Van Nicholas Yukon Disc

Van Nicholas has given the Yukon Disc a very wide remit. It's a four season commuter! It's a tourer! It's everything in between! The reality of my experience is that it's probably a bit wasted at the commuting end of that spectrum, and not really specced for the touring end, but it does a very nice job of the in-between bit, and it's a lovely thing.

• Pros: Beautiful frame, neat integration, high spec, fast ride
• Cons: Not the most comfortable Ti bike I've tried, not ideal for loaded touring

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The build: very neat and tidy, especially the dynamo gubbins

The Yukon Disc frame is a lovely thing indeed, with neat welds, an engraved head tube badge and a perfect brushed finish. With 72°/73° head tube/seat tube angles and an almost-horizontal top tube it's a very classically proportioned bike, and the 425mm chainstays give it a fairly compact wheelbase: 1,016mm on our large-sized test bike.

The stack-to-reach ratio for out test bike is 1.53, which is probably what you'd consider the softer end of endurance geometry or just upright enough to be considered touring; compare it to an outright tourer like the Ridgeback Voyage and that bike is more upright, with longer chainstays, a (much) longer wheelbase and a slightly shallower head angle. The Kona Sutra is slacker and more upright still.

Those two bikes, with their triple chainsets, steel forks and low-ride mounts, feel like they're designed from the ground up to carry some big loads. The Yukon Disc doesn't.

> Buyer's Guide: 13 of the best touring bikes

The integration of the cables and wires is very neat indeed. Everything's routed internally with all options considered, and although that's not unusual these days – even on touring and distance bikes – it is quite unusual to find provision being made for dynamo wiring too. Here it's all been thought through, and the result is extremely pleasing aesthetically. It's a nice bike to look at generally, and that's one of the reasons.

If you're routing cables and wires through a bottom bracket then you can't do that with a standard threaded BB, because there isn't room. Possibly for that reason Van Nicholas has gone with a PressFit BB shell instead, but I wish the designers had opted for a T47 threaded shell: you don't need the extra width of the shell for the frame design here, and the threaded cups are so much less prone to issues and easier to service. You're not likely to find either in the back of beyond in a hurry, though.

The ride: quick and fairly nimble, more audax than touring

I've ridden a fair few bikes calling themselves touring bikes over the years, and this is probably the one that feels least like a tourer out of the lot. I mean it has a pannier rack and mudguards and a dynamo and everything, so it certainly looks the part, but from a riding point of view it's much more like an audax bike than anything else.

The build I was riding here isn't especially heavy, at just over 11kg, and the unloaded feel on the road is more purposeful than most tourers. It feels pretty quick to be honest. Knocking out a 125km ride at 25km/h is something I'd expect to struggle to do on a more leisurely touring bike but it wasn't a problem here. I did mostly have a tailwind, but I was also hungover, so those things probably cancel each other out. My average ride speeds have been pretty similar to my Kinesis Tripster ATR: slower than the road bike, but not markedly so.

Van Nicholas describes the Yukon as 'a fast, complete bike for your daily commute, a wide-ranging tour, and everything in between'. That's a pretty wide remit. You could commute on this bike, and the titanium frame and durable build would perform well in all weathers. For a tour you'd need to do some work on the gearing.

Our test bike was running a 50/34 double up front and an 11-32 cassette which is a perfectly workable range for unloaded riding, but once you start to add any significant weight to the rear in the form of panniers full of stuff, that 34x32 bottom gear is going to feel pretty long on the steeper stuff.

If you were planning to use the bike more at the loaded touring end of the spectrum you'd probably want something like Shimano's new GRX groupset with a more compact chainset and a wider-range cassette. As of now that's not available on the Van Nicholas bike builder, but it'd be a good one for this bike.

In terms of comfort, the Yukon is a fairly taut frame and that adds to the lively feel of the ride, but it's not the most comfortable titanium bike I've tried. That's with the bike running on the 28mm Continental GP 4season tyres it came with; swapping to the wheelset from my Kinesis Tripster ATR – Hunt Superdura Dynamo with 30mm Schwalbe G-One Speed tyres – added a bit of extra cush to the overall ride, but it wasn't on a par with the bike that the wheels were borrowed from.

Tyre size is limited to 35mm without mudguards and 30mm with them, which is similar to, or a bit more generous than, other bikes it's competing directly with – the Enigma Etape (35mm max) and the Kinesis GTD (34mm max) – so if you want to get a bit more comfort then that option is open to you if you sacrifice the 'guards.

I found that the bike was a bit more comfortable at the front end than the rear, suggesting that the fork/bar combination is doing a better job of soaking up shocks than the frame/seatpost/saddle.

I did find that the fork had enough flex to induce a bit of mudguard rub against the tyre when climbing out of the saddle. It wasn't a major issue, and probably just the combination of mudguards and tyres wasn't quite ideal. It's certainly not an uncomfortable bike, and the two 100km+ rides I completed on it were done without any issues.

Groupset & kit: it's what I would have chosen

Build-wise I was treated to a full Shimano Ultegra Di2 transmission with hydraulic discs. Given free rein to spec the bike that's what I would have chosen for myself, so I was happy enough. The Di2 shifts were as crisp and reliable as ever, the brakes impeccable in all conditions.

Up front an SP dynamo hub provided the power to the Supernova lighting system. The front light is fixed via a bar bracket rather than a fork mount so it's taking up a bit of space there if you like to attach a lot of things to your cockpit, but it's a really excellent light with a nice beam shape and enough power for all-night cruising.

The tiny E3 rear light punches well above its miniscule proportions too. You need to be going fairly slowly for the dynamo to struggle to keep the lights supplied; even steep climbs well into a long night ride weren't a problem.

Overall: it's a very nice bike provided you're buying it for the right thing

I think that the Van Nicholas description of the Yukon Disc is rather a mixed message. It's called a tourer but it's not really a tourer: this is an audax bike, really, designed to go reasonably quickly in relative comfort for a long time.

The obvious competitors are bikes like Enigma's Evoke and Kinesis' GTD, both of which also trumpet their versatility but also are most at home somewhere near the faster end of the road riding spectrum. At €2,099 it's slightly cheaper than either of those options as a frameset (with fork), and the Van Nicholas bike builder on the website does give you a certain freedom to spec it how you want.

> Why your next bike should be a tourer

You could commute on this Yukon Disc, and you could also go touring on it, gear ratios notwithstanding. But it's really one to look at if you want a reliable, well-considered bike for covering a decent distance at a decent speed. That may be audaxes or sportives, or it may be the more leisurely end of the club run, or it may be a long commute a couple of times a week. It won't disappoint, and it's versatile enough to cope with other stuff as and when your riding schedule demands.

Verdict

Well-considered, classically proportioned distance machine with a lively ride