was looking for. When the frameset appeared at a great price on eBay, snapping it up was an easy decision.
Shimano curio
While the frameset is a bit vanilla, I’d like to think my choice of groupset spices the build up considerably. Released in 2016 for the ‘contemporary urban cyclist’, Shimano’s Metrea was lauded by the brand as ‘the most exciting development in cycling since the dawn of mountain biking’. Sadly, it catered for a market of high-end urban bikes that was never really there (high-end + urban = stolen), so that statement aged like an ice lolly in the Sahara. Its most direct modern relation is probably now CUES, which was another (potentially way more sensible) option for this build, but I was always perversely attracted by the way Metrea blends Dura-Ace 9000-esque looks with 1× gearing, so I resolved to find an application for the design sooner or later.
While I am only getting more fond of the groupset’s appearance as Dura-Ace 9000 gets increasingly scarce out on the road (particularly now that it has been officially recognised that some of the cranksets might break, which I might point out is not something Metrea cranksets are at risk of), I do admit that my choice may have been made using more heart than head, considering the riding I do with the bike extends way beyond the flat urban roads Shimano intended for it.
There’s no clutch on the derailleur or narrow-wide tooth profiling on the chainring but, in testament to the quality of Shimano’s drivetrain designs, chain management has been unilaterally superb. I can’t fault Metrea’s chain retention or shift quality. Gearing setup however is, to put it mildly, suboptimal. The 42t chainring, while on the large side, isn’t outrageous, but the 30t max sprocket capacity of the short-cage rear derailleur means there isn’t really enough range for me to comfortably cope with much of my local terrain (particularly with a toddler in a bike seat on the back).
That said, even if my knees do complain at the extremely low RPM efforts sometimes, the gearing offers enough to get by, and the satisfaction I get from using something rare and a bit silly means Metrea won’t be coming off any time soon.
On a roll
I’ve long been a fan of the versatility of DT Swiss’ GRC 1400 wheels, having mentioned in this review that they do just as good a job as fast road wheels with wide slicks on as they do on offroad with knobbly gravel tyres on. Since using them in my Open Upper – a gravel bike with knobbly tyres on – I’ve now pressed them into service on this build – a road build with wide slicks on – to prove that I’m not just full of hot air, and have been really pleased with how well they perform in this application.
They’re built to handle the rough and tumble of offroad, so have a generous weight limit that easily carries my daughter and I, plus they have a wide rim width ably supports the 34mm Goodyear Eagle F1 R tyres I’ve installed. Are 42mm deep carbon gravel wheels overkill for a project like this? Absolutely, but they do the job and add a little pizzazz to boot, so I wasn’t going to neglect the opportunity to use them.
I wanted a very wide slick tyre for this build, so the bike would be comfortable and grippy while still offering the potential to go fast when I got the opportunity to do so. High-performance tyres in a 34mm width aren’t the most common, and adding a tan-wall filter narrows the list of potentials down to two: these and Vittoria’s new Corsa Pro Controls.
The Goodyears made the build simply because I could get hold of them sooner, but I’ve been impressed with them. Goodyear markets them as ‘tubeless complete’ suggesting they don’t necessarily need sealant in to be used. I’ve found that to be true to a point: with my wheels at least, they seem to be fine to use dry provided you don’t mind topping them up before every ride. I added sealant to reduce the frequency of this task, as the last thing I wanted to be doing before popping to the shops was pumping up my tyres.
Flat-out to the finish
Components as transient as finishing kit should rightly not take precedence over the core bits of the build, but it still feels wrong to have gone so far without talking about the product I’ve chosen in the area that prompted the bike build in the first place. The bars are Syncros’ Fraser 1.0 XC, given to me by former Cyclist deputy editor, good friend and all-round nice guy Stu Bowers. Stu’s spare parts bin is a veritable treasure trove, and he came through for my Diverge build in a big way.
The Fraser 1.0 XC is an out-and-out race bar, weighing just 225g despite being unyieldingly stiff. Somewhat sacrilegiously I had to take the hacksaw to it almost straight away. It quickly became evident that using a wide bar and short stem with a fairly responsive gravel bike geometry meant the front end became unfeasibly twitchy. In short order I’d taken 40mm off each end of the bars and upped my stem length from 90mm to 120mm, bringing the bike’s cockpit more in-line with the longer and narrower dimensions I was used to, and the frameset was designed to work with.
I exploited the Diverge’s aftermarket-friendly seat post dimension by speccing Cannondale’s wonderfully smooth HG Save Carbon seatpost – it uses clever tube shaping and a composite layup to promote compliance under the Fizik Vento Argo saddle. Thanks to the Diverge’s sloping top tube, there’s plenty of it exposed too, so it tangibly flexes and improves the bike’s comfort.
Syncros’ featherweight CoupCage SL carbon bottle cages finish the bike off alongside Shimano’s Deore XT T8000 dual-sided pedals, so I have the option of flats for quick trips or clipless for more substantial journeys. I think these final two parts sum the bike up: fancy and fun where it can be, but solid and practical where it needs to be.
Sam’s Specialized Diverge E5 spec
Price | £400 (frameset, eBay bargain) |
Brand | Specialized |
Frame | 2019 Diverge E5 |
Fork | 2019 Diverge FACT |
Weight | 8.3kg (56cm) |
Levers | Shimano Metrea U5000 |
Brakes | Shimano Metrea U5000 |
Rear derailleur | Shimano Metrea U5000 |
Crankset | Shimano Metrea U5000, 42T |
Bottom bracket | Shimano Dura-Ace R9100 BSA |
Cassette | Shimano 105 R7000, 11-30 |
Chain | Shimano 105 HG601 |
Wheels | DT Swiss GRC 1400 Spline 42 |
Tyres | Goodyear Eagle F1 R, 34mm |
Bars | Syncros Fraser 1.0 XC |
Stem | Pro Vibe Aero, 120mm |
Seatpost | Cannondale HollowGram Save Carbon |
Saddle | Fizik Vento Argo 00 |