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from their site: And honestly, I would have liked a water bottle when in the bike park on more than one occasion.... I don't want it at the expense of performance, but if the room exists wtf not.

While I work in a different industry, Construction/Custom Homebuilding, I saw a similar thing happen in my field. People getting decks built, bathroom renovations, buying a new home, etc. earlier than they would have under normal circumstances, pulling sales from the future into the present. The major difference I noticed was that none of my suppliers or contractors ramped up their production or workforce to meet demand. General contractors just had to accept longer lead times for everything. I went from ordering cabinets 5-6 weeks out to 10-12 weeks, garage doors went from 3 weeks to 16 weeks. Even scheduling...

Thanks for that. The "Sh***y Kitty" reference refers to this bevarage:

I bet they'll find a way to fuck up an insert even.

UDH is doing that, it's 1.0 mm only. Only problem is that there is no Maxle Ultimate on the market to fit it. Speaking of, you can always buy a fat bike axle that otherwise fits the bike and have a guy with a lathe cut the correct thread in it...

re: seatpost sizes - actually, yes we do need the stiffness of the larger 34.9 tube. Not really a "performance" thing, just a reliability of dropper posts thing. I think we blew past the optimum design specs for a 31.6mm tube when droppers reached about 170mm travel so making posts longer than that is a huge challenge if you only have 31.6mm to play with!

9point8 has a few length's of 34.9 seatposts, but you must contact their customer support directly

I'd say sand casting will have a big issue with porosity. You'd need high pressure die casting to achieve compactness. Also, I'd say mechanical properties of casting ready aluminium alloys might be a bit on the lower side compared to 6000 and 7000 'aircraft grade' alloys, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the primary factor. That and the cost of investment. Casting is very good for chunky parts. I'd say it'd be good for rocker links for example. Seatstays and chainstays I'm not so sure... Fork lowers are still tubes which gives them a lot of strength. Also, yeah...

Experience from working in warranty at a carbon crank manufacturer years ago. The layer that forms on aluminum when air hits it prevents the bond from fully happening and over time they are prone to separating. Maybe I am not fully understanding what was going on, but that was essentially what happened each time cranks came in for warranty. Was extremely rare to see an actual carbon failure aside from impact on them.