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Yeah, I rarely ride acoustic bikes these days but when I do the playfulness and jumping/bunny hopping ability is miles better. And I'm a bad jumper so a lighter bike improves my jumping/manual/bunny hop abilities a lot. On a 25 kg bike it feels very exhausting getting it to do anything different than straightlining stuff and staying calm. I think riding a heavy bike well requires the rider to be physically strong and be a very good rider.

I think @carlinojoevideo put it really well comparing the two setups, especially since he’s tested with data acquisition. I’ll add my long-winded reply just based on feel. My recent experience was comparing a smashpot Mezzer to an Avy hybrid 38 on the same bike. The Mezzer had a higher spring rate and is less damped when compared to my 38 setup. Obviously different forks and dampers, so not a perfect comparisons. First thing to note is setup, I run a higher static bar height with the the 38, which makes sense given the increased static sag. Dynamic I’d guess they...

I don't think it's a 'vent'. Would mist the rotor with oil! Possibly additional volume that you can tune by swapping out those 'things'. Looks like two bolts to remove it.

No one needs any of these bikes, but if they make riding more interesting or fun I'm all for it. The Checkout isn't for me (at least right now) but for folks who are doing really long bikepacking trips/races it's probably awesome. It's noteworthy to me that a lot of the objections being posted mirror those from when suspension was first introduced to MTBs...

Gravel bikes has become too wide of a category of bikes, what we need is subcategories! The downgravel, the enduravel, the graero...

Didn't they introduce that new floating one for less friction when the fork deflects? This could be a cost saving measure, and to push the higher spending customers towards the podium.

Interesting that they went away from the foreskin shock that the Supercaliber has. I'm sure the bearing & link are heavier so I'm guessing the decision had to do with reliability and we'll see similar changes rolled into the Supercaliber. I've got no skin (of any sort) in the gravel game though.

Looks like they've also invented rear suspension... https://www.trekbikes.com/us/en_US/bikes/road-bikes/gravel-bikes/drop-b…

Not technically a mountain bike tech rumor, but it's very funny to listen to gravel riders insist they aren't just reinventing 1990s mountain bikes and then see product releases like this... https://www.bikeradar.com/news/rockshoxs-rudy-xl-gravel-fork 60mm of travel and clearance for 2.25" tires. This thing would have crushed the NORBA XC circuit. All it's missing is some stanchion boots.

Maxima plush 7wt - you can get small bottles of this pretty easily so it would be my first pick anyway. I like Motorex oils most of the time but RS shocks can be sensitive to viscosity so I probably wouldn't mess with that, especially when you are changing tune. Slick honey is great, use it for everything Soft jaws are crucial but you don't really need shaft clamps for an SDLX Air valve tool is the main thing Loctite 263 is also fine - not super critical but you can read loctites data sheets to check if they are...

People will feel a lot of things if you prime them before they try them. EDIT: I have a friend who, whenever we're testing something new and he is the first to test, always says "you'll try it out yourself" when I ask him what it's like and when you get your turn, he asks what did you feel or think, not "did you feel x". Because he wants an unbiased feedback. Anywho, all this talk about kinematics is all well and good, but the first thing I though when I saw the bikes was "even if it works, who...

You can propel any bike with chain growth forwards by bouncing on the pedals. If there's no force on your feet from the chain tension then you should be able to remove your feet from the pedals and bounce and get propelled forwards. That's not happening.

One thing to keep in mind is that, because both rebound and compression damping exert a force proportional to the shaft speed of the shock/fork, all changing these will do is alter the amount of time that it takes for the fork to dive and/or the shock to extend under breaking. During sustained braking, all you can do to prevent the fork from compressing more is add volume spacers and the only thing that can prevent the shock from extending is anti-rise.

Slick honey is Sram butter. Dynamic seal grease is a different thing. Check if it comes with the service kit. For air shocks it does. I have 80+ percent of the big tub still left after 6 years of servicing my and other people's shocks and have a big bag of service kit grease tubes also left (15 plus tubes). Oils can be bought in 100ish ml containers, doesn't make sense to go less than that. Threadlocker as long as it's the red one, I guess it should be fine. For the IFP, not sure if it's M5 or maybe...

RLS is so effective, that in an independent study, RLS was found to reduce the risk of concussion by 4x on average compared with conventional helmets*** Yet the study linked is 1) Not peer reviewed 2) Not actually published yet 3) Is hugely biased. Quote from the study: "Competing interests: This work was funded by HEXR Ltd. All authors are employees of HEXR Ltd or Dropmatics Ltd, which may benefit from the findings." HEXR is the company behind RLS, so they directly benefit from a study about increased safety from RLS. Also, canyon supplied the helmets for the control group...

Yo Dawg, I heard you liked Mips, so I put a Mips on your Mips, so you can have a helmet in your helmet on your helmet.

Changing the shim stack allows you to change the shape of the damping curve. Steep/shallow nose, linear, progressive, etc. The clamp shim makes the whole stack stiffer or softer, the basic "shape" remains the same. One of the assets Vorsprung has is a massive tuning database they've developed over the past 10+ years, so they should have the damper curve shapes pretty dialed for each application. I have an Avalanche tuned Bomber CR, Fluid Focus Bomber CR (with their mid valve piston/tune and mods), stock RS Super Deluxe, and soon a Telum. All the same size, all tuned for the...

I don't have full sweeps of the latest tunes from Fox and Rockshox but this plot is a rough approximation of where the tunes sit - generally there isn't really a nice match between the 2 brands, Fox shocks also vary wildly from year to year and each models also has very different characteristics. Rockshox has had fairly similar damping profiles (at least on compression) since the super deluxe launched, and even the Monarch Plus wasn't too different. They were slightly digressive, with the adjuster mostly changing the overall force but the newer 2025 shocks seem to be more linear...

Gotta love people who write an essay about wireless shifting who then tell everyone else to stop talking about wireless shifting.