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Of all the reviews I have seen online, nobody is complaining about the progression or bottoming out all the time. And if JKW didn't immediately fill it with volume spacers, then I think there is some overreaction here.

You have to remember the true target market of this bike....if you really need that much extra resistance then a Tallboy is the wrong bike for you, full stop. The forum guys wanting to run a coil shock are a niche of a niche type of mountain biker so they aren't going to design the bike with that in mind. I also don't think its that far off, and they maybe chose to ship it with that shock spec so people can easily remove the spacers if that need to. And plenty of people have run coil shocks in bikes...

@CascadeComponents right now...

I can't speak for other countries, but I think distribution was the reason nobody bought GT bikes in the US, not the product. Everyone I knew who had a GT bike for the last six or so years seemed pretty stoked with it, but IIRC the only place you could buy one in most metro areas was through Dicks Sporting Goods, which is a great place to get an exercise ball but not a great place to buy a $5000+ mountain bike.

I test rode a tallboy 6 over the weekend (5mi / 600' vert). It is really, really good. I have a ht4 that I love and I love vpp for longer travel bikes. I don't miss it on the new tallboy in the slightest. It goes uphill as well as the previous version with more traction when climbing square ledges and loose over hard... and goes downhill easily 30% better then the previous version. It is half way in between the tallboy 5 and my hightower 4 with regards to descending. Honestly, it's so good and so well rounded that...

99.5% of people looking for a GT or SC would have absolutely no fucking clue what Pon is lol. GT disappeared because all they had was their heritage, and that's not enough to carry a brand indefinitely as they pumped out mostly unappealing bikes year after year. I personally don't know anyone that considered buying one in recent memory. I had a GT bmx in 2006 and really liked it, so when I got properly into mountain biking I always looked at GT. Other options were always better. I stopped looking at them years ago. If GT was successful then...

Well, I guess I’d love to ride the new Tallboy and then decide, how the move to a new system tastes. The best feature imho of the VPP with a solid rear triangle was that all bearings were located in the rocker. Changing them was a breeze and there was no risk of damaging the carbon frame in the process. I tend to ride my bikes as long as possible, since they became so great. (swapped annually when I used to work in a bike shop, industry deals etc, and geometry was still shitty and new bikes sometimes brought revelatory...

That’s why you don’t buy transitions and buy Santa Cruz lol

I tried the Bullit, I liked it, well balanced bike

I'm sure they will be just fine as they seemingly have had plenty of people ride and enjoy their non-vpp ebikes. They also still are using vpp on their long travel non-ebikes.

It's 185x50. I'm not a fan of trunnion in general, but historically SC tolerances are pretty good and the design seems to be executed well, so I wouldn't expect any issues there.

I'm sure many have gotten the email, but new Tallboy with CC frame in all builds, 300g lighter than previous version. Despite my disappointment on the travel and 4bar, looks pretty sharp.

I’d take a well designed and built frame with a lower spec damper over a misaligned, poorly thought out frame with a fancy one any day. You can upgrade a damper, it’s much harder to upgrade out of bad engineering and manufacturing. As has been said above, even then, some shock spec or kinematic choices will mean different things to different riders.

Whichever bike has the best damper tune specced probably wins at that point. I'm pretty sure that's a big deciding factor between bikes with different linkage designs also though. You would need control wheels, and tires at a minimum, and probably drivetrain also to get any useful data about which frame works better.

If we compare the new horst link tallboy with the Allied Fitz, Forbidden Reya and Transition Smuggler, there a few difference: Tallboy is the only bike using a trunion shock most likely a 185x50, Smuggler and Fitz use a normal 210x50 shock and Reya use a 190x45 shock. So Reya most likely have a higher starting leverage ratio that could limit heavier rider that are getting close to the shock max pressure. Reya, Smuggler and most likely Tallboy use double bearing setup at the chainstay. Santa Cruz does the same for the Bullit and Vala. Allied Fitz has no exploded...

I’d love to see a shoot out of trail bikes using the same linkage designs. It would really interesting to start to dig a bit deeper as to what sets them apart - quality control, kinematics, maintenance, etc etc.

visual summary

New Tallboy all through this: https://youtu.be/06aPj2jKe4U?si=n0VbMiFXlzlGwgF2