I envisioned this as a road and rails-to-trails tour, with the occasional gravel road if it gets me away from traffic. I'm not planning any rugged bikepacking like the Oregon Outback, so I figured the Soma Saga was the best bike for the tour. The Saga worked well on my six days down the coast in 2022. But it needed work.
Since I broke the right shift lever while on the 2019 Loop Tour I'd been thinking about converting the Saga to bar end shifters with a triple chain ring. One of the reasons I built my nice bike shop is because I had this conversion in mind. So in January I started ordering parts and removing the old components. I didn't have the right tool to remove the SRAM bottom bracket, so I had to go over to the Bike Collective for that. But I did have the right tool to install the new VO square taper bottom bracket and everything else.
I wanted a triple to increase the gear range. With the original 42/28 and 11-36 cassette I was short on both ends of the spectrum. Keeping the 11-36 ten speed cassette and going with a 48/34/24 triple I now have the range I need, with a low gear well under 20 gear inches, plus a nice high gear for going down those endless hills where you want to go faster than coasting will get you.
My initial plan was to do the basic assembly and then give it to Mike to get it all working, but Mike was unavailable so I ended up doing it all myself. I'm pretty happy about this as I learned a lot and should now be in a much better position to fix things should they break on tour.
After I got the drivetrain working I realized that without the need for the SRAM road style short pull levers, I could swap out the brake levers for long pull and install linear pull (Vee) brakes, which would give e much better stopping power than the cantilever brakes I had. So I did.
For the 2022 ride down the coast I put on a set of Schwalbe Marathon Supremes 700x35. These are the lightest tires in the Marathon line and I like them a lot. I consider the rest of the Marathon line to be too heavy, especially the Marathon Plus that most bicycle tourists favor. But I wanted to go wider. Soma says this frame can handle 47mm without fenders, but I figured 44 was probably as wide as I could go. Unfortunately I could not find the Marathon Supreme, or the Marathon Race for that matter, in anything wider than 35mm. So I ended up putting on Rene Herse Snoqualmie Pass 700x44 tires. They actually measure out at 42mm wide, which is fine. Of course these tires are much more vulnerable than the much heavier and sturdier Marathons. Then after getting a thorn puncture on a rainy ride around town I decided if I'm going to ride these it would have to be tubeless. This led to a new set of rims and now I'm all set. The bike really feels fantastic with these tires.
See the service log for the specs on the new build.