29+ and full suspension - BRAAP

Yes, correct saddle height. I'm a freak.

A few days ago I posted a quick picture of the bike I'm calling "BRAAP". I'll let you decide if that's an acronym, and if so, what it stands for (Big Rowdy Alces Alces Proletarian?) But I can say that taken as a whole, it stands for super, super fun. And yes, full custom full suspension frames are now officially available (priced the same as the Ventana/WW configuration for now at $2500 w/shock), drop me a line for details.

First, the basics. Here's the bike:

BRAAP!

The executive summary here: modern XC geometry, 100mm travel, lots of standover, pretty darn short stays, pretty darn low BB. Designed to just *barely* allow the use of a Thomson dropper post with the saddle clamped at full ~28 degree downward tilt.

I wanted a long-day go-anywhere bike that would be fun for exploring rough/undeveloped trails, as well as snappy and responsive enough to be fun on a lunch ride. It's built super beefy (all Supertherm all the time!) because 1) I wanted to be able to loan it out to buddies/customers without worrying about how big they were, and 2) I crash. Sometimes hard. There's also the fact that honestly, being a weight weenie about a 3" tire bike when you're approaching 40 and have 2 small kids is ridiculous. If I wanted to be faster I'd drink less beer and ride more. The complete bike weighs about 28 pounds with fairly nice but not crazy parts.

And, I'll be blunt: I got what I was going for. And then some (with some inevitable tradeoffs, of course). This is my favorite full suspension bike ever, and I must have owned 30 or so by now.

Loads of Chupacabra clearance

I'll do another post next week for those folks who are interested about the nitty-gritty of the swingarm and seatstays. Suffice to say for now that they're a mixture of straight-gauge 4130 and 304 stainless (for bearing fittings) along with a LOT of probably unnecessary work to attach everything to the dropouts (I'll use rockers next time and for customer bikes - much simpler/lighter/cleaner).

So, how does it ride?

In a word, it's like having a short-travel DH bike on the downhill, and a really capable (albeit not all that light) XC bike on the climbs. It has insane gobs of traction in even the worst off camber gravel type situations. It wheelies and manuals and pops around really nicely (though not as nicely as Stupidmobile, since that bike has a wheelbase that's almost 3" shorter!) It's extremely capable on steep terrain going up or down - no wander on slow techy climbs, tons of confidence on steep roll-ins and rough fast descents.

There are tradeoffs, of course:
-3" tires are pretty slow going uphill unless the terrain is really rough. You won't be getting any Strava PRs on your local dirt road climb on this bike.
-I wanted a very low bb, because I love how low bb bikes ride. In technical stuff when pedaling, pedal strikes can be pretty frequent (and potentially dangerous if you're going fast!)
-They are intact so far, but the bike demands to be ridden really fast on rough gnar, and I'm guessing I'll eventually shred my probably too-light Chupacabra tires.
-Chupacabras (and 100mm travel) aren't great for going off big drops or hitting big jumps at the bike park. To be fair, though, this bike was never intended to be a full-on DH sled and doesn't have the travel or geometry to be ridden that way.

Curved bridge next time!

Some people will also find the combination of larger tires and suspension to be just too much damping out of trail feedback - the ride can feel "numb" on smoother sections of trail and while you might be going really fast - in some cases it actually doesn't feel very fun because the bike is doing so much of the work. That's a line that everyone has to find for themselves, though, and on the trails I tend to like best (rough XC) this bike is perfect.

I'm pretty excited about this bike, not just because it's a blast to ride, but also because I can now do really fun and weird stuff with full suspension bikes (FS fatbike? FS 29er with 400mm chainstays? Super low/high/long/short/fat/whatever? All doable) and let the geek flag fly. Not everyone is going to prefer 29+ (or even fit on it) but that's the nice thing here - I can do 27.5+, 26+, 24" fatbike, 20", mixed wheel sizes... anything.

I'm not about to stop riding Stupidmobile (currently set up as a rigid singlespeed with, natch, a Chupacabra on the front) since Park City has a metric ton of trails that are way too smooth for any form of suspension at all. But when I wander into the shop, this is the bike I usually grab.

A couple from Carey

Finally built up and dirty (a little dirty, anyway) after the epic powdercoat delays of the spring.

Geometry for the bored and/or nerdy here.

 

Just in case you forgot...

You (and I) are sissies, because we are not GDR people.

Well, maybe one person reading this is. :)

Happy friday, all. Go ride, even if it's only for 45 minutes at night after the kids fall asleep (my GDR is "Golly, Daytime Ride?!?" these days...)

Thanks to Jon for the photo. Bags by Alpine Luddites.

Fatbikes are fun on dirt too

Especially at night. Here's Felix demonstrating at Curt Gowdy on his 83mm shell low-q fatbike in the daytime:

Now, I'm not convinced that fatbikes are a great choice for racing on dry trails like Felix is doing here unless things get *real* weird terrain-wise, but what I will say is that they are *awesome* for night riding. At night, you can still see big obstacles and the general direction/trend of the trail. What you can't see are the subtleties and the small obstacles - which a fatbike will happily ignore. I'm about 10% slower on my fatbike in the daylight going uphill, maybe 5% slower going downhill. At night, the uphill doesn't change much, but the fatbike is at least 10% faster - and 100% more fun (ie, I can let it rip and not be afraid I'll die because I didn't see a patch of sand).

Give it a whirl, folks! No reason to leave that fatbike hanging all summer, even if you've got other bikes to ride.

Oh, what the heck... one more

Sarah's (not my Sarah) new 29x4" bike. Featuring BB wrench counterweight and no shock bushings yet! It's friday...

No decals either? Walt's not even trying...

Pretty normal modern XC geometry, dropper post compatibility, and remote lockouts and adjustable travel out the wazoo. Sooner or later I gotta modernize my own stuff, my own FS bike looks pretty darn obsolete these days.

This thing would fit me pretty well if the seat tube and head tube were both 2" longer

When the weird turn pro...

With apologies to Hunter S.  Sam is pretty small in stature. 4'10", to be exact. She wanted a bike that could, as much as possible, do it all (ie XC, trail/enduro, maybe even huck?)

If you go more compact, the seatstays hit the collar!

Even with 26" wheels, 100mm travel was pushing standover too high for comfort... until we went old school (props to Cannondale) and threw the usual front triangle configuration out the window. We also got one of the excellent new Syntace Flatforce stems (*excellent* for folks struggling with handlebar height) Result? Plenty of standover, 100+mm travel, and an appropriate geometry for someone on the short side.

415mm chainstays. Eat your hearts out, tall people.

Here's the print:

Flatforce stem gets the bars level, not shown here.

Ken, 148x12, the future, Keanu Reeves

As promised, here's part 1 of my thoughts, musings, ramblings... incoherent gibberish about new axle standards.

I'm not even going into the new 110x15 fork standard right now, we'll concentrate on 148x12.

First, remember: if you are buying a hardtail, a through axle has no actual benefit over a QR unless you weigh 400 pounds or are constantly forgetting to tighten your skewer. Your pathetic excuses for legs won't get any more power to the ground than they did before - the rear end of a hardtail really doesn't flex much, so adding a big fat axle make zero difference in how the bike rides. Of course, I build them all the time, and if/when I get around to building myself a new bike, that's what I'll do. Why? Because time marches on, and it's harder and harder to get nice QR parts - just like it's hard to find a really nice set of v-brakes these days. C'est la vie. Take the red pill. Or maybe the blue one? I can't remember, the sequels have caused me to block all Matrix-related knowledge from my brain to avoid the pain.

142x12 came out about 3 years ago and quickly took the world by storm. Why? It promised a bit stiffer rear ends on FS bikes, compatibility via adapter for most existing hubs as the cassette and disc rotor stayed in exactly the same place, and something new to sell to the bike-buying public. Which I would roundly condemn, except that I'm one of the purveyors of said new stuff.

27.5+? My doing.

As a giant world of diverse wheel/tire and drivetrain options has opened up in the post-29er glasnost, lots of manufacturers realized that cramming 3x29/27.5" tires into frames built around 73mm BB shells and 50mm chainlines (just a quick pause for a definition here: "chainline" here means the distance from the center of the frame to the center of the middle chainring, though these days that mostly means the *only* chainring. Here's Sheldon Brown's definition) would cause some terrible problems fitting everything where it needed to go. The chainstay, tire, and chainring all fight for space on a typical mountain bike frame (FS or hardtail) and if you have to give too much to the tire - you've either gotta lengthen the chainstays or do *something* to move the chainring out of the way. As more and more gears get crammed onto cassettes, the flanges of the hub have also gotten closer together (this has been going on for 20 years, really) which is generally bad, as the spoke tension between driveside/non driveside gets out of whack and the wheel gets less laterally stiff and weaker. Bigger rims (ie 27.5, 29) exaggerate these problems. Something had to give (well, ok, maybe "had" is too strong a word). Something is giving, anyway.

Enter "Boost" (why didn't 142x12 get a cool name?) 148x12 rear ends. The idea here is that you move both the cassette and disc rotor outboard 3mm, and move the flanges out to match. Result, you can move the *chainring* out a bit to make more room for the tire, keep a decent chainline, and end up with a bit stronger rear wheel to boot.

Now, there's another solution out there that I've been doing for over a decade along with a few other weirdos. It's to stick with 135x10 (or now142x12) spacing, but move the *entire* rear end (meaning, the hub/dropouts/stays) about 5-10mm to the driveside (the exact amount depending on application). This gives you a great chainline for single ring bikes and loads of room for short chainstays and big tires. It's also a near-dishless/even tension rear wheel. Great stuff, IMO. Cannondale ripped me off this year with their "AI system" (here's C'dale's explanation of the setup). Stupidmobile (you know, the 29er with 40cm chainstays?) was built this way. So are many bikes I build for customers, because it gives you a ton of benefits and really only has a few drawbacks. You can also do fun stuff like an 83mm low-q-factor fatbike by using various amounts of rear end offset (Felix's runs a 135x10 rear hub offset 10mm).

Whew. Did that all make sense? No? That's what I run into a lot. Many people don't like the idea of asymmetry, so the whole idea is off the table. I think that's a big part of the 148x12 idea - easier to explain, inherently less weird and threatening...but we don't do normal and unthreatening around here!

Ken wanted it *all*. 148x12, lots of tire clearance (in his case 27.5x2.8-3 or so) and short, short chainstays (well, not totally insane - we did 41.5cm). So we went nuts and did an *offset 148x12* setup. In this case, it's just 2mm of offset to get the chainline we wanted, but it still felt weird to take a brand new Anvil dummy axle and chuck it up on the lathe!

So long story short, Ken's bike is weird but should be awesome. Your bike can be awesome too if you think outside the box a bit and let me get creative - it's custom, folks. The world is your oyster.

Or we can just do 148x12, because what the heck, I already paid for the dummy axle, and the writing is on the wall...

Totally Unbiased Review: Stupidmobile

First off, just to make sure we're clear - the manufacturer of this bicycle made me do something like 10 hours of work, for no pay, just so I could ride it. The company made me pay for all the parts as well as powdercoating the frame and didn't even give me an employee discount. Apparently if I break it, I have to fix it myself.

Bastards.

Sorry about all the shadows. 

So I decided to name it "Stupidmobile". Why? Well, mostly because this bike has the most ridiculously short chainstays you've ever heard of (40 cm, or 394cm if measured horizontally). A 2.1" 29er tire only has 15mm of clearance to the BB shell itself. There's not much way to go a whole lot shorter and for someone who has a 36" inseam, the whole idea of chainstays this short is... well, stupid. Right?

Well, not so fast. My first ride (around the block, in the rain) had me pretty worried - so much so that I pulled out the angle finder to check things over, because it seemed MUCH too twitchy for a bike with a 69 degree head tube angle. After confirming things were right, a little cogitation solved the mystery: I had been riding exclusively on the cargo bike (7' wheelbase!) all winter. Any "normal" single bike was going to feel weird.

Nevertheless, I was still nervous last week when the trails dried out enough to get some real rides in. I set out to find out just how stupid Stupidmobile actually was by riding a number of variations on our local (literally a 10 minute ride from the door) trail system. The Shoreline trail is mostly bench cut singletrack on steep, semi-rocky (limestone) soil. It occasionally wanders up a drainage (the Dry Creek section is a classic) or a mountain (Mt. Van Cott is a fun way to cough up a lung) and it features what might be the most fun section of singletrack in Utah - the Bobsled (yes, it's really berms the whole way, yes, those guys are jerks for riding it when it's muddy). Long story short, it's got most of your types of XC terrain to test frame geometry.

I have to admit that at first, I wasn't riding the bike very well. I was oversteering everything due to the super short wheelbase - the bike steers much quicker than you'd expect from something with a 69 degree head tube angle and coming from an FS bike (my main ride in 2012) with almost an extra 1.5" of wheelbase, it was a bit of a shock. If you leave your butt in the saddle over any kind of rough terrain the tucked-under rear wheel will let you know in a hurry by attempting to eject you. I managed to not crash up the Dry Creek climb and figured I'd take it easy on the Bobsled. Unfortunately, I was with my buddy Paz Ortiz who is not only the only non-douche realtor I know in SLC but also a really badass descender and enduro/SuperD racer. He and I always duke it out on the descents so I ended up riding way faster than I should have.

Man, that rear tire is close to that bottom bracket. 

The results were stunningly awesome. Stupidmobile's short wheelbase let me rip through the berms and the slack front end made things manageable on the rougher and straighter stuff (though to be fair I think a longer bike would be better on the rough/fast/straight sections). I've got experience with this type of geometry and in fact I've been riding similar bikes for years - but I figured there would be diminishing returns under 42cm or so of chainstay length and 42" wheelbase (at least for me). I was wrong. The bike is probably not *faster* on most terrain but it's not slower than a longer bike either and it's super, duper fun for trails where jumping, flying, and general silliness are your goal. Would you be faster in a race? Probably not - the bike is pretty unforgiving of mistakes and a poorly executed bunnyhop that comes up short over a log or rock is going to result in an ass-over-teakettle disaster. I don't even want to imagine how hard it would be to keep things under control after a few hard climbing efforts with your whole body exhausted and your brain on autopilot. It would be bad.

But for rides under 2 hours, or short races, or anything where the goal is fun and not playing chicken with your lactate threshold? Awesome. I love it, I don't regret a thing. I'd recommend it to customers, even, with a few caveats (see the bullet points below).

Awesome stuff:

-Very "intuitive" and hip/lean steering action. If body english is your preferred steering method, this is the kind of bike for you. If you like to jump over/wheelie over/roll up the berm to the side of obstacles, this geometry will help you do it.

-Great climbing traction whether standing or sitting. Man, there's a lot of weight on that rear wheel.

-It's very easy to unweight the front wheel (shocking, I know) for getting up over obstacles whether you're going uphill or down.

-Just plain fun. But then again, it's a mountain bike. Pretty much all mountain bikes are fun unless you're a seriously grouchy individual.

Not much creativity from the Waltworks photography div. on display here.

Not so awesome:

-Mistakes will be punished severely. If you come up short on that jump over the little rocky section your dentist will be getting another mistress and/or boat, probably. Kidding aside, this is a terrible geometry for riding where you'll be trying to go fast when you're not fresh and alert. You need to be on the gas and be paying attention to your lines because the bike won't bail you out of a lot of mistakes that a longer one would.

-Unless your technique is very good or you run a very low bar position, it's hard to keep the front wheel down on some steep climbs. The lack of weight on the front wheel and general high trail number mean that this bike does want to wander on slow technical climbing - those who really enjoy that type of stuff may want an adjustable travel fork or a bit different geometry. It's not unmanageable but it's also far from a perfect climbing bike.

-This frame requires a zero-dish (hub offset to the driveside by 5mm) rear wheel and you can *only* run an outboard position (~56mm chainline) ring. That means no crank mounted bashguard (ISCG can be done, though) and no front derailleur. XX1 cranks are a no-go. A Rohloff hub could work reasonably well as they use a 54mm chainline if you are a planetary gears kind of person.
EDIT: Actually, with a 28t MRP bling ring running at 51mm chainline, XX1 will work. In theory you could avoid the offset rear end here.

-Even with the whole rear end moved outboard to line up with the ring the chainline is not especially good in the highest or lowest gear. The stays are so short that the angle just gets extreme. I've had good luck running 9 out of 10 cogs on a 10 speed cassette, which is plenty for me, but those who want a full range will not be happy with the drivetrain performance. Singlespeeders will have no problems. EDIT: With a 28t Bling Ring, chainline is much better and I get full use of all 10/11 gears.

-Tire clearance is somewhat limited - a 2.3 will fit fine but anything bigger is a tight squeeze. Adding 5mm to the chainstays or using an 83mm BB shell (which brings another set of issues that I won't go into now) would take care of this.

So bottom line: I love this bike. I like it even better than my previous short-stay setup from a few years ago and for the right rider (ie more interested in having fun on 2 hour rides than absolute speed or 24 hour solo sufferfests) I think this sort of geometry is a great fit.

I should also note that the new Paragon Polydrops (which Mark asked me to test prototypes of with this frame) are working great after probably 15 hours of riding and I'm happy to build with them (no extra charge) for anyone who is interested. They are probably not the ideal dropout for this bike due to their length (makes it hard to use the second bend on s-bend chainstays to get any heel clearance) but they offer some cool flexibility in terms of bike setup and I have had zero problems with them thus far. Most riders may prefer the low mount or classic DR2010 (or sliders for the singlespeed crowd) but that's a decision that's complex enough that I'm not going to go into it here.

Thursday afternoon quick rant: you can't manual

I hear constantly about how this or that bike doesn't "manual" easily enough. Often I hear this from obvious freds or 50 pound overweight retired dentists online.

Folks, this is a manual. It means you get up on your rear wheel and balance there, without pedaling, and roll along. It's not a wheelie, it's not just lifting your front wheel for a second to get it over a dip or a rock in the trail. Almost no mountain bikers can do it (including most pros), and it's not even a particularly useful skill for most people for trail riding. It's a skill that often coincides with being a really good bike handler and it's occasionally useful, but if you're skilled enough to do a real manual, you can basically do one on ANY bike.

So if you want to complain that a bike doesn't manual well, I'll be happy to listen provided you go grab your trials bike or BMX and manual that for me. Otherwise, you can't manual because you can't manual, no matter what bike you're on, and furthermore, manualing won't really help you on the trail, so don't worry about it.


Yours truly, 36 year old fred who can't really manual Walt