lcdbm89

Sorry Viathon! Pinkbike just told everyone that your over-priced bikes are Walmart Bikes, I'm not going to pay $25 for something on the Dollar Menu!!!

I'm currently designing a Top-Mount rear hydraulic derailleur with both up and down shifters like current gear functions. Including a ratchet system to up shift one click at a time. It houses a Pos/Neg hydraulic chamber and I'm designing a retrofit aftermarket braket to convert bottom hanging rear derailleur to my mid mount, not hanging down, compact design that sacrifices zero function and optimizes the reality of the sport by eliminating the need to beak off derailleur hangers in the woods. I'll post something soon. Pat Pending. I see only one benefit of this expensive design...profit to the designer. Bummer for mountain bikers, another over-priced baby step in mtb revolution. MSRP of the Top-Mount Hydro-Derailleur(TMHD)$499 Hope to put some on 2019 models and retrofit models may be available this summer 2018.

How about innovation and integration with our derailers and gears. We moved to hydraulic discs over a decade ago... brakes are awesome now, how about leaving our drive sprocket enclosed with a built-in chain cleaner and a derailer above the rear gears so we quit breaking derailer mounts and slipping gears. Or a dual chain bike with opposite sprockets on the wheel and the drive to make for smoother shifting and higher speeds on street bikes. I'm sure someone can come up with something innovative.

Somebody mentioned the 1990 Boulder defiant... It has the top tube rear shock and that was 28 years ago, we don't see everyone out riding these for a reason haha. And how long have gear boxes been around? I know when I was a kid I could shift my parents redline road bikes while sitting on them and at the time I didn't know any different... Why would the combination of the two make a bike any better. I guess if you're going for a gravity bike and you just keep adding weight to it it should be faster in theory right?

Now that I have read the comments my initial opinion has changed. Originally I thought this man has something really innovative here and that the rear shock was a form of genius. If most dh riding is done in the dirt and mud, how long will the rear shock last with nobby tires throwing sand-filled mud and rocks at it? And we don't want a more expensive bike, what we need is quality and affordability. Why spend $5,000 on a bike? The engineering is the McDonald's of it all, and quality bikes aren't "made in China". At the end of the day, you're not going to reinvent the wheel! A bike is a bike and it's getting to the point where people don't even care who made their bikes because it's got a hundred different manufacturers parts on it before you can ride it anyway. Just make it functional and affordable...