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I keep 4 bikes rideable. An old Merlin ti Road/Cross bike, an old Fat Chance for commuting and grocery getting around town, a vintage Mantis for fun social MTB rides, and one brand new insane Yeti. The others handle 90% of my actual riding, and and cost as much combined as the Yeti does. But the Yeti is a spaceship compared to the others, and makes all the pain and punishment of riding the others worthwhile as training.

Oh man, how great is that... that’s a dozen kids whose parents can tell them to go play outside, and they can now go out and ride into the woods, instead of doing what my friends and I did, just wandering around with a stick, banging around looking for trouble & daring each other to get into it. Glad to see it.

I don't know how I landed on this article, but I'm sitting here reading it, and across from me is the most fun bike I've ever ridden, a decade old custom Yeti team frame with an insane mix of components on it, its shock resting comfortably at 50%. The best car I've ever owned, a 1979 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce. I put 4x what I paid for it into every kind of service. 3/4 of the time I owned it it was in the shop, and it didn't even really matter, somehow. My new Surbaru, a million times nicer in every way, but damn if every time I get in it I don't wish I was strapping myself into that ridiculous Alfa instead.

I can't thank you enough for showcasing this. The CDale Pong bike was one of a handful of truly inspired bike designs in the history of the sport, just barely existing in that sliver of time when it could have existed at all... it's a rare and wonderful thing that it still exists. About 15 years ago, a Cannondale prototype from the mid-90s with an integrated hydraulic drivetrain surfaced on ebay, and went unsold. I don't know why I didn't buy it. ...I worked for CDales biggest competitor at the time, and got to work on our own fluid drive prototype around then, an integrated hydro drivetrain with vickers variable vain rotors for different drive output ratios, & shared with the suspension and braking lines as a capacitor to acheive some amount of regenerative/conservation in the lines. ...it was an absolute nightmare, and nowhere near efficient enough to be viable, but, was incredibly fun to tinker on after work. Those were the days.

Yes, derailleurs should die. Don't know if Zerode will be the ones to eventually do it, but they sure as hell have a lot more vision than the commenters in this section. "Things can't be done, otherwise they would already have been done." Well whoopee, why bother getting off your couch at all... hell why bother waking up in the morning? The sport should have come to this point twenty years ago already. That this guy, in a tiny shop in his little island paradise, has poured his time and money into this and come up with a working result at all is pretty frickin fantastic. If anyone asked you guys in 1987 whether we should stick with derailleurs based on Deore XT m730's performance, you'd have said no too. It takes a hell of a lot of work and a lot of iterations to work something out. Derailleurs have had most of a century to get where they are today. Expecting a cycling-specific gearbox design to be everything everyone ever dreamed of all at once in its first few attempts is absurd. But you don't get to the refined version without the early versions, and I don't see any of the rest of the biggest companies, companies who could actually afford the R&D, doing the work it takes to get there. If Metz' bike rode like waterlogged driftwood and only lasted for a half a season before wearing out, it would still be more ambitious and successful than anything else on the market. To think MTB used to be the sport of wild and reckless innovation... and is now full of stuffy judgmental curmudgeons... no way.

...however, E13 is not a megacorp with a 300 page product plan engineered to squeeze every dime out of a global dealer networks for its shareholders. They certainly didn't have to eke every mm out of this wheelset, but they did anyway. I get the impression that whatever they do, they do because they want a better product to exist, are willing to try it, and afterward charge whatever it takes to be able to do more of it next year, when they kick up that driveside flange to a classic hi-flange config, and make that spoke angle symmetrical. Come on e, you know you want to. You're so close...

Yes, most do. Having worked for a few larger MFG's in the sport, I was surprised to discover that the premium lines were simply there for branding. None of the fancy high end equipment I was so excited to work on made the company any money. You just never sell enough of it to recoup the expense of developing it and selling it. The bread and butter is in quantity sales, and those are in the mid-range to low end. The reason it was important, the only reason we even did the high end stuff at all, was to have a flagship line to attract eyeballs, and much of high end programs costs came out of the marketing budget, not product. As product, they were so far outside the realm of being profitable, they, and the enormous hours we billed on them, were just considered a necessary expense, not to be recouped. Same goes fro the custom team bikes, wind tunnel silliness, concept bikes, $10,000 personal decal sets, and the rest of our geeking out about details that amount to nothing of tangible value. It "builds the brand".

Every bike has its use purpose. I use my rigid to improve my handling skills. Then I use my FS machines to improve my aerials and speed. You can spot people who only ride one or the other easily. But it doesn't really matter. The world does not depend on our ability to ride our bikes in the woods. It's far more critical to longevity in the sport to ride a bike that makes you happy.

I went to school for composites specifically to design better composite frames, and after spending the $ and time, unfortunately came away with the same conclusion. There are ecologically friendly matrix and reinforcement materials improving in performance steadily, though they're not comparable to carbon or epoxy yet, but even as they draw nearer, you're not going to find them being made cheaply in asia. Got to open that lab and do that work in house, and that's a serious investment. Otherwise, it's tough to beat alloy frames. Cheap carbon comes at a high deferred cost, no way around it.

Favorite guy in the whole sport.