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Uh, that's most bike buyers. The number of people that I've sold bikes to who don't care/know what the knobs do is... the majority. We do our best to educate, but I could see their eyes glaze over in the first 10 seconds. The number of customers who care about how suspension works is less than 5% in my experience.

This whole power war situation sucks. I spent years fighting for MTB trail access and I'm quite worried with the Class 1 eMTB players blatantly flaunting the spirit of the rules. For the first time, the anti-MTB crowd actually have a valid point. DJI and Specialized DGAF. None. Burn it all down.

I recently read an article by the enduro mag. They made a survey and found out that 70% of their readers that took part in the survey never changed their rebound from what the bike came with. The amount of people riding bikes that dont have a clue about basic setup is very high. For them, something like the progression rate is not relevant. We are all so far off the average user that we are not who brands have to engineer their bikes for. https://enduro-mtb.com/performance-gap-das-dilemma-moderner-bikes/

You have less to push against with a more linear bike. If you look at wheel force normalized for sag it all makes more sense than just looking at leverage curve. The wheel force is always identical at the sag point when normalized for sag. The more progressive layout will have a higher wheel force past sag and lower wheel force before sag in comparison.

25% has been the middle ground for a while I feel like. The Tallboy and recent Specialized stuff are the big ones that come to mind that are this low. I was actually thinking it would be amusing to make a Genie retrofit kit for the Tallboy. But yeah I think some of it is targeted demographic. The downfall of more progression kind of depends on what you normalize for in the comparison. If you normalize for sag, full travel is harder to access. That may be a benefit for some, but if a rider is on the cusp of...

I'll be honest, 15% is pretty low. Not V1 Sentinel low but getting there. Definitely down in the "huh" range. The only way I'd ever expect to get that to not bottom out in the parking lot with a coil is run practically no sag or run an unreasonable amount of damping. I had a V2 Hightower as a personal bike for a bit. It was significantly more progressive with a little more travel and a little more shock stroke to work with. I put a DHX2 on it once for the sake of experimenting. At 30% sag it would...

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...

I'm just stoked that wild shit like this still being built. Forbidden had Laurie out at Prevost, obviously nothing to see here

One thing missing here is the fact that with the proliferation of composite know how, there are more people around able to safely repair a wider range of issues. Rather than pretending we are recycling carbon bikes I’d love to see more frames designed in ways that facilitate repair. Repair is verifiable in a way that recycling is not, it is cost effective for everyone concerned, and it is as close as you’ll get to good for the environment. It probably flows on to other design decisions to ensure repair is viable (like bearing placement, etc etc), but designing bikes...

potential inappropriate content warning 🤣 updated version of neko explaining his 32" experiment from mountain creek

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...