Short answer: Atlantis Long answer: the start of Riv featured three frames to be offered: Road, All Rounder, and Mountain.
With nothing else to compare to, Riv fans in the beginning who had been Bridgestone fans naturally mapped each of these forthcoming Riv offerings to their predecessors, the Bridgestone RB, XO, and MB. But these equivalencies were not fully accurate, since Grant was now able to design things without many of the limitations that he had at Bridgestone where he was not the sole influence on frame design. In the mid-to-late-90's the idea of the All-rounder was still pretty unique: a good touring oriented bike with cantis and good road-riding characteristics but with the room for big tires. Sure the touring bike with cantis was nothing new, but there wasn't much in the way of room for something close to 2" tires on such a bike in the common marketplace. The 1993 XO-1 was exciting in this regard. (And Specialized's Rock Combo as well.) I remember the neat thing that made the XO-1 special was the design for 26" tires. A weak thing about hybrids of, say, 1991 was that they were made for 700C wheels at a time when 700C tires were limited in their widths. Just by being made for 26" wheels, the XO's (and their predecessors the CB's) were smarter in their day. Of course the frame also had to have the room for the width. The 1992 XO-1 had sidepulls and had less room. The 1993 XO-1 was for cantis, could fit 26 x 1.9, and it was an exciting bike. Around that time, by 1994, there was a Bridgestone contest to try to come up with a better name than "hybrid." They didn't want their awesome XO-1 to be called a hybrid, because most people who knew bikes at that time associated the word hybrid with the idea of a 700C compromise bike. The XO-1 was anything but a compromise. So as a Bridgestone fan at that time, I remember being excited by the following: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/bridgestone/1994/pages/38.htm I have always guessed that the name All Rounder came up around this time, whether it was coined by the contest winner or not. Within a year, Riv was starting, and the first few Rivreaders were talking about the All Rounder model to carry on where the XO-1 left off. To me, these two bikes helped to blaze the trail for the greater abundance of road bikes made for big tires: a status quo that we all enjoy today that was not the case in the mid-90's. In the later 90's, the All Rounder was mostly considered a 26" bike. There was some whining over the fact that Grant wouldn't make one for 26" wheels in sizes greater than 59 cm. "But if I want a 60+ cm All Rounder, how can I get wide tires?" Riv's answer was, "well, there are a few 2 inch 700C tires out now, and the offerings should get better over the years. Things are looking up." Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that one of the bigger evolutions to take place in the time between XO-1 and the year 1999 was the increasing availability of tires on the market, especially in 700C. This helped to optimize this special frame. By 1999, Grant wanted to make a more affordable All Rounder, and that's what the Atlantis started as. I'm pretty sure that the Atlantis offered better clearances than the 90's All Rounders. Now it's 2014, and which model is the All Rounder most like? That might be a bit harder to say now, and that's a good thing: Over the last 10 years, the Rivs have become even more versatile. One All Rounder rider I know equates his to something more like the Riv Country bike (AHH or Hillborne.) I've never heard of anyone who didn't enjoy his/her All Rounder. And the Atlantis, the Hilsen, the Saluki, The Bleriot, and the Hillborne are all its descendents. A couple of those a little less so because they are made for sidepulls, but I consider the tire clearance to be the biggest thing, and a Hilsen with 700x43 Rock and Roads is pretty worthy of the name All Rounder. Maybe to some degree the Bombadil and Hunq also descend from the All rounder but I consider those mountain bikes. In the very early days of Riv, there was a lot of overlap between the All Rounder and its rare cousin the Riv Mountain model. So I see these as coming from the Mountain line where it is understood that there has always been commonalities between the All Rounder line and the Mountain line. This is starting to feel like the elf lineage charts that one can find in a Tolkien appendix: http://fortmarinus.com/projecttolkien.shtml -Jim W. On Jan 18, 2014, at 9:46 AM, Bill Fulford wrote: > It's snowing again in Maine and although I got a short ride in this morning > I'm beginning to get a bad case of cabin fever. I was looking through my > favorites on Flickr and was impressed by several photos of the all rounder. I > came to rivendell after this model and know very little about it. What I'm > most curious about is which current production model is most like the all > rounder? Any insights would be appreciated. Bill > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "RBW Owners Bunch" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. James Warren jimcwar...@earthlink.net - 700x55 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. 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