2014 Kona Rove bike

I once had a road bike, a Cannondale R2000 with an Ultegra drivetrain and Cane Creek wheels.

It was a size 58cm frame and I am 6'3" tall. The bike was very responsive and nimble but riding was harsh and unforgiving. Eventually I sold it. Roads around here are very bad , not really meant for road biking. I decided not to ride aluminium frames again; what's left then? Titanium is too expensive and carbon is not cheap either. Steel.
And here it is, the 2014 Kona Rove (59 cm.):

The propaganda machine advertises this as a "gravel/free range" bike, some sort of a toned down cyclo cross bike which is equally suited for commuting and mellow mountain biking trails.
But , for me, this was the answer to riding the crumbling infrastructure.

What is weird about this frame is the size of the head tube, 7.5" tall, 3" taller then the head tube of a Salsa El  Mar. I installed a Cane Creek (110 series) ZS44, a Deda Elementi handlebar stem and  an FSA handle bar.

This is a work in progress project and I am still waiting for some parts to arrive.
This frame takes 700cc wheels. I got 29" DT Swiss and equipped them with 700x35  Vittoria Randonneur tires and Avid BB7 mechanical disc brakes.

I did some more work on the bike, not a lot of progress but still moving forward. I installed a cyclocross specific crank set (Shimano CX 70 36-46T) which I paired with a road Ultegra 12-25T rear casette.
I do not know if this was  the right choice, I need to see how they work together. I also added Micro Shift 9speed shifters and ran the brake cables.

And this is how the Kona looks today, June 24, 2014 (hot and humid outside)
Work on the bike continued slowly. I added an Shimano XT M-772 rear rerraileur.
I had to mess around with the gears a lot; the new derailleur  is a totally different design, still parallelogram base mechanism but with different control options.

As you can see from this pic, the rear end looks very crowded;in order to remove the rear wheel, the skewer has to be taken out completely and only then could one extract the wheel. I think that the frame was  designed with a road rear derailleur in mind.

 One more pic:

I taped the handlebar with Deda Elementi grey thick tape.

I don't know if I am going to leave it like this; I may change to a darker tape colour later on.

A few more pics taken at Kensington Metropark:

And this concludes the presentation:

The weight is 27.0 lbs. (12.25 kg.)