Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
Five lucky people will be selected at random to win a Vital MTB t-shirt.
Thanks in advance,
The Vital MTB Crew
Banshee UDH aftermarket perhaps?
https://www.instagram.com/p/DORa0yFiZFB/?igsh=MW5hMXExM2o2N214Zw==
Jealous, at 5-7 I’d be lucky to get 150-160mm of drop, whereas I’m at 180mm of drop on my Spire with room to spare.
my legs are long enough to ride a 210 on a large, on other frames i could easily ride a 240. your point?
Turner used them in conjunction with thrust bearings in the round tube DHR. In practise they had similar issues to bushings - they have very narrow tolerances so you either had play or they wore out too fast. Especially when dealing with side loads its hard to secure all the parts and still work smoothly
After going from a Santa Cruz to a Spesh Enduro: sadly yes
From what I've heard, nothing new for 2026. Apparently making it UDH compatible correctly, with current geo, involves more than just new dropout forgings, so a redesigned swingarm would have to be part of the package. It's a fantastic bike to ride but definitely in need of updates to the seat tube, dropouts, and cable retention. 160mm travel would be nice too.
That BotD Titan might have something else to speculate about if you look closely.
I'd buy it being an intense but their mules are typically aluminum - would be very close to production. Also, don't the dw6 bikes have solid rear ends without the rear pivot of a horst link? Is this an 8 bar? What even is this?
I have 2 - a HD6 that'll be 2 years old next month and a Ripley V5 that's a year and 3 months old. I'm not sure I get your comment?
The pivotless variant is the Phoenix which is a flex tail and thus a DW5. But it's flexing instead of pivoting. A pivot is technically needed. A 5bar layout won't really work.
Arherton bikes do have the pivot and are named DW6.
It's definitely a raw rocker and appears to be a reworked swingarm. Slightly modified kinematics? It has different brake hose retention, at the very least. Would be nice to see it go post-mount native on the dropout forgings
Got it, that makes more sense and thank you!
Thanks for everyone’s thoughts on this! Scor was an interesting one, I hadn’t thought of that. My best bet was a next gen Norco Sight, maybe from before they committed everything to the elevated crab approach. Cable routing exit maybe matches, and I swear I heard rumors there was some churn in their design strategy…
Picture was from March of 2024, too(I REALLY wanted someone to release that bike)
That proto frame goes way back. I shot this photo of it in the early fall of 2023. Sorry for poor quality. The obvious heel rub and linkage swap-out (on your more current photo) shows it's seen a lot of hours. The guy riding it started working for a different bike company, so he may have offloaded this one to another industry friend. At the time, I was thinking it was maybe a Diamondback prototype that got canceled/never saw the light of day. He was fairly open with it; it was spotted at local Seattle area watering hole(s), etc.
Does this guy never drink water on a ride
or like me wants water and not trail debris with it so uses a camelback or similar
my bottle holder is only there to hold the range extender occasionally
You just described half of why I have Fidlock bottles.
I also have a Cambelback...but Fidlock works really well (and has a lid).
It was part tongue in cheek part serious answer. Ibis let me down massively in the past and I will never miss the opportunity to diss them. That said, my Mojo HD and HD-R were both devouring the double-row bearings in the lower link. You got 3-6 months or riding out of them, then replacement was required.
Noken? Factory version?
Could it be a salsa proto ?
-cable ports and frame layup look similar to carbon cassidy/blackthorn
- salsa has previously used split pivot so a jump to another DW system wouldn’t be a huge leap
Whilst i used to trashing bearings on my ibis, I was more disappointed when the main pivot de-bonded from the frame
The cable entry design at the headtube, lack of in frame storage, and the overcomplicated pivot/link situation at the bottom bracket, all lead me to suspect Yeti.
I feel like Yeti needs something complicated like dw6 or switchfinity is to convince people they are buying the premium suspension option. Meanwhile, suspension designs from 30 years keep winning every DH world cup
Look at the chainstay – it looks nothing like any Yeti ever made: squared-off, sharp edges. And the cable port? On Yetis from the past few years, those are screwed in.
Do you guys throwing out these opinions actually look at bikes?
As others have shared in this thread, the unknown six bar bike was spotted all the way back in 2023, before the newest Yeti bikes with the latest cable ports launched. To my eyes, the cable ports on that new mystery prototype are a dead ringer for those old SB165 cable ports.
SARCASM MODE ENGAGED: Did you even read the thread before posting? Disappointing.
Back in 2023... so a year after the SB160 was released with the updated cable port.
Saying the two below look similar is wild. Zero resemblance. Might as well compare a rotisserie chicken to a cassette.
Somedays I still pine for a team of robots to kill my face.... One of these days.
Yeah if that's a yeti then they threw out their entire design language for that frame...
Which has been consistent for well over a decade by this point.
I'd argue that seat tube/top tube juncture and the elbow where the chainstay meets the bb is entirely consistent with Yeti's design language, just reconceptualized around a different suspension design. The rocker link and seat stay bridge don't stray far from the current DH bike. It's been out a few years now so no secret anymore, but I saw an aluminum test mule for their ebike platform way back in 2017 that looked a lot like this.
Given that pic is from 2023 it's anyone's guess if it's something they pursued any further after refining the DH bike. The fact it's painted white makes me wonder if it's a really early proto that someone just kept riding regardless. Carbon frame samples often get a thin layer of white paint in part because it's easier to see cracks and such.
There is also their six-bar patent from 2020.
That it's at least a Yeti concept in the later stages of development seems like a pretty good guess to me
I don't remember all the Yeti 6 bar patents but I think most of them (if not all) used a 4bar to emulate a linear path in order to replace the switch infinity slider. Like the one in your image. This one uses a scissor link which is effectively close to a Chebyshev link which is basically a single sided Watt link. And some patents used a Watt link too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt%27s_linkage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_linkage
A water bottle *is* a range extender.
And it gives you more range than any battery 😜