Fitra's Surly Troll

One of many great things about cycling is the sensation of adventuring it gives, even if you only ride a short trip. For some, this sense of adventure become their main reason to love cycling.

Fitra Nugraha is no strange name if you happened to visit our blog a lot, or if you're deep in Jakarta's urban cycling scheme. He's famous for managed to ride solo from Jakarta to Lampung, around 300 kilometers of it, for a couple times: once with a brakeless fixed gear, and  twice with a road bike. He drawn a couple conclusion from those trips: skinny tires are useless on unpredictable surfaces commonly found on inter-city roads in Indonesia, and 26" tubes are easier to find. So this purpose-built adventure machine was born.

Surly is the name you came to if you want ultimate versatility: they stated not only once on their site that their bicycles can be reinvented in many iterations, and that's no exaggeration on the Troll. You can build this bike in many configurations: singlespeed, multispeed, internally-geared hub (Rohloff included), with or without front suspension, disc or rim brakes, and so on.

Being accustomed to the road bike it's no surprise that Fitra had the cockpit set the a cross-country race bike should: slammed stem and narrow flatbars. To keep things in the reasonable side, we decided to put Shimano Deore group all over. The wheels are Shimano M495 hubs each laced with 36 spokes to Speed rims to keep things stout. The stock rigid fork are replaced with 80mm Marzocchi MZ3 for the time being. Since the Troll is everything but lightweight, the carbon stem and bottle cages are there as an in-joke because "they easily take 10% off your bike's weight."