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So I will chime in with absolutely no hard data, but experience with building LOTS of wheels. The quick answer: Yes Spoke Tension Matters. now, the deeper answer, is: It Depends and does it matter So, one way that the spoke tension matters is durability/maintenance intervals. A tighter spoke allows more consistent load on the spoke/nipple/rim interface. This helps stop vibration and microscopic load/unload happening and therefore spokes loosening. a looser wheel most definitely loosens faster and things go haywire faster. an evenly tensioned wheel at a higher tension will stay straighter longer than a lower tension wheel. So from...

@TEAMROBOT At the time there where a few builders trying similar things like jack shafts and single pivots with pully wheels and also short multi link bikes like Cortina and Karpiel but I felt they all had some serious down sides. The Big Fat Fatty Fat was an attempt at solving the issues that I had with the bikes at the time, weak frames, poor kinematics with both pedaling and braking. The BF3 was really good for the first attempt but still had lots of chain stretch and pedal kick. The two that we built where retro fitted with a...

While you are correct that current Canfield Bikes are alloy and built in TW, we also started with building our own bikes in Utah by hand. Some aluminum but also steel front frames were made one by one a lot of times custom for each customer. After about 5 years doing this, it wasn't working like a business, more like a hobby. We had to make the decision to go where we could scale production so that we could focus more on design and customer relations. Way to go Trinity, you've got a really cool bike here and I'm stoked...

It's definitely not a bad thing. Canfield Bikes are top shelf quality but as you pointed out scaling up needs to be taken offshore to be price competitive and sustainable. Myself and Trinity aren't there yet as we are both still proving our bikes are worthy of a place in the market and neither of us can afford to go straight to a production company and order the many hundreds sometimes thousands minimum to be able to sell at lower prices......but that's OK too. Maybe one day we can. There are a huge amount of pieces to the puzzle, which...

all i want to do right now is loosen all my spokes and see if notice. thanks dave.

Those two rings on the XO have to be steel based on their appearance and the drivetrain hierarchy. Otherwise I don't see a way they would drop weight off their XX SL cassette which definitely uses 3 aluminum rings.

Thank you so very much for that info as the cassette is the most "tempting" part of the drivetrain to upgrade a full XT build to considering the weight difference. That and the crankset, but the XTR crank is 2 piece glued and I think it's well known what happens with shimano 2 piece cranks 🙂

xtr cassette is made of cheese unfortunately. buddy of mine trashed his after 3 months and most shimano pro‘s are running the xt one because of unreliability.

Integrated bashguards* @sprungmass I think the 52T is a spider/carrier, the two smaller aluminium rings are pressed/pinned onto it and the lower 9 gears still appear to be single piece, as currently. Should make for a cheaper to make (cheaper to buy?) and a lighter cassette. With less endurance though (but Shimano also has 3 Al rings on the XTR cassette, 2 on the XT, 1 on the SLX and 0 on Deore).

Looks like integrated chain guides on the chain ring itself. Leaked press release says bashguard compatible, but no need for a chain guide.

Looks about right. 9 cogs machined out of steel, 2 steel (die cut?) ones pinned and then last alloy 52T pressed on. Too bad they went Shimano route with all the pinned sprockets because the current eagle cassettes with 11 machined cluster are the cleanest looking. The new cranks look really nice. 5dev vibes.

Will new XO have alu/alloy cranks and cage? Not sure if those pictures have been here before.

Yeti high pivot sixfinity patent from September 2021: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/32/ef/b9/62a62f10c7b773/WO2…

I would say still an "excessively" high pivot. There is a weird square jonction in front of the BB.

On the topic of Zerode - 19.03. is the date! Looks like horizontal shock, hp-Horst link without the excessively high pivot, the frame doesn’t look like a tank!

On high pivot design, you can get similar effect than switch infinity (or their 6 bar) by moving the pulley wheel instead of the main pivot. This is possible since pulley don’t need to accept different diameters with fixed tooth count.