Touring Bike
 

Wonder what you guys think of the Priority 600 (link below). Site doesn't mention touring at all but interested in hearing "O" Pinions.

https://www.prioritybicycles.com/pro...SAAEgKT5vD_BwE

seems like a great price for a nicely equipped bike. I paid much more for my pinion co-motion. Cheers. (I'm not complaining)

Ryan Van Duzer has done some touring on a Priority 600.

If you think you would be happy with a 12 speed Pinion, give it consideration. The range of top tube lengths across the bike sizes is not very broad, but I suspect that the average biker would find a size that would fit.

I personally would not want the 12 speed Pinion. One of my bikes is fitted with a Rohloff, the steps between the 14 gears are about 13 percent. On the 12 speed Pinion the steps between gears are about 17.7 percent if this link is accurate:
https://www.cyclingabout.com/tour-wi...inion-gearbox/

That said, the Pinion 12 speed with a range of 600 percent beats my Rohloff with about 525 percent, so it does have some advantages over a Rohloff. It took me a while to get used to the large spread between gears of about 13 percent, so a jump between gears of 17.7 percent would be larger than I would want. My derailleur bikes have jumps between gears smaller than the 13 percent on my Rohloff, so I found a 13 percent jump to be pretty large. Bottom line is that I would find the 18 speed Pinion to be an upgrade from what I have, the 12 speed not so much.

I am not sure which dynohub it is fitted with, but virtually any dynohub is an advantage over non-dyno touring bikes these days when almost everybody wants to charge up something. The text says it has USB charging capability, I suspect you need to add a pass through cache battery for that to work well.

I think it has some nice features for the price. If you want maintenance free, the belt is a big selling point. I do not know what the maintenance schedule for the gear box is, I suspect is similar to my Rohloff, that needs an oil change every year.

Seems like a very good price. My ranking of bicycle features is: Fit, Frame material, components.
Only three sizes? Maybe you are one of them. What tubing, will you like the ride?
I have a Pinion 18 and the main advantage for me seems to be that I shift more often because it is easier.
Lowest gear is a couple of notches below my derailleur bicycle. Any lower might be too slow to stay upright.
Once a year to "change" the oil in the gearbox. When I did it, hardly any came out, but 60 cc went in. Where it went and where the vent hole is remain mysteries to me. Presumably, the symmetrical, undished, rear wheel is stronger. I haven't tested this limits.
The dyno hub will charge my phone, at speed, and rechargeable AA batteries, for my GPS.
Might want to find a dealer or owner who will let you have a test ride.
Good luck

Sounds good on paper. The problem is, a lot of things sound good on paper.
My concerns- which may not amount to anything in reality-
-Weight
-If either the drive belt or the gearbox give up the ghost mid-tour, how hard is it to get a new one shipped to you? And how hard to install it in a motel room?
-How long with the maker of that gearbox be around?
FYI, the Gates belt sounds fine. But if I remember correctly, some friends of mine that use one on their tandem mentioned it used one that Gates no longer makes. So when it goes, it's back to chains or something different.

It seems like the belt would be easy enough to have on hand and have ready to be mailed out or even carried. Also if worried about future availability, you could buy a few and have them on hand stored in optimum conditions I guess. I don't imagine they deteriorate too quickly if stored properly and I am sure they would outlast an old codger like me.

Not as easy an option for the gear box though. Spare gearboxes would be too expensive for an individual to keep around and it would be hard to figure out which parts might fail to stock individual parts. Hopefully it is very reliable.

As far as the "on paper" thing... I have not looked into the numbers lately, but when they first started pushing the gates belts for bikes I looked at the numbers and thought the numbers being used to push the belts were pretty misleading. They seemed to be using what looked to me like pretty much worst case wear and efficiency numbers for conventional chains. I'd assume they probably used best case numbers for their own product. I thought the numbers they used at that time were misleading at best. It looked to me as if you really needed to factor in aesthetics like drive train cleanliness and so on pretty heavily in order to make them come out favorably in the comparison. That may be well and good if those factor were really important to you, but if you were heavily swayed by the performance numbers IMO you were being mislead.

I don't know if the belts have improved much in the years since I looked into them so maybe all of that is moot, but i doubt it.

I did like the notion of a nice clean drive train, but was not sold on internal gearing and wasn't sold on the belts having sufficient advantages over chains.

I am sure folks will manage fine and enjoy the nice clean drive train, but I'll pass and feel good about the simplicity and serviceability of a chain driven derailleur equipped bike for the foreseeable future. I am willing to be convinced but haven't seen anything that tempts me away from chains and derailleurs yet.

A couple of extra thoughts:
-Half or more of the time, when I shift, I shift more than one gear. So I've seen the jump-between-bears being touted as an advantage of 12 speed over 11 or whatever, but in my case, I guess I'm pretty tolerant to a wider range of cadence. So I'd be concerned with overall gear range, not so much the spacing between gears. As long as you're geared low enough that you're in danger of falling over, you should be good there.
-On the "sounds good on paper"- my first "real" bike was a Raleigh Sojourn, and I got a lot of miles out of the thing. However, the stock rear wheel only lasted about 4,000 miles, and the warranty replacement lasted 500 miles (then I had a rear wheel built up that lasted 50,000 miles or so). So the moral there, is that it was a bike that was specced as a touring bike, had all the features you'd want for that, but wasn't really up to the task, either, at least in its stock version. You can take a $200 or $300 bike and make it sound wonderful in the catalog writeup. But that makes it hard for us to judge your proposed bike when we haven't used it.

Yes, does seem to be a nice value. I didn't know Pinion P.12 was same range as the 18. In the video above the woman has her Priority with drop bars too.

I looked into a different bike by Priority (Continuum Onyx) a couple of years ago. If I recall correctly, they have a showroom in NYC, but are otherwise a direct to consumer mail order business. I believe they have a 30 day money back guarantee, too.

Re the 12 speed, I'm totally with tmsn in that 17+% jumps between shifts are a pain in the donkey.
On a bike with loaded gear especially, you would find yourself very often wishing for an inbetween gear---this comes from a lot of "been there, done that"