Curve goes big with their latest Big Kev titanium adventure gravel bike, scaling up the tires from their gravel GXR for full 29er MTB monster gravel-plus capability off-road. After 3 years of R&D to take the original Kevin further, a bigger Kev now sports room for up to 29 x 2.35″ tires, with more progressive off-road tuned geometry to match…
Curve Big Kev titanium 29er adventure monster gravel bike
Calling it a progressive gravel bike built to reset a “new benchmark for adventure cycling” – Curve’s ‘gravel-plus’ Big Kev is their response to riders asking for more off-road-ability for bikepacking and ultra-endurance racing. This new titanium gravel bike is built to deliver the comfort & durability for “bucket-list bikepacking adventures like the Tour Divide, Rhino Run or Race to the Rock”… just as much as it will bring confidence to your gnarly weekend gravel adventures.
Geometry & Tech details
From a geometry perspective, the Big Kev is more progressive too. Beyond bigger tires, Curve gives the new gravel-plus bike significantly longer frame Reach, higher Stack, a slacker head angle, and a steeper seattube. It gets slightly longer chainstays & wheelbase to accommodate bigger tires, and yet they managed to keep almost the same total standover clearance even while moving from 40mm on the original Kevin (GXR) to 2.1″ MTB tires on the new Big Kev.
Plus, there are two fork offset options of either 46 or 52mm thanks to a dropout flip hip that let you tweak the bike’s Trail for more or less stability (79 or 72mm, respectively) for quicker handling or more stable loaded bikepacking geometry.
Curve also adds an 8th frame size to the wide XXS-XXL range, slotting it in the middle as an Extra Medium (XM) for smoother fit steps where most riders are anyways.
Curve build the Big Kev from a lightly shaped set of titanium tubes to create a frame that is MTB tough, yet still ti light.
Big tires though really form the basis of the more-adventurous Big Kev. Curve optimized the bike around 2.1″ 29er MTB tires with a dropped chainstay and big machined plate yoke to maintain a narrow 85.5mm T47 BB width and road Q-factor for long days pedaling. And for faster gravel riding, low-profile 2.0″ tires will carry you quickly over smoother terrain.
But there’s plenty of room for at least a 29×2.35″ tire out back. And up front, the new Curve Ride 415 carbon bikepacking fork has room for a 2.4″ tire to offer more off-road control & grip.
Beyond that, the Big Kev carries the asymmetry to its 12mm dropouts where there are flat mount disc brake tabs and a UDH for your derailleur – the first Curve UDH.
Plenty of mounts too. The Curve adventure bike has plenty of room in the main triangle for frame bags plus a pair of bottle cages, then another under the downtube, and toptube bag mounts. And each leg of the Ride 415 fork gets four braze-on mounts so you could mount anything cages or a pair of cages/bags on each leg. Plus, the bike gets rear rack and front & rear full-coverage fender tabs.
And of course, there’s that pretty, proper Curve Cocky cockatoo head badge. Hard to beat that.
Curve Big Kev – Pricing, options & availability
The all-new Curve Big Kev gravel-plus bike is available for pre-order now with two standard wide-range 1x SRAM AXS Eagle builds, with either Force or Rival controls. Both builds feature Curve’s own 25mm internal tubeless Dirt Hoops Carbon off-road wheels on DT 350 hubs, and both get Curve’s widely-flared Walmer adventure drop bar in size-specific widths.
Complete bike pricing starts at A$9300 in Australian dollars, or around $5800 / 5900€.
Framesets sell for A$4700, or around $2900 / 3000€.
Curve says they will start shipping the new Big Kevs in November 2022 for those who order now. And the sky is the limit on the customization potential
