There was one more twist to the story I shared yesterday.
When everything was fixed, we got a shipment of the first five OPN-11 frames. We always get a few frames early so we can shoot photos, video, share the bikes with some media in advance, etc.
And so for two days, Andy and I are riding around Basel (fantastic area for gravel bikes by the way, so do visit us when you have a chance). We're having a great time until at the end of the second day, when we are doing the final spec checks, my Large frame doesn't fit the smallest chainring we specify.
Well, it fits, but the chain is super close to the chainstay. This was the problem we had before, but that's fixed now. How can it have returned? We look on Andy's bike, a Medium. No problem at all. We look at mine again, his again, mine again. We switch some parts, same problem. We measure the BB drop on both bikes, there's a difference, but then again the tires are different. We measure the tires to adjust, and now the two frames are still different, but in the other direction.
The two sizes also have slightly different BB drops, but accounting for that, times pi, minus the square root of nonsense, plus fatigue from two days of riding equals me going insane. Half an hour of agony later, I find a different way to measure the exact shape of the chainstay. This is identical for every size, but it's different for the Medium and the Large frame we have here. Hey! Slowly it dawns on me; the only reason I can think of is that this one large frame is in fact NOT the new design, but somehow they shipped an old frame as part of the five.
Somewhat at ease, but still nervous, I fire off an email to the factory very late at night. Could this be the case? Casually, the next morning we get the reply. "Oh, one Large frame wasn't done on time so we sent one of the old ones." Maybe you could have mentioned that before we almost found ourselves in the ER for a triple bypass?!?
Anyway, then it was full steam ahead, into production. Here's the first video from those two days, enjoy:
