All

Great question! The tough thing about chainstay length is that there are very different camps on this topic, even within people of a certain height. I'm a tall person who swears by long chainstays, but lots of tall people hate them. So while it makes sense to have size specific chainstays so RC grows proportionately with FC, if they're not adjustable, your CS number's still not going to please everyone. As far as I see it, there are three options for frame manufacturers: 1. Adjustable chainstays with a big range of adjustment. Think of the outgoing Kona Process X, where...

On the contrary, if you’ve got the time and patience I would highly recommend doing the math instead of using linkage. You will learn a lot this way. Kind of like it’s good to learn calculus before just using calculators to solve calc equations. It probably sounds more daunting than it is, but leverage ratio is just the derivative of y axle position so you can solve for axle position as a function of shock stroke and whatever other dimensions you might be playing with and then you’ve got everything. Once the equations are there it is way way faster...

First rule of frame design, ignore marketing crap. Compare a whole bunch of different designs in Linkage and realize that everyone is slowly converging on the same thing. The window of preferred anti-squat and leverage ratios is narrowing in on roughly 100% anti-squat at sag and a LR of 20-25% linear progression starting around 2.8 to 3.0. Anti-rise seems to still be down to designer tastes or a compromise of the chosen linkage platform / shock location. The more time you spend in Linkage the more you realize everything has already been done...and thus why the window of optimized designs...