First ride: Mason_cycles updates Bokeh gravel bike. We take a detailed look at the Bokeh 3.0, chat to its designer Dom Mason about the updates, and get a sneaky first ride cycling
Mason have updated their iconic Bokeh gravel bike with a host of tiny new details to enhance your riding and bikepacking experience and VecchioJo was lucky enough to sneak a first ride on one in Wales and chat to Mason mastermind Dom Mason about all the updates, and some other stuff, with a bit of mild ranting, which could be another article in itself.and Dom called it an AdventureSport bike because he wasn’t very impressed with the gravel word at the time.
“I had to design my own wheels with Hunt [who are just up the road from Mason], and WTB had just come out with a 47mm 650b tyre. Loads of the first Bokehs we sent out had those WTB tyres on and it was a slick with some side knobs and we were using a Panaracer Comet MTB tyre which was basically a summer mountain bike 650b tyre because we couldn’t get anything else with a tread on, which is wild as it was only eight years ago.
Luckily, they can rely on feedback from a flock of devoted customers and their supported riders such as Angus Young , Josh Ibbett and Philippa Battye putting in some serious miles and pushing their bikes to the limit to provide invaluable critique and thoughts. “Nothing on this bike is for fashion... I mean, the colour is nice. Nothing on our bikes is ever going to be following fashion or done for marketing reasons. That’s a fundamental because it’s bullshit, it pisses me off. But the cycle industry, and a lot of other industries, run like that and it’s got a whole lot of us in trouble now. People have got containers and containers full of stuff because they’re used to changing it for a model year.
“Mason has always been technology led. Disc brakes, big tyres, adaptable internal routing, thru axles – all that stuff has driven what we do. Tyre sizes, wheel sizes, 1x, dropper posts, flared bars – that’s all driven what we do. But I'm not looking at what other people do that much. I could end up just trying to chase what everyone else is doing instead of focusing on what I think is the right thing to do.
“From the start we wanted to do these fast ground-covering gravel bikes which we called AdventureSport bikes because gravel didn’t really seem to sum up what we we were trying to do. Gravel didn’t mean much to people in the UK, it just meant something to the USA, because we don’t have massive long gravel tracks in a straight line, we have muddy bridlepaths instead.
Tucked away discreetly underneath the top tube is new dynamo routing where the rear derailleur cable used to be on the older Bokeh. The new ports are tidily reinforced and allow you to run the dynamo light cable inside the frame in a direct line between front and rear lights. Staying with dynamos, the RangeFinder fork is internally routed for a cable from a dynamo hub to the crown mounting for a front light.
The frame is easier to keep clean too. Those cables and hoses run through Mason’s proprietary Ø56mm ‘ThruBB’ shell – a larger than normal BB shell that allows you to use a threaded bottom bracket and route cables safely through the large internal space without interfering with the rotating bottom bracket gubbins. You can even fit a dropper post cable in there as well, if you want.
“Now in gravel, you'll get people thinking, 'I’m going to get a gravel bike and I’m going to ride all the way down Europe," or"I’m going to do some 300km day rides." That’s not a starting point, but conceivably 150km a day, and actually people quite quickly get a lot better than they thought they would get and they can ride further than they thought.
“Developing the new fork has opened up stuff,” says Dom. “The fork is one of the hardest bits to do and then you can design the frame off the back of that. This opens up the opportunity to do bigger clearance if we wanted to do a bigger clearance titanium or aluminium road frame like a Definition Plus or Aspect Plus. We’ve seen bigger tyres just becoming natural and a 35 appears normal because it’s good for where were ride.
Having Dom point out all the Bokeh's changes, tweaks and subtle details and talk quite emotionally about them, it’s incredibly obvious that he spends a lot of time thinking about things. “Maybe coming from skateboarding a little bit, I’ve seen that you have to support the thing that you’re part of. Well, you don’t have to, but otherwise, what are you doing it for? If you’re part of this thing and making these bikes for people doing this thing you should support it somehow.
“There’s the fast-gravel thing, there’s the just-bombing-around thing, there’s the bikepacking thing, there’s the ultra-endurance bikepacking race thing and then there’s people who are going off for months of adventure,” says Dom. “We’re now designing bikes to take more load with more clearance and more attachment points – and more durability – but we’ve kept the geometry and tubing on this one the same because it’s supposed to be fast and light and racy and quick.
I rode the Mason Bokeh 3.0 in Wales for a couple of days over every type of terrain that you might roll a gravel bike: grassland, bumpy field-edge, moorland, fire road, broken tarmac, loamy singletrack, rocky stuff, gulleyed paths, dark holloways, grass-up-the-middle lanes, and even some actual gravel. It was the Campagnolo Ekar groupset variant with 650b wheels shod with 2.1 Vittoria Mezcal tyres.
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