All In One – Bike Snob NYC

Additional to yesterday’s put up, you will have seen a lurker within the background of one of many photographs:

It is because Yonkers is rife with deer, they usually worry no man:

In actual fact this one really began to strategy me, and for a minute there I believed it was going to come back up and sniff my crotch like a canine.

The paths simply north of town are filled with such wonders, and for a time my favourite deer-slayer was the RockCombo, which was roughly in its inventory configuration when I first acquired it in 2020:

It grew on me rapidly, and over time it grew to become my “prepared for something bike:”

Then got here The Nice Purge of 2024, and the tough determination to go it alongside, because it overlapped with the Homer particularly:

[Via the comments.]

Sure, the RockCombo had extra mountain bike in it, however for that I’ve the Jones.

I used to be sorry to see it go, however I do nonetheless have its offspring, which can have a brand new rider as soon as my youthful son grows into it:

I’ll have to provide it a “Rivendell Junior” remedy with some swept bars.

I additionally get to see the RockCombo each as soon as in awhile when it pops up in the feedback, because it did yesterday:

As you may see its new proprietor has elevated it to a brand new stage of class and class it might by no means, ever have attained beneath my curatorship.

It’s sufficient to make me need one other one…or at the very least take a look at what they’re going for:

The RockCombo is usually cited as the primary gravel bike:

Nevertheless, this will’t be true, as a result of if it was then Specialised can be suing all the opposite firms promoting gravel bikes the identical means they sued that man who named his cafe Roubaix:

In any case, seeing the RockCombo once more made me nostalgic for it, and in my subsequent pokings round I discovered a recent assessment of the bike I’d by no means seen earlier than:

It was from the June 1989 difficulty of “Bicycle Information:”

And was a part of a sequence on “hybrids” that additionally included the Bianchi Tangent:

The Fisher Hybrid:

The Bruce Gordon Rock ‘N Street:

The Miyata Alumicross:

The Offroad Climber:

And the Serotta Slicker:

1989 was fairly a 12 months.

After all the hybrid idea quickly developed into one thing tamer; for instance, the drop bars disappeared, and if something it’s the lack of drop bars that has since come, at the very least partly, to outline the hybrid. However the way in which hybrids have been described in 1989 is strictly the way in which we describe a sure sort of motorcycle starting with “g” in the present day:

Proper right down to the mystical ineffability:

It was solely a matter of time.