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Mullet trail bikes will often climb so well before the effective gear is smaller. Depending on where you are it can be a wee benefit. So far as push saying no to building shocks they don’t think would work well for the application? I don’t get how that’s unhelpful, it’s probably the opposite. Building something you don’t think will meet your own standards or performance goals seems like a recipe for poor experience and service.

Long time lurker, first time poster here. For some background I’m an aerospace composites engineer and spent several years in Advanced Product Development with an emphasis on environmentally friendly materials. There’s so much to get into on this topic and if folks are interested I’d love to start a dedicated thread on materials and environmental impacts. The TLDR is, carbon fiber as a green product on its own is a fallacy. The raw fiber production may result in a certain level of carbon sequestering, but the process is still so energy intensive I wouldn’t call it an environmental positive. As...

They've shown these off at least a year ago. Plus the idea is not completely novel even for Outlier... Plus plus, if I understand correctly Outlier's goal was to lower the rider CoG. There are other reasons why you would want your pedal surface to be below the pedal axle. Besides copying an out there product to fill up your product line and fill your CNC machines (as per Lewis). Case in point, they didn't even iterate on the bearing-axle layout much.

the comment section proves humanity is doomed.

https://www.sram.com/en/life/stories/specialized-highgear-co-development From the outset, the core challenge was clear: transmitting full downhill sprint and impact loads through an extremely compact system. Traditional solutions such as belts or meshing gears were quickly ruled out due to inefficiency, packaging limitations, suspension constraints, and durability concerns. Chains remained the most efficient and proven option, but early analysis showed that a single chain could not withstand elite downhill loads within the desired compact gearing and envelope. That insight led to the project’s defining architectural decision: a two chain system. Two parallel chains could theoretically share the load, but ensuring equal load distribution introduced a...

Has specialized provided an explanation for why there are 2 chains hidden in the frame, rather than 1? The 4 chainrings and 2 tension idlers is a lot going on - seems like there must be a good reason?

I always saw VPP as Santa Cruz's USP. If it's Yet Another Plain Old Horst Link, what am I getting other than the name that makes it exceptional?

Saw this in the background of an Instagram story, must be the new tall boy going away from VPP

I think this is as close to a „for racing purposes only“ bike we’ll get from specialized. Who is the realistic target group for this? A few age groupers, the occasional dentist and maybe some kids sponsored by their rich parents. The ones who want it will buy it anyways, other than that I see it as an engineering exercise and podium representation at the World Cup for spesh. Low production numbers, complex molds and layup, high structural requirements and engineering costs, it was never gonna be price competitive and i don’t think specialized will care about the hardtail dad...

Can you please not drag your abrasive views on world situation into every damn topic? We're talking about bikes not world politics. As for the new Demo and Sram drivetrain thingamajiggy, will it be available for other brands besides Specialized too? Does it circumvent DWs twochainz patent?

This Just In! Stark Motorcycles is going to be joining the MTB world with its EBike Called the Stark “NotaMoto”. This ebike has 80 horse power and a gear box. Apparently they made the decision to join the bike industry after one of the executives said- “ I mean its all bullshit. You can buy an ebike from Specialized at the same price as our motorcycles. But with like 1/1000th the power. We should just put mountain bike wheels on a Varg and just sell it to them. Theyre just in denial that they want a motorcycle and want to...

I take this more as neither one of these things are likely to happen. Shaving 20% of the Levo seems likely as does seeing a new enduro anytime soon.

Thank you. This was my thought, too. If you drive a car without a crumple zone into a brick wall at high speed, even though the same total force is being applied to the wall and to your body, your body and the wall will notice a difference compared to hitting the same wall at the same speed in a car with a crumple zone. In this analogy, the dual crown fork is the car w/o a crumple zone, transmitting all the force immediately to the headtube area, and the single crown fork is the car w/ a crumple zone...

Just don’t crash then 🤪

Honestly the extra forces are massive. It has less to do with the fork's axle to crown and much to do with the flex you get out of a single crown. A dual crown will transfer (almost) all of that front to back flex to the frame so the difference is far from subtle. As someone who has broken many frames near the head tube, I won't buy a trail bike that can't take a dual crown. Also as someone who kills CSUs faster than they come off the factory line, I now run a dual crown on my pedal...

All of Sram’s new road brakes, released after DB 8s, Mavens and Motives, still use DOT, strangely enough. (If anyone cares.)

Reece Wilson testing what looks like a new Dominion (From his IG stories) Plus the complete bike

Well, turns out the manufacturer of such shiny products, happens to be engineers themselves, and after testing and comparisons came to the conclusion that, with their design, the difference in stiffness between the 15 and 20 was only 4% a % that can easily be offset with the right choice of hub rather than something random like most people run ( see Yeti and their podium builds with dt 350 ) After riding the Edge with the 15mm axle and i9 hydra 2 front hub, I came to the conclusion that I don’t need a 20mm axle and the pain...

Melamed talking a bit about the new Maxxis casings, sounds like they are not far from the release anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6JUjkXUdAs&t=215s

All good! I wish I could take credit, but this one was written up by our Engineering Director Matt White. 👍