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Yesterday I spoke with a guy who rode a couple of EDRs and would always ride xtr mech since forever but he was on a sram. He said not only the chain slap was unbearable on the new di2 xtr but he would also drop chains pretty much daily, to the extend the top of his crank which cought the chain became all scratched... The shifting was absolutely amazing but the reliability is horrible and he also noticed shimano sponsored enduro pros would run full dh chain tensioners or STFUs just to keep the chain on, which is mindboggling how...

@TEAMROBOT - I remember testing showing CX file treads were slower in almost every application, but still people buy and ride them because they look fast. Btw, while I’m here, I feel like a massive driver of mountain bikers yelling at clouds about product happens when product support doesn’t match the promise. Unhelpful warranties on stuff sold with massive margins, and a consistently terrible pattern of companies refusing to acknowledge issues until suddenly a new model pops up. It makes journalism more important, I get so irate seeing reviewers acknowledge issues in old product they simply refused to when it...

25% has been the middle ground for a while I feel like. The Tallboy and recent Specialized stuff are the big ones that come to mind that are this low. I was actually thinking it would be amusing to make a Genie retrofit kit for the Tallboy. But yeah I think some of it is targeted demographic. The downfall of more progression kind of depends on what you normalize for in the comparison. If you normalize for sag, full travel is harder to access. That may be a benefit for some, but if a rider is on the cusp of...

I’ve been mountain biking since I was a teenager in the 90s and the marketing material has never been as sober as it is right now and the products have literally never been higher quality. Thirty years ago you’d drop a huge stack of cash on 1.9” tires made out of QC-rejected pencil erasers and hay, they’d be hard as coffin nails and look leprous after three rides (several flats per ride), and the marketing material would be all like “God himself couldn’t make rubber stickier; this rubber is so sticky it’s gray; you can ride on the damn wall”...

Y’all are acting like bike financing (which is what leasing is, btw) is some brand-new idea. It isn’t. The basic tools have been around forever. In its most archaic form, its not all that different from opening a store card at your favorite big-box retailer. What bikes still lack is a real underwriting structure where the lender can tie the loan to the asset itself. When I finance a $100,000 truck, the bank holds the title until I pay it off. If I stop making payments, they can repossess the truck, sell it at auction, and recover at least some...

I feel like you answered your own question when you said " a ton of people already do it for SXS, boats, and motorcycles." If the SXS, boat, and motorcycle people are making money by financing their overpriced toys, why would high-end bike companies not want to get in on the action with their overpriced toys? Yes, financing a high-end shiny ebike is completely unnecessary, unwise, financially imprudent, all of that. But so are cigarettes and gambling, and they're doing great!

I agree with you that financing toys is generally stupid, especially for those that cannot afford them in the first place. What I will say is that the rise of consumer financing of everything is proliferating and bikes are already no exception. Klarna and FinanceIt and all sorts of 19% interest financing options already exist to walk out of a bike store with a 12,000 fuel ex you can't really afford. What I'm not getting is how it is different for the customer who can afford to flip their 12,000 bike every year or two. They buy it for 12,000...

This seems completely unnecessary though. Financing and leasing cars makes sense because they are necessary in most of western society, but blingy brand new mountain bikes are not. You can have almost as much fun and exercise on a $700 marketplace hardail as a $12,000 ebike. Financing toys just seems like a bad idea, yet a ton of people already do it for SXS, boats, and motorcycles. Nice bikes are cool, but going into debt or leasing something because you need to keep up with Joe Shmo next door who has a Mercedes Sprinter van and pivot ebike with titanium...

Fluid Focus make air shock bumpers that double as volume reducers.

😁 Indeed some proper bump stops would be a very good tuning option! Fox air shocks started coming with "real" bumpers a few years ago but they are very soft and not that effective IMO. Fluid Focus make aftermarket bumper which work very well, and I don't know the real reason air shocks only used an o-ring but I guess it was to make it possible to use every last mm of travel.....a nicely progressive bump stop gives a "bottomless" feel but your o-ring probably won't reach the last 2-3mm which consumers will always complain about sadly. Air springs would...

You have to remember the true target market of this bike....if you really need that much extra resistance then a Tallboy is the wrong bike for you, full stop. The forum guys wanting to run a coil shock are a niche of a niche type of mountain biker so they aren't going to design the bike with that in mind. I also don't think its that far off, and they maybe chose to ship it with that shock spec so people can easily remove the spacers if that need to. And plenty of people have run coil shocks in bikes...

Super weird that it took him that long to admit it was a mistake, and only in the comments, and still doesn't seem to have an actual number for the RMU. Someone who remembers better than I do probably knows more, but his practice of patenting something and then throwing out lawsuits at seemingly every non DW bike has been called into question.

Maybe Im missing something but how in the right mind is a company like Santa Cruz releasing a bike with very little travel, high price point, and the rear shock comes stock with all of its tokens in use? If you needed more resistance youre just up shit creek until Cascade makes something? Im genuinely so confused how they go from a well done VPP to a simple 4 bar and screwed that up when every other company can do it. Like who signed off on this?

That "XC tire" conversation from customers and from a shop employee makes me want to walk into the ocean.