Friday, August 12, 2011

Moody Blues... I mean greens?

Obligatory self-deprecating intro: I once attended a Moody Blues concert. And thought it was cool. God I was lame when I was 15.

Sorry. The title was an attempt at a joke, since this bike's owner's surname is Moody. Apparently I am just as lame now.

On to the bike. This is a classic "squeeze a small person onto 29" wheels" XC setup:
-59cm/23.2" toptube
-96mm head tube/39cm seat tube/29" standover
-71/73 angles. I am not a believer in slacking back the head tube angle and steepening the seat tube angle to make a bike appear smaller in terms of effective toptube (size small production 29ers are notorious for this - many of them have LONGER wheelbases than the medium size). You end up with a bike that *fits*, but handles like crap with wheels way too far in front/behind the rider.
-Nice shortish 43cm chainstays, with a direct mount front derailleur mount (though there's no derailleur right now) and 2.3+ tire clearance.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice Work! What kind of dropouts did you use?

Walt said...

They are just standard Paragon disc dropouts. Nothing fancy, but nice solid dropouts.

Cody said...

Walt, what is the height of the rider? 23.2" ETT doesn't really sound all that short/small. We do find that when we start getting into short ETT's and HT's, fork interference with DT becomes a legit issue.
Thx- CJB

Walt said...

Hey Cody -

This was as short as we could go while maintaining a decent (80) trail number and clearance for size 43 feet. You could squeeze it a bit shorter and risk some toe overlap, but I generally don't think that's a good idea.

Most of the 29ers with <23" toptubes you see out there are using some combination of very slack head tubes, steep seat tubes, or toe overlap risk to get that TT number shorter/smaller. That, IMO, is a dumb way to design a bike - you can find examples of size small 29er frames that have a longer wheelbase than the size medium from the same manufacturer!

Plenty of room for the fork, that's the easy part.