Thorn Club Tour Mk5

The Thorn Club Tour is a very versatile bike, and built like this it's a jolly tractor of a thing that's comfortable on the tarmac and off it. Add some luggage and it's the kind of bike that you could roll out of your garage, hop on and ride to pretty much anywhere in the world, whether the roads go there or not.

The Club Tour is now on its fifth incarnation, and it's a design classic that's stood the test of time: a Reynolds 725-tubed, externally routed steel touring frameset with as many braze-ons as you're likely to need. Thorn's sizing is worthy of note: The Club Tour Mk5 is available in five sizes from 50-61cm, with a long and a short option in each, making ten sizes in total. That allows you to fine-tune your fit both for your size and what kind of riding you're likely to be doing, offering a more upright and a longer, more stretched-out position.

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The main change for the Mk5 is that Thorn has done a bit of work with the shaping of the stays so that the bike can now accept 650B wheels as well as 700C. The frame is compatible with either disc or rim brakes and there's a set of bosses on each chainstay to allow you to fit cantilever posts in either the 650B or 700C position, and a classic ISO disc mount externally located on the dropout that will take up to a 180mm disc.

The frame is mated with Thorn's new disc-only Mk3 fork which uses a Boost-standard 15x110mm thru-axle to beef up the front a bit. The frame is a standard 135mm quick release, so you'll need a very specific set of wheels built up in 650B or 700C depending on your preference. Our bike was specced with 650B wheels (Shimano Deore hubs and Ryde rims) and Schwalbe's excellent G-One Allround tyres in a 57mm width. That's a lot of tyre, but there's plenty of room in the Club Tour to fit them, even with full mudguards. Thorn reckons you can fit a 70mm tyre in there.

One of the selling points of the Club Tour is its versatility: the way it's designed means that you can start with the frame and end up with very different bikes, depending on what you use to put it together. Our test bike had a 3x10-speed derailleur transmission and STI levers on a drop bar (Shimano 105 levers and Deore mechs and chainset), but you could equally go for flat bars, or bar-end shifters, or even down tube shifters if you wanted.

Similarly, we tested a disc build but the frame also accepts cantis or V-brakes, and you can spec a rim-brake fork to match if you want.

The ride

Our test bike, with its big tyres and wide-range gears and comfy Brooks B17 saddle, is ideally set up for some serious touring, which isn't really a type of riding that's advisable right now, but I've taken the Club Tour out on local rides on a variety of surfaces, both loaded and unloaded, and I have to say I'm impressed by its ride quality and versatility.

You don't need more than about 40psi in the Schwalbe tyres to get a bike that feels reasonably efficient on the road, but there's enough air under your rims to make the bike really comfortable over broken surfaces, and on fire roads and trails the G-Ones have plenty of bite, especially in the dry.

I started with some graded trails and ended up doing everything up to some of the more technical local bits on the Thorn, and although it wasn't the ideal bike for steep, rocky descents it can handle them well enough. The ideal riding for this build would be a mix of asphalt and gravel, but if you found yourself in more challenging terrain then you'd have plenty of capability in reserve without feeling that you're giving away too much on the blacktop.

The long wheelbase and generous trail on this bike mean that the steering can sometimes feel a bit vague at low speed, especially if you're running the tyres a bit soft for off-road use. But at cruising speeds the bike behaves very predictably, and if you load the fork with panniers then the slower steering will likely be welcome.

Given that the Club Tour is a bike that's almost always going to be running a rear rack it seems odd that the Thorn doesn't have two mounting points on the rear dropout for mudguard and rack. It's not a huge issue, but neither is it a tricky thing to do: there's plenty of space there.

If you were really worried about overloading the mounting bolt you could always migrate the mudguard to the upper disc mounting bolt on the one side, so that at least one of the mounts isn't doubled up.

Other than that, you're not short of places to put stuff. There are low rider bosses on the fork, two standard bottle mounts in the main triangle and a third on the bottom of the down tube.

You don't quite get the wealth of mounting points you might on a bikepacking bike, but here the expectation is that you'll be fitting racks and using traditional luggage, and the bike is very well set up for that.

Choose your own spec

In terms of the build it's not really worth picking holes in anything particular: this is the build we asked for, after all, and like I've already mentioned you can build it up pretty much any way you fancy. I'd be happy to roll this bike out of its big box, pump the tyres up (not too hard), bolt on some carrying capacity and head off on any length of trip you care to imagine.

The triple chainset (48/36/26) and wide ratio cassette (11-36T) give you a huge range of gears, though it's worth noting you could go bigger at the back (say an 11-42T) if you were going to be attempting steep or unmade climbs with a full load; you're much more likely to run out of ratios going up than down.

Although the TRP Spyre mechanical disc brakes lack the bite of hydraulics they're still very efficient, and also extremely easy to set up and fiddle with. I'm a big fan of hydraulic disc brakes but I'd forgo the performance benefit for the bodge-ability of cable discs if I was going anywhere remote.

Similarly with the cable routing: everything's in plain view, which makes for a slightly shorter maintenance cycle than internal cables but also means that getting things fixed out in the field is a whole lot more straightforward.

Value and conclusion

This build comes in at a grand total of £1,870.86. That's a fair whack for a touring bike, and similar to the Genesis Tour de Fer 30, which has a slightly lower spec overall but does come with racks and dynamo lighting. A Surly Disc Trucker comes in a bit under this price in a 3x10 build with bar-end shifters. The Trek 520 is good value at £1,300, albeit with a lower spec, and the Dawes Ultra Galaxy is £100 less than that, with a similar build. Those two bikes don't have the kind of clearances the Thorn gets, though the more bikepacking-orientated Trek 920 (£1,700) does. Salsa's Marrakesh is another option, with a Shimano Sora build coming in a bit more expensive than the Thorn.

> Buyer’s Guide: 15 of the best touring bikes

Anyway, it's not cheap, but if you're looking for something you can build to your exact specifications and depend on to do the job, it should be one for the list. That job could be anything from the commute, and lugging the shopping once a week, to tackling the Carretera Austral or the Karakoram Highway. So long as you're not in a big hurry, I'd back the Club Tour to get you there.

Verdict

Versatile and configurable tourer that's more adventure-friendly than ever