I'm new here and was hoping to get some help / guidance w/ a project.
As stated, my goal is to build up a MTB-ish Gravel bike or Gravel-ish HT MTB on a reasonable budget. I'm thinking:
Reasonably lightweight
Flat bars
Wide 700c (or narrow-ish 29er) wheels,
Aggressive (for gravel) geo - maybe something a bit longer and around 68-69 degree HA resembling a Cutthroat, Fezzarri Shafer, Sonder Camino, etc.
Long (for gravel) dropper
I have some useable gravel components so my 1st choice would be to find a a gravel frame that fits the bill, but I have not found anything like this in the Chinese carbon market as they all seem to be pretty much the same standard geo, but if anybody has seen anything like this please let me know
The other idea is to pick up a HT frame where the geo is in that neighborhood (something like an Epic, Alma, etc.), a suspension corrected rigid fork, preferably non-boost so can use current wheels, or maybe even pick up some new wheels if too big of a pain to convert current non-boost rear wheel to boost. Based on my research so far, this is probably a more likely scenario, but would love to find a vendor who sells as many of the components as possible under one roof and would maybe even install the headset / BB (if PF) to save me the trouble!
If anybody has any suggestions, leads, or ideas on the best frame / vendor for this project, I would really appreciate the input. Thanks!
