The Basso Palta sees roads, trails, mud, dirt, gravel, pavement, sand, even a darkened wood, and says “si, certo!” It’s a category-blurring bike that is happy with all expressions of riding. It feels right going slow, fast, up, down, on pristine tarmac and ancient gravel footpaths, and anything else you desire to ride. It accomplishes this through great design, both thought up and executed in Italy. They knew that a bike like this would have to fit 700c tires up to 42mm wide. So they built around the necessary clearance. Also, because of tires that size, they also knew it needed disc brakes; so they worked with 12mm thru axles, flat mounts for the brakes, and 160mm rotors. They knew that keeping the bike simple to operate was important as well, so they designed with single-ring drivetrains in mind. Those are the elements they needed to work into the frame. In the front end, to keep steering precise without sending impacts directly into the bike, they designed straight fork legs with an offset crown. The crown is under a 1 ½” steerer that tapers to a traditional 1 1/8” at the stem. The headtube juncture is also fairly large to minimize deflection at the fork. The main triangle tapers in various directions to emphasize both power transfer and comfort. The top tube gets smaller and flatter as it moves from the head tube to the seat tube for compliance. The downtube grows a bit on its route to the BB86 bottom bracket to minimize lateral flex at the crank. The seat tube is scalloped both to better fit a fat tire in back as well as offer a little flexion. The tapered seatstays get thinner from the rear dropouts to the seat tube and there’s no tube joining the seatstays for a little more vertical compliance in back. The geometry also combines an aggressive seat angle with slack head angle maximize agility, almost mountain bike like in its angles. The 430mm chain stays are the shortest they could make to fit 42mm tires. The drop is a cyclocross-like 65mm to make sure you can clear your pedals over big rock and steps and the unknown. The proprietary seatpost is also designed with comfort in mind. It is fairly small in shape and even has an elastomer inside the post to damp vibration. The post itself is 300mm long and has 15mm of setback. The clamp works with all rails. The frame comes with plugs and stops for internal cable routing choices, thru-axles, fork, headset, seatpost, stem and spacers. The Diamante stem works with 31.8mm diameter handlebars—the small comes with a 90mm stem, medium 90, Large 100, XL 100. 5mm stack spacers come with as well. If you want to run an internal battery, it can hook to the inside of the seatpost. As this bike is built for adventure, you’ll find bottle cage mounting bolts in the traditional places on the down and seat tubes. They’ve also put an additional set under the downtube. For those who really crave going far off piste, Basso has an optional fork with three bottle cage holes on the outer faces of the fork blades. They have also created an optional Endurance Pack that includes a painted 20mm spacer to put your stem higher. They’ve also created a Mudfest kit that included fenders made by Ass Savers. The Basso Palta Medium frame weighs 960g unpainted. The fork weighs approximately 270g. It builds up into a bike that’s light enough for road racing, rugged enough for trail riding, and a pleasure whenever you’re rolling along.
