Sounds like a nice setup. What group/chain are you running and is your t-type crank the threaded type (powermeter)? I was looking at the xplr threaded rings and they say they are good for flattop road chains, but I was wondering if they are good to run for t-type chains as well. My Epic 8 is tight with a zero offset 38 threaded ring, but I’m wondering if a 40 xplr ring would work. I’m also not sure if those xplr rings have a different offset compared to the MTB rings (which have offset options of zero and 3mm).
T-type xxsl drivetrain with threaded chainring. The red chain is 13 and 12 speed, same thing for all the xplr and transmission.
Edit same chain for xplr and road
I thought sram’s official stance was that xplr and road flattop are cross compatible, but t-type flat top isn’t.
Actually now I see t-type chain goes to new red xplr e1 crankset, so yeah I was mixed up which parts go together.
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I bet it’ll be a full suspension bike and everything else will be pretty much the same. Tires tbd (mud tires if it rains).
So in other words 13spd XPLR is compatible with the transmission crankset? Apart from not shifting as well under load and maybe the weaker spring in the derailleur this seems like the ultimate XC setup.
No other way around, transmission cassette/der/chain with xplr chainring on transmission crank, just to get a bigger chainring on mtb.
Theres a sram support page that says threaded xplr chainrings are only compatible with xplr crank but pretty sure thats just because usually a large xplr chainring wouldn’t fit a mtb frame with stanard crank position. My shop called sram and they said threaded xplr works on threaded transmission crank.
I mean modern gravel bikes are most limited because of to small tire clearance. Gravel should have gone boost-axles from the start. MTB with drop bars should have been the starting point instead of road bikes. But I guess manufacturers wants to trickle up the capabilities over number of years so that consumers needs to buy new bikes all the time. Focus even manages to make a gravel bike with boost, but with 12x110mm front axle so you can’t use your current road or MTB wheels.
Todays hardtail mtb-frames does not have good enough chains ring clearance for a large chain ring. I have 38t on my hardtail and 46t on my CX/gravel. The new Scott is just a regular Scott Scale with limited chain ring clearance that consumers (incl me) have been riding for years with rigid forks from other brands.
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There is no grand conspiracy to continually sell consumers bikes that will knowingly be “obsolete” within a few years. It is easy in hindsight to say “oh, they should have started at XX point” but the reality is that the product development process is an iterative one.
Why didn’t mountain bikes start with suspension or the current geometry? We spent decades riding bikes that were eventually surpassed by better technology and design. Heck, back in the 90’s and 00’s, the instant you bought a home computer, it was obsolete because technology was evolving so quickly. Why didn’t we just start with today’s powerful PC’s?
Gravel bikes started with road bikes as the base because that is where gravel started. People were riding road and CX bikes on gravel for long distances. Further we did not have the knowledge base (or the products) for what we know now about tires and wheels. I don’t even think Boost spacing existed back then.
So there is no grand conspiracy to force consumers to continually buy new bikes. Do bike companies want to SELL more bikes? Absolutely. But the idea that they are intentionally staging product development in order to move their products into obsolescence lacks foundation in fact.
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Gravel did have one start point as MTB w/drop bars, way back in 2009 - the Fargo.
There an interesting historical study as to why few other bikes followed it’s lead, and those that did were not able to find mass appeal of gravel bikes that were designed as an advancement of CX bikes.
I guess it’s because my bike - a Procaliber - is designed with a 52mm chainline, but I’ve managed to squeeze a 40t with decent clearance by pushing out the chainline to like 56mm or so (it was not easy finding a 40t Shimano direct mount chainring with nearly no offset). I’ve also had to lengthen my hoses to run my corner bars (I purchased the most narrow set and a 35mm stem but MTB systems aren’t really designed for C/Bs… shockingly).
Not optimal, as it moves my chainring out, but pushes my gearing towards the bigger cogs, but I also very rarely ride gravel and can’t justify purchasing an entirely new bike.
The issue here is that even the newer 55mm chainline doesn’t play well with the lower gears on the cassette.
This is why some frame builders are starting to utilize superboost rear ends with 55mm chainrings for trail bikes with bigger tires and short-ish rear ends.
Your arguments does not translate to the gravel development at all. Mountain bikes didn’t start with suspension is because suspension for bikes had to be invented. Computers evolved because the tech had to be invented. When the gravel trend started we already had the tech in MTB, but the manufacturers decided to not use it.
I agree it’s not some big conspiracy, it’s just common sense product iteration to make as much money as possible.
Boost spacing most definitely excited when road went thru axle. We have been riding gravel on MTBs with narrow handlebars and slick tires decades before road went to disc brakes and road gravel became a trend. I even had aero/tt bars on my MTB in the early 90s.
Boost spacing didn’t exist when the gravel bike marketing category was being developed in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Road and Gravel have a lot of overlap but Road has lagged behind and stayed separate. More gravel bikes shipped with TA while road disc was still experimental, there weren’t any rim brake gravel marketing category bikes until recently, etc.
There is recency bias where people think that what is in demand (or at least popular in the media) today would have been in demand in the past. That isn’t the case, the customer base needs time to accept new products. To say nothing of the fact that new products need to be designed, tested, and produced.
I don’t believe you’d be able to sell many 1x 38-42t chainring, 148 boost/15x110, 180mm+ Q, drop bar bikes designed around 2.2"+ tires, in 2013. And this is even before you consider suspension components. The bikes that did exist around that time with similar features stayed in production largely due to their overlap with road components.
People are just now beginning to accept bigger tires are fast in the literal last 1-2 years. The Race King and Thunder Burt were shown to be fast on Bicycle Rolling Resistance almost 10 years ago and only a very small group of racers/riders even attempted to use them.
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Agree with most of what you said, but rolling bigger tires and lower pressures has been mainstream for more than a couple years. Sure, the bike manufacturers always lag way behind (still shipping new XC bikes with 175 cranks in 2024), but I remember getting my Spark RC back in 2017 and the first thing I did was swap the stock wheels/tires for wider IR rims and higher volume tires. I wasn’t on the leading edge, I was following the general consensus at the time. And the race king has been a popular XC tire for almost a decade.
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The Race King and Thunder Burt have been the most popular tires for gravel racing in Norway since they launched, and they still are. But what’s been happening here might not be the case in ex. USA, where gravel racing seems to be a new thing.
Here’s a pic (from 2014) of a guy who had been racing the same bike in Norways biggest gravel race since 1993. Race King FTW 
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What size were the higher volume tires you used? Higher volume meant 42s or 45s, maybe 650bx47. There were almost no 700cx47 or 700cx50 tires, in 2017. General consensus wasn’t 2.1s or 2.2s because they didn’t fit the bikes, and dropbar MTB conversions weren’t common or supported.
RK and TB may have been popular XC tires, but they went nowhere for gravel until recently. Even now we’re in an unsettled time where a big chunk of the racing base doesn’t believe/won’t accept the “bigger can be faster” testing and real world results. 4 out of the top 10 at Unbound were on MTB tires, which means 6 out of the top 10 were on gravel tires…
It doesn’t seem there’s much crossover between Norway and the USA.
There were a handful of guys buying Felt (or other brands) beach racing bikes to use the very fast testing Schwalbe Big Ones in 2016/2017 but that didn’t create or influence much of anyone as fast as I can tell.
How did he manage to fit a triple chainring with such big tyres 
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Most other top racers were on 29ers.