Overland Adventures New Zealand

So a little bit of history on my love, hate, ok and love again affair with my Jones LWB Spaceframe adventure/mountain bike.

So I have extremely long for my height, femurs and because of this are one of the few that need a slack seat post angle bicycle.

Now I could have a custom built bike frame made for me! But I looked around for a standard production frameset first and can across the Jones brand from Jeff Jones in Oregon USA.

After some toing and froing I phoned up Jeff in the USA and Jeff adjusting up one of his personal bikes to my bikefit and sending me photos of it setup for me.

I ordered one of the first batch of his new Jones Plus (now called LWB) 24″ in blue in early 2015.

I liked it was much but the bike was just too big for me and it was the smallest Jones Plus available so I took a chance and ordered a Red Jones 23″ Diamond 29″er (now a SWB is close to this bike) sold off my Big Blue Jones Plus 24″ and built up the Mr Red!

I loved Mr Red and rode it a lot including my last Bikepacking Event (Kiwi Brevet) in early 2017 (about 5 months before my accident) now during the event I discovered that the Top Frame Tube was just too high for me.  

Now a few months later Jeff Jones released the all-new Jones Plus Spaceframe frameset! so I backordered one for myself and build it up into this bike below.

Now this Jones number 3 was the right size and I loved riding up to 50 kilometres, but longer rides were painful because of the super stiff truss fork!

So because of this and a planned 3000 kilometre Tour Aotearoa to ride! I accidentally sold off my Mr Red Jones Diamond 29″er and build a Carbon HT 29″er for Tour Aotearoa.

This (the carbon thing) was bike I crashed and destroyed the front and rear wheels, band the handlebars and a number of other things riding to work.

Ending up with a Severe Traumatic Brain Injury which has stopped my ability to ride longer than 20 kilometres with out having to have a Brain Rest for 20 minutes and repeat.

Anyway on the 26th March 2020 NZ when into a total Lockdown for a number of months, during this time I started to feel a bit better because of all the sleeping I got to have and because of the Lockdown and having to be careful (not to have more accidents) I rebuild my Black Jones again and named her the “Black Walnut“.

The bike was much better riding with the smaller 2.3″×29″ tyre’s, the fork discomfort was there but the rides were short and every few day’s so ok for lockdown.

Now sometime later Jeff Jones came out with a Jones Unicrown fork, so I ordered one and fitted it to “Black Walnut” and changed my bike set-up big time into a Monster-Gravel Bike with drop handlebars and also changed the tyres to Vittoria Mezcal 2.6″×29″ for a great all round bike.

But because of my Brain Injury I found shifting gears hard work and build up a Shimano GRX Di2 815 groupset Ritchey Outback V2 Gravel Bike it was great but accelerated my brain fatigue! so I ordered and started build up a Ritchey Ascent frameset with my spare rim’s and Vittoria Mezcal 2.6″×29″ tyre’s.

So because of the Summer heat over Christmas period I set the Ritchey Ascent build aside until now to think about things and have realised that I should have fitted the Shimano XT Di2 groupset to my Jones LWB Spaceframe and not be building up the Ritchey.

This because the Jones LWB has a larger then standard 76mm fork offset and with it’s slack head angle and also slack seatpost angle it would be easier for me to ride.

So the Black Walnut frameset was just seating in a corner dirty and unloved, it’s time to build the right bike for me.

So it’s time to build up version 3 with almost full Shimano XT Di2 2×11 with gearing of 38-26 and 11-42.

Now you may notice that I have changed the forks back to the standard Jones truss fork and this is for two reasons, I have a short steer for my truss fork (don’t need to cut down my Unicrown fork) and also because I can only go for short distance rides now.

So it’s time to cut down the steer on my Jones LWB.

But not working in a bike shop anymore it’s time for one of my helpers to cut down the steer tube on my behalf.

I’m waiting on my new Handlebars to arrive in New Zealand.