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Wish they'd do the AeffectR in the 160s too. I've had the 165s on the pedal bike for several years now and they are the best price per weight per tough cranks I've owned.

We are now, still, yes.

Just expand the pad spring out more before installing? That's all I do and never had rattling.

just make everything kashima, the lowers and the uppers, problem solved, enough idiots out there that just want gold:

This is Atherton's brand new HQ in Wales. Do you know how much a brand new purpose building like this costs? Lots of ££££££, before you pay dollar one on staff costs. Whenever I see big cool new shiny corporate HQ's in bike world, I think the companies think it's supposed to impress me, but it just worries me. A lot of the Bellingham companies got shiny new offices in high rent areas in the last 5-10 years and each of them took my breath away in a not-so-great way.

There are many current and recently ex-employees from Rocky, and almost all of them had no bearing on the current financial outcome of the company.

Long time lurker but joined just to contribute to this fantastic discussion (loved the podcast as well) Whilst "Just in time" makes sense from a cashflow perspective it surely only really works if your whole supply chain is setup that way. Otherwise you're going to have a ton of forks, drivetrain etc in inventory anyway to fulfill the final builds.

Given that it was probably SRAM's lawyers that were responsible for 5dev discontinuing the udh mod kit, ordering the biggie kit sooner rather than later is probably a good plan if you think you might want one.

To be fair there's been talk of them folding for years.

Ah, yes, I’ve been concerned there aren’t enough choices in the stem category.

Specifically, it’s because Rocky Mountain was purchased by Procycle in 1997. Procycle was founded in Saint-Georges, QC, in 1977. In the 80s and 90s, Procycle had a full-sized factory and assembly line (manufactured and assembled over 8,000,000 bikes), until production was shipped over to Asia because of cost. They used to manufacture and assemble Peugeot bikes in North America. Procycle became Rocky Mountain in 2018, and stopped producing all other brands it owned at that time (Miele - entry-level bikes of all kinds and Evox - Commuter style e-bikes). North Vancouver was responsible for frame development, marketing and some sales/service...

The XT crankset is a good candidate for durability but they can still suffer from sheared spindles. I would put Race Face Turbines above XTs for winning a durability contest. The Shimano BB is leaps and bounds better than the 30mm RF one though. Same goes for Saint vs. Atlas cranksets.

One thing that this made me think of with respect to Rocky was their desire to make their own e-MTB motor/battery and not take an off-the-shelf model from Shimano, Bosch, or others. I thought I remember this being a thing, though I see they license the unit from another Canadian company called Dyname who seem to only supply Rocky. Was this maybe a step too far for a medium sized company? It could have been something revolutionary in that Rocky would get to keep more of their sales dollars from the ever-growing e-bike market, but maybe they just don't have...

Regarding bike development... Are the 2 to 3 year cycles long enough? We had a lot of companies that used to do 2 year cycles but switched to 3 years claiming rushed products due to the a 2 year crunch.. Personally, I think the companies wanted more time to get the money back on expensive carbon molds. Maybe 4 years and there will always be some new components to help refresh a bike in that time. Look at cars where the the product cycles are typically 6 years with a mid cycle update.. I guess I'm just thinking out loud..

I knew this was coming with Anna 's season last year. Mixed feelings- really stoked for Anna, sad that one more privateer team is going away. All the best to Anna and Abby next year!