Sonder Camino AL frame and fork RCCR
Sonder Camino AL frame and fork
£449.00
Highly-capable adventure bike frameset with modern features at a stunning price.
The Sonder Camino AL frame and fork option is an excellent base on which to build a commuting, gravel or bikepacking bike. Loaded with features and at an excellent price, it compares well with far more expensive framesets.
This latest iteration of the Camino frameset brings two major developments: a full-carbon fork with triple luggage mounts, and internal routing through the down tube. Previous models used a fork with an alloy steerer and no mounts, and external cable routing down the underside of the down tube. There's also a change in geometry, most notably the head tube angle is slacker at 69 degrees, and the wheelbases all lengthen too. Longer reach means shorter stems, again as with the mountain bike world, aiding stability and control.
The frameset is designed to give you space for huge tyres and clearance comes courtesy of chainstays designed to make room for a fat tyre, which in turn means it's either a 1x crankset or a very small 2x crankset. The drive-side chainstay starts out as a solid plate, from the bottom bracket to just rearward of the chainring, where it's welded to a normal curved chainstay. Inside that, you’d easily be able to fit a 46 tooth chainring.
There are sensible features like the BSA English threaded, which will please pretty much all of humanity. At the forks, there are three standard luggage mounts on each leg to hold luggage cages for water or other camping gear. Being small threads set into carbon, these mounts are there to prevent vertical slipping of a load, not to retain its weight so you'll want to use a strap system around the fork to hold a load in place.
The frame also now features internal cable routing for a clean look, though some might want the simplicity of external routing. Thanks to the long wheelbase, we found the Camino to be very stable at high speed on gravel, even loaded with bikepacking kit. The chainstays and the BB drop make twisting through trees on windy trails fun, so you’ve got the best of both worlds with this bike.
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