RoboDuck

Robot welding is fairly common in Chinese facilities and really started to take off for the mass market bike share and other high volume low quality production 10-12 years ago. It's not really the flex Rossignol thinks it is; from the factories I saw the quality was more variable than your average TIG line. It can certainly be good (sounds like many of the Taiwan facilities are bringing it on for high end bikes) but it's not guarantee of perfect bike frames.

@Snfoilhat: How is a whitepaper on their support forum a "Fake Science Publication"? I'm the first to call out BS claims and science but the methodology and approach in their test was pretty reasonable. You could argue the whole reason of doing it was "wrong" because its to show an improvement over a competitor but that doesn't make it bad science. It was a bit of a sandbagger win though because if you have nearly 100% disconnect of the pawls you are inevitably going to have much lower drag than any system that doesn't.

Holy shit some real engineering going on. Lighter, faster rolling, longer warranty and a lower cost of manufacture? Lets' go E13.

The Dale Stone drama is amazing. Having personally stood trailside with several other industry people with Dale when those brakes were on the lever force was unusually high for any trail brake. It was the first thing everyone said when they did the parking lot squeeze. Does this represent ever set of Mavens ever? Probably not. Was it really that big of a difference to literally every other brake I have squeezed before or since? You bet your bottom dollar it was. Is Dale a secret Shimano/Intend operative implicated in a false flag operation? I will leave that up to you to decide. Considering how much beans and rice that guy eats I would hope his (possible) shadowy corporate overlords paid more. Is SRAM the lord and saviour of all our component needs? Well they don't need as much service as Fox, you can stand on their derailleur, and they have made a very very powerful brake. So if you want to choose your component Jesus for some sort of strange bit of corporate zealotry I guess there are weirder choices. But I might point out that basically every major brand has a habit of releasing components with absolute dog-water levels of QA. In just the brake world you can call out: - Avids of any sort: enough said - First Gen codes: They did how many warrant recalls now? - Second Gen codes: See above - Shimano levers: Why did they just stop working in about 2014 for 30% of customers? - Shimano levers: seriously why - Shimano caliper pistons: Why are they made of glass? - First gen TRPs: enough said - Dominions: Well they look like they are carved out of a 1910 vintage block of aluminum with a chisel and had a habit of leaking but they do stop good when they don't leak - Hopes: Why do they only seem to ever work for British people? If the Maven was all the straight magic we wanted it to be why has there be 15 revisions since launch? Maybe instead of shitting all over the YouTubers desk we should ask why we keep defending companies that deliver the above. At least the guy in his basement is just telling me my money was badly spent and not actually taking my badly spent money for a product that shouldn't have left the factory floor.

The latter I am sure. When you are talking about 50-100g of difference paint variance is quite high.

I didn't realize how hard Loctite would go as a title sponsor

@justinfoil: The rocker has very marginal influence on either. He want's to decouple axle path from the leverage. In any event the benefits are very very small and the packaging on this layout adds some complication. It's neat but...

This 1000%. There is no need to decouple the two things; the amount of "tuning" that can be done with axle path on a non-idle standard 4 bar is pretty much nothing because as soon as you get out of a small operating window the anti-squat will be way out of whack.