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The Spire was one of my favorite bikes that I have had the pleasure of owning. Really wish I hadn’t sold it. I’m excited for the updated bike to get the chips and salsa treatment 😎

There are like 3 completely idiotic conversations happening at once here.

I now see what people were warning against in regards to @Dougal - SC...

Can we just cut to the chase and pre-emptively ban Dougal? I thought this place was the last safe haven from his bullshit. The schtick of poo-pooing everything on the planet is old as dirt and he ruins every conversation he butts in on. Doogs, you spend an awful lot of time on forums for someone who claims to be so busy. Go farm downvotes somewhere else.

Noted. So as the in-house suspension engineer for your own small suspension tuning company, what expertise and experience are you drawing on to make such a broad, declarative assessment about large scale manufacturing and production and the brands that rely on it? Please spare us your tired feud with DVO. You've already poisoned the well in multiple other forums with that. Anyway, while I'm happy to share my own narrow experience with Taiwan based manufacturing I won't proclaim to be an expert or an authority, just a sample size of one. But I've made it a rule to show myself...

That's an awfully confident statement from someone with little or no experience operating a company with large scale outsourced production, overseas or domestic. Care to share a factual example? Also what and who is a 'marketing type brand?' Last I checked the bike industry is collection of honest brands, riders, and designers trying their best to make products of value or improve the experience and enjoyment of other cyclists. Of course they also have to market and advertise if they want to stay in business, but both realities can coexist. You're the NZ distributer for Hayes/Manitou and operate a suspension...

The soft undercurrent of a few of these post seems to imply anything made in Asia or engineered by Asians is somehow of lower quality. Engineering really has nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity. You can find high and low quality products everywhere in the world. Quality is a reflection of the decisions made by the brand not the the citizenship or location of the engineers. If you are manufacturing at scale at some point you'll need to work with a factory and their engineers. And you'd have a hard time finding a greater concentration of institutional knowledge and...

If Transition is a catalogue brand then almost every brand is aside from hand-made projects would be by your estimates then. Since when does it matter ultimately if engineering is in house, us based contractors or Taiwanese contractors? Catalogue implies picking a frame from a pre-designed catalog. Not having a bespoken frame made and engineered for you. Particularly frames like the Spur, which catalogue did they pick that from?

is frameworks a catalog brand then? engineering consultation is the norm in nearly every industry when it comes to manufacturing something you can’t just buy off the shelf. And the majority of the assembly lines for products on those shelves were designed by engineering consultants. maybe they are using Taiwan factory engineers these days, but at least at one point transitions carbon engineering consultants were stateside if lift talk is to be believed.

I've been riding XT Di2 for the past 5 months and that hasn't been my experience. Zero dropped chains and I just run an upper guide (always have). Shifts flawlessly. As far as chain slap noise it seems to be heavily dependent on the bike and what kind of chainstay protection it has, my HD6 is fine. Even the most vocal critics (Pinkbike tech editors) have noted that it varies from bike to bike. Not trying to convince anyone that they need to buy it, just relating my personal experience.