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Maybe most of them know that would be inappropriate and choose not to be weirdos

Headset bearings are going to be ecstatic about this smart design choice.

SRAM owes me royalties. I called it in June of last year.

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.

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...

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...

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...

Lmao

To make that XL Trek 32" fit me, I'd need about an 80mm positive stem and 50mm riser bars. I know there aren't that many people who are 6'6"+, but surely there are more of them than there are 5'2" people who would actually buy that bike, right?