Reap has a new gravel bike prototype on display at Rouleur Live, which it began designing less than two months ago and says its “our take on gravel [bikes] in the future”.
Rouleur Live sees many brands pull out the stops, designing bikes and parts with special paintwork. But Reap went one step further by creating its first gravel bike.
The British brand wanted to demonstrate how it manufactures bikes in the UK, taking a concept from the drawing board to the prototype stage in seven weeks.
Reap says it started with a “blank sheet of paper”, but the prototype model takes inspiration from the brand’s Vekta road bike.
The prototype has the same integrated seatpost as the Reap Vekta. Its front end is also similar to the brand’s aggressive-looking road bike.
Reap designer Ben Meir described on LinkedIn the last two weeks of the process being “perhaps the biggest two work weeks of my life (so far).”
Meir said that Reap was behind schedule, but that the brand had promised to deliver the prototype in time for Rouleur Live and Reap would “look a little silly” if it didn’t.
Speaking to BikeRadar, Reap said the prototype came out of the autoclave just days before the show.
But it was touch and go because Reap ran into issues on Tuesday evening when the autoclave decided it “didn’t want to work properly”, according to Meir, and it nearly lost the fork mould.
Having averted disaster, the prototype shows where Reap is headed and what it sees as the future of gravel bikes.
The bike has clearance for 50mm-wide tyres, which is in line with emerging gravel trends and reflective of how Lauf founder Benni Skúlason thinks tyres should go wider still.
The prototype also has chainstays which appear to twist and Reap says the rear triangle of the bike is designed to incorporate vertical compliance.
Reap, which is owned by the specialist composite manufacturer Kamm Projects, explained at Rouleur Live that it has built in compliance by using a bio-derived composite – though that’s as much as it was willing to divulge.
The bottom bracket width on the gravel bike is the same as a road bike. Gravel bikes can have wider bottom brackets to accommodate their wider tyres, but Reap says it wanted to stick to a narrower width to keep the prototype’s Q-factor the same as a road bike.
While the team at Reap is yet to test and finalise the prototype’s design, it says it looked at other popular gravel bikes – from the likes of 3T and Factor – to decide on the prototype’s geometry.
In a nod to its home county of Staffordshire, Reap has called its gravel bike Type 300 K5054. This is after the Spitfire WW2 fighter plane, designed by Staffordshire aircraft designer R. J. Mitchell, which had the prototype name Type 300 and the serial number K5054.
