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I looked into the patent and unfortunately they have you beat by a few months. Provisional was filed in March of 2025. Provisional patents are a great way to buy yourself time to fully decide if you want to pursue something while getting a foot legally in the door and not spending a ton of money. It gives you a year to decide if you want to proceed with a full on patent and doesn't have to go through the same review process so pretty much anyone can file one.

I have literally been trying to file a third-party preissuance submission with the US Patent Office for 2 hours but their website and phone menus are dogshit so I'm giving up. It would have been hilarious if submitting a pdf of vital comments is what got a patent not approved. Anyone got contacts at SRAM? Would be good to at least contact them lol.

Yeah, the Schwalbe GP are in the same ballpark of weight. But I don't get along with their knob patterns or rubber compound. I tried the insert + light casings setup years ago and just never got along with it. I had lots of issues with inserts causing lighter casings to warp and wobble. I'd like to see what Conti's response to NDH & Gravity Pro is. Their DH casing has always felt to me fairly stiff but undamped. Like, I can run it pretty low pressures but it still always transmits a lot of feedback to my hands. Their...

I'm so glad I left engineering. Lol. This reminds me of discussions with my old boss who loved analysis and wouldn't leave us alone when we had anything vaguely interesting on the go. Trails have bumps. Bumps give momentary grip. the momentary grip results in a momentary braking force. The momentary braking force results in a momentary decrease in the effective spring rate if you have high AR. So the bike feels softer in the rear which is exactly what you want in the moment when your rear tire hits a bump riding down steep shit. Trails have corners. Even...

Now if I put in an initial distribution of 0.78, CG height of 650, wheelbase of 1299, and coefficient of friction of 0.5 I get 0.53… there are four variables. I’m pretty sure we don’t ride around fixed to our bikes in one position. You can get even higher if you go with something actually slippery for friction like 0.2.

That said, if you use an initial distribution of 2/3 on the rear wheel, a CG height of 1000, a wheelbase of 1299, and a coefficient of friction of 0.5, you get 28% of weight on the rear wheel under max braking regardless of angle.

How they are positioned on a piece of paper only impacts the end result if you create the summed vector by tracing a line from the first tail to the last tip. But I’m not tracing lines so it doesn’t matter. There are only four numbers to plug in. It doesn’t necessitate a spread sheet. I’ve thrown countless numbers into it that I’ve listed here before. I can come up with weight distributions and friction values that will give pretty much any weight shift imaginable. There’s no point. This was all to show that with a rearward weight bias it’s...

It doesn’t matter if they are tip to tip, tip to tail, or tail to tail so long as they are in the correct orientation because vectors are summed based on their components. Same goes for gravity. It’s broken down into components in that diagram such that everything is parallel or perpendicular and can be summed easily. Go look up the FBD of a car braking. This is basic stuff. Static is essentially the same as setting the coefficient of friction to tan(theta) so you’re changing a relationship to that is fundamental to the problem by looking at that. D'Alembert's...

So I think what’s throwing you for a loop is there is a fundamental flaw in your FBD. What you have drawn is only accurate if the front wheel is pinned to the ground at the contact patch (ie wheel stuck up against a log or something). If your wheel is stuck up against a log or anything else that prevents it from being able to roll downhill then the weight distribution 100% shifts forward as it gets steeper. But this is a fundamentally different scenario than braking force. See the FBD below if you’re actually interested in sorting it...

Slope angle factors out entirely. You need to step through it by summing the moments about the front contact patch. These sketches work fine for reference, but you need to actually do the math. It's pretty easy to see how m, g, and Cos(theta) factor out, but I had it simplify for the sake of it.

Yup good points! Rubber has the highest grip when there is a small amount of slip. Also your front tyre can't brake AND turn in equal amounts so even if you were braking with the front only, you better hope there aren't any turns on that trail! And because the friction coefficient (which is different to tractive efficiency...) gets lower as you increase vertical load, if you were to have 100% weight on the front wheel (which you don't) you would still have much less braking available anyway. Also does anyone know the actual gradient of a "steep" trail? Most...

We all get that braking shifts weight forward. What I just walked through is how much weight you can end up with on the front and rear wheels in a certain scenario that involves braking as hard as grip will allow. Downslope does not factor into weight distribution. If you walk through the math you end up with a cos(theta) term in both the numerator and denominator that cancel out. 0.5 is a pretty reasonable number for loose soil such as a rake and ride and that yields about a 50/50 weight distribution on any slope with weight shifted rearward...

It'll be interesting to see if the dhx translates well to a dd or exo+. I suspect the magic there is 95% new dh casing. I've been running them on my dh bike and my e-dreadnought for half the summer, and agree that they are better than the other brand's radials. Feels like you have the sidewall support in corners of a cushcore insert, but with the traction of a radial. They were great in western canada's dry conditions this year. Kind of unique conditions in that there's the usual loose over hardpack, but certain corners were full on deep...

I got my hands on a DHX and DHR2, both in the New DH casing, and have some first ride thoughts. Two words: holy shit! The gist of it is, the feel of this casing is what I wanted from radial but couldn't get. I weigh ~150 lbs, and am on a ~49 lb ebike, riding totally dry and blown out trails about an hour north of Santa Cruz. I started with lower pressure than what I run with DH, but kind of hedging a bit - 18 front, 20 rear. With old Maxxis DH or Conti, I usually run...

Looks like a very solid offering and pricing for the 90 kit isn't too bad with how eye watering Yeti kits have gotten.

Have a look at Matt Beer's article from PB. At 2:40 in the video you can see his weight distribution changing in real time. That said, I don't need another Shockcraft branded drawing to tell me if I can use my rear brake on a steep trail. 30 some years of actual riding is a sufficient data point to know the answer is yes. Often and effectively.

So I went and grabbed my DH bike to see how the CG location stacks up. This is an easy experiment to do if anyone feels inclined to put some real numbers on themselves… measure the weight of you and your bike. In my case this is 190.4 lbs. Then find a nice level spot where you can balance with your bar end ever so slightly on a wall for support. Put the scale under the front wheel and then weight the bike however you see fit. Record that weight. (Total weight-front wheel weight)/total weight is the percentage of weight...

The problem with internal cable routing really comes down to the fact that suspension forks currently don't allow for hidden hoses. I think, based on what happened in road and gravel, that if that possibility existed, headset cable routing would become extremely common. I think a lot of brands were worried about the sales floor problem that happened with road bikes of having a rats nest compete with an integrated bike. Imagine how much money some brands lost as a result of that. Add to that, they are in a position where they have to predict the future, and they...

It's usually because there is some merit to the idea to begin with, and the development happens outside the publics view. Take headset routing, the real merit to it is that it allows for stronger lighter frames with internal routing, and less complicated carbon moulds, the downside is only on the consumer end having to work on it. Superboost wheels are objectively stronger and make a lot of sense, but it's competing with a standard that was more widely adopted and made it hard to swap wheels between frames. Wireless only is for the same reason as headset routing while...