SpeedofLite 

The SPECIALIZED RockCombo was the seventh of seven bikes reviewed in the "Seven Hybrids" section from Bicycle Guide, Jun 1989.
This post includes the "Blatant Opinions" sidebar summarizing the road testers views.
A pdf of the entire "Seven Hybrids" section can be found here for the next 7 days: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AgHfxA8atbGnnzUX...yQAhU?e=xdsk19

The section intro and BIANCHI Tangent review are here: Road Test/Bike Review (1989) Seven Hybrids -- Intro / BIANCHI Tangent
FISHER Hybrid here: Road Test/Bike Review (1989) FISHER Hybrid
BRUCE GORDON Rock 'n Road here: Road Test/Bike Review (1989) BRUCE GORDON Rock 'n Road
MIYATA Alumicross here: Road Test/Bike Review (1989) MIYATA Alumicross
OFFROAD Climber here: Road Test/Bike Review (1989) OFFROAD Climber
SEROTTA Slicker Cross here: https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-v...ker-cross.html

lasauge 

The opinions section at the end is brilliant - prophetic and entirely consistent with my own experience with trying to turn old road/mountain bikes into 'hybrids.' Hooray for 29ers and gravel bikes!

repechage

I never see these come up for sale. Not enough made? Everyone likes them?

Trakhak

Our shop ordered exactly one of those. Took quite a while to sell. A few people were curious about them, but no one ever asked us to order another.

I agree with post #2 above agreeing with the last paragraph. I too have never understood the appeal of (complicated and expensive) drop bar conversions for vintage ATBs among Bike Forums posters. Not great on the road, not great off-road.

As noted in the article, drop-bar bikes and single track don't mix very well. In the early days of off-road racing, John Tomac tried that setup for what I recall was one season, if that much, and then reverted to flat bars.

Trakhak

By the way---completely forgot about those Suntour self-energizing brakes (see the prominent ad in the opening post). They seemed to work well (only encountered one bike with them). I wonder what happened with them.

john m flores 

Wow, Ted Cosentino totally foreshadowed 700c mountain bikes!

repechage

I do have a Ritchey with the Scott mtb. bars, is useful when riding the bike on the road. I do not even recall the name of them, curve around and return to centerline with a forward radius and flip, a plastic bridge tiring all together.
‘I made the change so long ago I forget when.

non-fixie 

When you can afford to have more than one bike, compromises like these don't make much sense, IMHO.

Yet they do look cool, in a Swiss army knife kind of way.

And the idea keeps coming back: One bike for (almost) everything

Jeff Wills

Those are Scott AT-4 bars. Interesting that they used the same plastic bridge as the TT bars (I think).

Bogester 

I had one of these for several years. I used it mainly as a winter/rain/beater bike as mine had big honjo fenders. It did the job ok and it was kind of cool looking but it was very beefy and didn’t fit me too well (too small ). Because of the size and the stretched out bars I was kind of leary of riding it too much off road. I once had a panic stop at an intersection section locking up the front brake. I went over the bars going forward and somehow landed on my feet…would have liked to have gotten that on video. I passed it on shortly after that. My little dog liked it though.

georges1

Maybe the ancestor of gravel bikes but I myself too don't understand dropbar conversion on mountain bikes as well. I personnally always prefer to mount a longer stem and high riser bar on a vintage MTB. I will turn my old Giant Tourer hybrid into a gravel bike I already have the rims and the XT stuff for it. The hybrids of back then were already in 700 or 29' wheels. As for the 26inch wheels on MTB, they offer you more agressive acceleration and better handling than 27.5" and 29" as this was my experience during various rides.

Spoonrobot 

Don't forget the Bridgestone MB-1 came out a couple years before the Rock Combo, as a drop-bar MTB itself: https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-v...ne-mb-1-a.html

The Rock Combo has been given an overinflated place in the gravel bike lineage after Specializer's 2021 marketing campaign for their Unbound 2021 Diverge. Claims that it was the original gravel bike, which thanks to the OP of this thread, we have a lot of information to determine that's not true. The whole thing is is goofy anyway because Specialized had a drop-bar Stumpjumper featured in this 1982 ad:



And then a couple years later Dave Mac is racing on a special Team Stumpjumper built by Jim Merz: https://domesticbikes.com/pink-stumpjumper/




I believe Charlie Cunningham was probably one of the small few (or the one) who originated 26" drop-bar MTBs in 1978/1979.

https://www.pinkbike.com/news/charli...-cc-proto.html

Now of course there were Cyclocross bikes, Rough Stuff bikes, and many other bicycles designed for riding unpaved roadways way before. So the lineage for how we got from the Safety Bicycle when almost all roads were dirt or cobbles or bricks or wood, to the modern "gravel bike" is convoluted and has a lot of missing information - but it's clear that the Rock Combo was too far along the timeline to be the progenitor to more developed designs. This isn't a slight against the bike, it was another decent design in the late 80s/early 90s hybrid mini-trend and the 2021 marketing campaign got a lot of people excited about both modern and C&V gravel bikes and uplifted a lot of these bikes that were wasting away in basements and garages back onto the pavement and trail to be ridden.

The Rock Combo suffered from the contemporary design standards of the time. 1989 was too early to get more highly sloped top tubes which allowed a headtube length high enough for good stem implementation. So it has the problem of a long flexy quill stem and flexy handlebars with the excessive knob tire designs making handling challenging, especially compared to similar bikes with flat bars. The riding position, even if the contact points are the same and the geometry is agreeable, also feels somewhat strange. Balanced on high beam above the bike somewhat. It's not bad or dangerous, but not as intuitive as modern designs. You can feel the age of the concept, today.

It is interesting how the editors took the bike to be used on late 1980s trails - which makes their griping sensical and calls for a high BB as well. If this bike came out today, it would probably never see single-track and would get high praise for the low BB "stability". Tradeoffs of course but it's something that these bikes were almost always conceptualized around riding to and on mountain bike trails and not seeking out gravel or unpaved roads as is popular now. Of course the big challenge of navigation and mapping would make doing so in the late 1980s and 1990s difficult. In many areas, roadways maps excluded many roads not seen as thoroughfares and often completely excluded unpaved roads - one would have to special order such maps if they were even available and then figure out what went where, what actually existed, how to get around without GPS and so on. It can be trying now with many roads taken private, bridges out for decades with maps never updated, road bed washed away and so on - and this is with modern technology. I couldn't imagine how it was 30+ years ago.

One of the most interesting things is that the triple-butted tubing can be clearly seen on Reed Kennedy's ultrasonic tubing tester: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...#gid=500288468

Anyway, I've enjoyed this series more than most, given my specific desire to learn as much as possible about the ur-gravel bikes.

bikemig 

I'm a fan of early gravel bikes. Unlike some of the posters, I do like a drop bar MTB conversion but the tricky part can be finding one where the geometry works. I do like how my '93 Bridgestone XO 2 rides as well as my 90s Stumpjumper drop bar conversion. Fat tires rock.

Garthr

All the Specialized bikes of the 80's were much too small for me unfortunately, so in 1999 I had my custom Franklin made to take 700x35 tires(w/room to spare) and cantilever brakes. I still ride it today with 33.3mm Marathon Racers. I have XC Pro cantilevers on it and they are the best I've ever used and they are not even a SE rear. For pads I chop off and file the ends of Kool Stop smooth post type so they clear the stays to open all the way. Inside the KS smooth post pads is a metal frame that extends only to the rearward notch of the rubber. Chop that off to where the frame begins with a utility scissor and file off as much as you need to clear your frame. Those elongated offset pads don't help with braking anyways. Smaller road sized pads work just fine.

ShannonM

The RockCombo seems to be a very polarizing bike. A lot of people (well, not really a lot of people, as only 500 were ever made) really, really like them, for what seem to be the same reasons that the "Show Us Your Drop-Bar MTB Conversions" thread has as many posts as it does. And there are some people who think that they just mostly suck at everything.

Me?

I wish I'd bought one 20 years ago, when it would have cost me like 50 bucks and a case of beer... I'll never be able to afford one now. For what they get these days, I could probably have a frame custom-built and painted to match, including the same-style-but-ironic-text decals that it would have to have in order to be the bike that lives in my head.

Oh, well... that's what my Karakoram is for. (Once I've got the bread for the build.)

--Shannon

ShannonM

And now I know what those decals should be:

"Generalized" on the top tube.

"RockOnBro" on the down tube.

"G" on seat and head tubes.

Great dark chthonic Gods below, I'm a dork.

--Shannon

mhespenheide 

I've often thought about commissioning a custom frame closer to what the RockCombo was supposed to have been, rather than what the production frame ended up being. I'm unsure whether I'd try to get it painted to look like a RockCombo. Maybe!