It seems like mountain bike geometry is reaching something of a plateau, with most companies settling around the same mix of numbers and angles, but baked-in adjustable geometry is still common, and often quite elegantly integrated. Flying in the face of elegance, here I've concocted what is likely the most adjustable mountain bike you could cobble together, allowing for a truly staggering range of use and utility.
Base Frame: Nicolai Geometron G1With some healthy modifications, of course.As the preeminent modular bike platform, the G1 offers a whole suite of adjustments when it comes to wheel size, shock stroke, and geometry hard points. You can run it with essentially any combo of large or small wheels that you please, all while also adjusting fit geometry and shock kinematics. Of course, there are some adjustments Geometron is leaving on the table here, so we're gonna have to add them.
First off, implementing a shock mount like the one used on
Starling's new generation of frames, should allow for even more tweaking of the shock stroke and progressivity.
I'm also envisioning some mashup between Geometron's Mutator chips and Rocky Mountain's Ride 9 system, which should give the end user quite a bit to think about when tinkering trailside.
While we're at it, we might as well pop an eccentric bottom bracket in there, to allow for some slight tweaks to either the BB height or the front-center / rear-center balance.
Front End GeometryThanks to the extensive tinkering done by
Chris Porter and the mainstream efforts by folks at Transition bikes with their
SBG concept, we can all appreciate the combination of long reach, slack head angle, short stem, and a short offset fork. Other big companies like Specialized and Trek are integrating head angle adjustment into their flagship frames as well, giving folks the ability to push that head angle as low as 63°. That said, there's no reason consumers should have to settle for just one fork offset and a workshop-adjusted head angle. Some additional components will be necessary to give the people what they
truly need.
First is this ingenious
quick release adjustable headset, cooked up by a few engineering students at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.
This mechanism, in combination with the racetrack-shaped headtubes used by Specialized on their Stumpy EVO, could theoretically give you a full adjustment range of around 5°, letting you swing as slack as the Grim Donut, or as steep as the current crop of progressive XC bikes. The integrated adjustment (i.e. Trek/Specialized method) would require some tools or a few minutes in the home shop, but the Cal Poly Engineers' device can be swapped in only about 20 seconds, tool free.
All that headtube angle adjustment is fun and all, but you're going to start feeling bad about how un-adjustable your fork offset is in comparison. Have no fear, as the adjustable fork crowns from
Outsider Bikes should have you covered. Offering anywhere from -10mm to +8mm of offset adjustment, you should be able to find a millimeter increment that suits your local lap just so.
Cockpit ConsiderationsTo match the wide range of offset adjustment we're going to have on this bike, you'll need to play with a variety of stem lengths in order to keep your steering dynamics dialed. Sure, you could just have a bevy of stems on hand and swap them out to try different combos, but that's hardly convenient when you could integrate multiple stem lengths at once with the
3FStech AIM adjustable stem. This groundbreaking innovation graced the front page of Pinkbike
way back in 2015, but I'm not sure it was given the discussion it deserved.
High performance, and handsome to boot.
As initially designed, the AIM stem allowed you to use a bar-mounted remote to switch from a +6°x55mm to a -7°x95mm to a -20°x120mm on the fly. It would be easy enough to modernize the numbers there, with something like a 35-60mm sweep, because think of all the times you wish you had a different length stem at various points throughout a given ride.
This would of course be coupled with a handebar that offers a similar level of adjustability, namely the
VariGrip bars from Newmen. They use an ingenious threaded insert at the end of the bar with an accompanying grip design that allows you to adjust from 710mm - 760mm or 760mm - 810mm, depending on the model.
The
Fasst Flexx handlebars have been created to reduce the vibration that makes it to your hands, but I think there's some room for more user adjustability in the design. Thanks to the linkage separating the center clamp from the bar extensions, you could theoretically articulate the whole thing up and down to simulate various bar rises and upsweep geometries. Hell, just add another layer of complexity and you can control the backsweep too.
That takes us to the grips, the simplest and humblest of bike components. But not on this bike they're not, we're taking it up a notch with
RevGrips. As the only grip design to feature actively moving parts, they allow the rider to adjust the degree to which they throttle on the bars, which qualifies them for this escalating nightmare of an adjustable machine.
Last but not least, we have the seating arrangement. This bike will certainly sport an
Aenomaly Switchgrade, so folks can adjust saddle angle on the fly. With -10° to +12° of range, it's a no-brainer. Atop that will sit an
SQlab saddle, as their design allows for the rider to swap out between 3 different durometer inserts to adjust the seated feel. Both of those will ride on an
e*thirteen Vario dropper, for as far as I can tell it has the widest range of travel adjustment on the market
DrivetrainHere's where things get a bit tricker, as you're increasingly locked into one brand and one mode of operation with modern drivetrain components. To start, we've got the
TRP TR12 Drivetrain. Sure, it doesn't work quite as well as Shimano or SRAM equivalents, and it is rather expensive in comparison, but it features both a 40° lever position range, as well as a two-screw clutch tension adjustment.
Cranks are typically such a drab and thought-free part of the mountain bike, so let's zest them up a bit with the
Aerozine Xeon-A1 adjustable crankset. They come in 4 different base arm lengths, from 130mm to 170mm, and through the use of 4 different threaded inserts, you can adjust the length by 5mm / 3mm / 2.5mm / 1mm. With options like that you're sure to find one that suits your terrain and preferences just fine.
Because the Aerozine cranks use the SRAM 3-bolt chainring standard, you're free to swap rings to your heart's content, ideally in a way that's trailside adjustable, being that we're trying to maximize that here. Something like the
OneUp Switch Chainring System should do the trick, or perhaps an
O-Chain, with 4 options when it comes to degrees of float.
SuspensionAKA the bottomless pit of adjustment possibilities.There are a lot of options and directions to go when it comes to suspension, so we're searching for a good baseline here, as well as trying to stick to consumer-available products. Starting off, we've got the
Ohlins DH38 m.1. This fork has seen some massive success under riders like Loic Bruni over the past couple years, but that's not why I'm including it here; the name of the game is...
adjustability. Available in 29" and 27.5", with an impressive 4 stock offset options, the DH38 already seems a bit more nuanced than other options out there. But the real magic lies in the travel range, which is rebuildable to anything between 120mm and 200mm, which means you can find a balanced travel number to match the sum of all your other adjustments and settings.
With both a main air chamber and a ramp pressure to adjust, you'll have no shortage of bracketing laps to get things dialed in.
In keeping with the fact that Geometron tends to stock them on most of their builds, we'll be speccing an EXT Storia shock. Though there are shocks on the market with more clicks, the rebuildability and boutique nature of this model lends itself to the near-infinite adjustments we'll be able to make on our true do-everything bike. Anything you can't tune on-trail, you can refine internally to get where you want to go, so there's no base uncovered.
Now, coil may seem like an odd choice when one is looking for maximum adjustability, but there's a bit of a trick here, and that comes in the form of the
Sprindex adjustable-rate coil spring. With plenty of range to adapt to your rider and gear weight, or even your preference for a given track, the Sprindex should get you right on the money. (Or at least within a 5 lb. increment of that point.)
BrakesWhen it comes to end-user adjustment in the brake market, one brand has been pushing the envelope longer than anyone else: Magura. They're not the most popular stoppers out there, but if you want to customize and tweak every last element of your brake system, their
MT7 is a pretty safe bet. With myriad lever options, color and decal packs, and 4 pads per caliper, you can really get into the weeds and play with different combinations to suit your extra-special requirements.
There are even
aftermarket levers available to those who aren't satisfied with the stock options. If ultimate adjustability is your goal though, then the
HC3 lever is going to be your best buddy. This
brake lever has 3 independent adjustments all contained within itself, so fiddle to your heart's content.
Maybe throw a few different pad compounds in your pack and try to bracket all those as well, in the name of adjustability.
Wheels and TiresThings finally start to get simpler down here, at long last. Since we haven't yet integrated camera lens-style aperture technology into our bicycle wheels, the size of your rim is a firmly set diameter. That means hub setup and tires are really the only things you're going to be playing with after the initial build, which still leaves plenty of room for messing around. On the hub front, most through-axle designs have moved away from adjustable preload, instead relying on the axle tension in your frame to keep things tight and aligned. Project321 has stuck to the ways of yore though, integrating a preload adjustment in their new
M-Pulse hubs, now being featured in Stan's wheels.
Adjust everything, settle for nothing.
When it comes to tires, there's little replacement for the tried and true method of prying different sets of rubber on and off your rims, to suit a given track or set of conditions. That said, people have tried some other solutions, though often to
middling success. Where the ability to adjust on-trail really lies is with pressure, and no system packs more pressure variables into a tire than
Schwalbe's Procore. With what is essentially a 2-chamber design, Procore lets you change the ratio between the two to suit your riding goals. At this point there are many better tubeless insert systems out there, but this is about adjustability, not off-the-shelf performance.
Like tubeless, but with a tube.
In Conclusion*slaps hood of imaginary mountain bike*
The way I see it, this could be the
only bike on the market, as it can essentially be modified to fit any use case and terrain. It might be a bit heavy with all the ancillary components, but luckily
bike weight doesn't matter. I'm pretty sure the rough math works out to you having to do about 3.5664x10^13 bracketing laps down a given track to get your settings dialed, but just think of how dialed your bike will feel once you settle on that perfect combination of settings.
For those of you who struggle with detecting a facetious tone over the internet, rest assured that I think this is an insane project and that you should just go ride your bike.
Quick look at your profile has me looking at not 1, but 2 different bikecadd images of custom hardtails, along with real life pics of them. You have literally looked at all available models of bikes out there, and NO, No god damn way sir, I will virtually build my own bike sir, and have it custom built for me!.
In all honesty, big props to you, i currently have 3 different bikecadd tabs open with three different designs open that I’ve been obsessing over for the last 6 months.
How was your experience with Marino bikes? What was the quality like? I have so many questions!
Click that link homie.
Someone will make a useable cvt for bikes one day
what in tarnation
So you're telling me that that thought never crossed your mind when designing? how'd that one slip? the first thing you should think about when designing a bike is not geometry, nor build kit but instead the pb comments section...
The model in the picture works with a chip (which I don't quite trust considering how thin it will be in the middle) but cranks with multiple holes for the pedals are common for unicycles. For the kind of increments (typically 5mm or so) they're trying to cater for here it may get tricky though.
I still feel like I have to try to catch @dariodigiulio out though, so I'll mention this: nsmb.com/articles/machina-bikes-first-ride ... which has adjustable stiffness/flex on the chassis.
Actually a really good idea IMO - and something I thought of myself last year when my swingarm came a bit loose and I suddenly found I had improved grip on techy, offcamber trails I was riding that day.
Helloooooooo?
I want the option of anywhere from 2oz for my commute, through to 4 gallons for the epics.
I'm on 180/180 and it's pretty impressive.
I feel I need a coil conversion for my Zeb to level it up to the Formula Mod shock as well.
They where thinking outside the box and even came out with a dart 4 x crank!
r2-bike.com/OAK-COMPONENTS-Brake-Lever-Set-Root-Lever-for-Magura-MT-Brakes-raw
Going this root, it's just another day in planet troll-pinkbike
Anyone else get this warning?
Does it come with “media” setting?