hhmtb

F it, bring out the 39er wheels and keep the Niner brand going another decade! 🙄

@mprett1: you guys are my peeps😁 I'm tooling around on a custom designed/made 165 titanium suspension bike with no motors or electronic gizmos. At 50 years old and 35 years of MTB, I understand the appeal of ebikes, but I don't current need or want one. I tell ebikers that try to convince me that "I will eventually require one when I can't physically make it up the hill any more... But until that day, I am still a man." That's usually ends the conversation with laughs. I do however feel like the younger riders on ebikes are short changing themselves in the long run. Building strength and endurance when young is key to healthy aging.

When I saw the title of the post/video, I was excited thinking, “maybe they’ll call out the ridiculous corner the industry has painted us into.” After watching it, I’m shaking my head at the lack of real substance. Half the video has Ben Cathro talking about his difficulties with fit and durability. No offense to Cathro, he’s an excellent rider and I enjoy watching his tutorial videos with my wife who is learning how to ride, but at 6’7” he’s at 99.969 percentile male height in the UK! It would be downright irresponsible for a bike company to spend its limited resources to build a production bike to fit someone so far out at the end of the bell curve. Sorry Ben, you’re going to struggle with fit on production bikes just like you no doubt have trouble fitting in some standard size vehicles and furniture. Ben would be best served going custom. His opinion however, does not belong in this discussion. What needs to be communicated is that the industry has forgotten a huge portion of potential customers. A 5’4” woman is 52.8 percentile in the US. That means 52 out of 100 women are shorter than that…shorter than Christina. That the author is having trouble finding appropriate bikes at that height, wtf are shorter riders supposed to do? Indeed I’ve seen ladies struggling on XS framed 29 bikes that are too long and slack for their fledgling skills and body size. So the industry is saying half the potential women riders need to spring for a custom frame?! And oh by the way here’s a bunch of geo numbers for you to learn without context because we failed at our job to optimize around known human factors. From my standpoint, I also feel left behind. At 5’9” I’m at 45.9 percentile in the US. I have the ability and desire to ride a 160+mm bike on all trails but there are hardly any available now with 27.5 front and rear wheels; nearly all have at least 29 front. While I get along fine on 29 up to 140 travel, any more travel raises the stack and standover to unacceptable heights. So I bought one of two identified options of full 27.5 160+ frames that had reasonably designed suspension 6 months ago. In a size medium, it was so long, low, and slack that any ride that wasn’t straight up and straight down was not fun. I ended up steepening the head angle 2* to 65 to liven it up on singletrack but it’s largely uninspiring still. For some of us it’s about fun, not strava times. At more than 3 decades of riding, I know what works for me but nothing is currently being made. I have to go custom too. And 45 out of 100 guys are shorter than me! While I feel for all who are going through tough times in the post COVID bike industry, I can’t help but think they also brought it on themselves by building only trendy bikes for racers that don’t work for the average rider.

He's right to be concerned about it out since historically every bike that has mounted an idler pulley on the tension side of the chain has failed rather prematurely. The last example of this were the Corsair Marquee and Maelstrom. Neither seemed to last more than a few months of regular riding. This was about 10 years ago, so I guess it takes about that long for people to forget so another company can take a crack at it. haha. I suppose if you use a steel cog, big bearings or needle bearings, and double shear mount a burly axle, it "should" be durable. However that setup is heavy so no trail bike has done it that I'm aware of. I like how Deviate double shear mounted the axle, I'm curious if they did any of the other things. Looks like the cog is metal at least. FWIW, the Corsairs were double shear mounted with little bearings and both plastic and metal version of the pulley making the rounds.