I’m thinking of selling my road bike and replacing it with a soft tail 29er. Has anyone done similar?

Can you replace the tyres with road tyres meaning a 29er can do reasonable distance on roads similar to a road bike when ridden on the top of the bars or hoods? With the added bonus of putting some knobblies on and hitting some singletrack…

Or am I way off? Sorry if this is a daft question.

you’ll have to think carefully if you want drop bars (for hoods etc). search for “monster cross” to see how designers are approaching it. Also Singular Sams Peregrine I think. Problems come from the effective handlbar height being too low when drops are put on short headtube/low headtube mountain bike 29er frames. You need big stem rises to get the bar height back. Clink may be ablong to show some pics of his approaches to it.

Alterantively use flat and bar ends for road work.

If you’re not a big guy then it’s quite reasonable to run Open Pro or CX rims with “29er” nobblies and then swap them out for road tyres when you want to.

Road tyres make my 29er fairly rapid.

I’ve got flat bars and ergo bar ends, get a pretty decent position of road use, you can always pop your hands closer to the stem for that “aero” position.

Basically you’ve got a sports hybrid!

Why? It will be severely compromised on road but many have managed with worse