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I always strip and rebuild bikes and frames when they're new to make sure that everything has grease, anti-seize, and locktite where needed and the only bike where it was a waste of time was a Specialized because everything was already assembled well. My Raaw madonna was pretty good too but the main bearing lip seals had been damaged and needed replacing. The sealing on the Raaw is pretty good and the stock bearings lasted a couple years in most of the pivots except the main pivot that wore out in 6 months. The main pivot is sealed from the...

For a while, half the people I rode with were on one Forbidden model or another, and honestly, those frames have some of the worst QC and overall design execution I’ve seen in that price range. Unless it’s the bike’s very first ride, they creek like crazy, and the suspension pivot hardware is borderline laughable. A buddy of mine—who posts here pretty often—ended up getting his frame replaced under warranty after endless battles with headset creaking. Forbidden eventually admitted the carbon had ovalized. No, Specialized isn’t the most exotic brand out there, but I definitely wouldn’t put Forbidden anywhere near...

I don't think there's any way how you could reasonably argue that anything in Specialized's current line-up is a "dud". On the contrary, everything they released within the last couple of years has been very well received. The Epic is considered to be the de-facto benchmark in its category - even by other manufacturers. The Stumpy 15 has won multiple bike-of-the-year awards and basically every reviewer loved it. The Chisel is basically the only actually good and worthwhile budget XC bike on the market. The road bikes are all considered to be top notch, so is the Diverge gravel bike...

We don't have any Marin County fire roads in VT.

not a race itself but prep for the race, specialized gravity team camp/wind tunnel testing

Nah, The Industry™ will widely adopt the same marketing/design paradigm Orange wielded for so many years, moving the main pivot a couple milimeters up, then a couple milimeters to the front, then machining it before heat-treating the frame, then afterwards... Circle development, seasoned with a subtle price hike on each stop.

They could jsut keep making XC bikes more expensive for the same thing.. is that an innovation?