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Saw this EXT Vaia at Sundance loam pass event on an Ari, talked to the ext guys for a bit about it. He said it’s internally adjustable from 170-200, meant for heavy enduro and dh. He said they’ll start selling hopefully in November for around 2k USD

Pretty cool concept. I remember first noticing this on Vali Höll's YT. She rode without the pulleys during practice and then they were added for the final. Rulezman also makes them for his Banshee bikes. He claims it completely removes pedal kickback.

At risk of sounding like a legitimate crazy person (which I probably am) I thought more about what I wrote, put on the hat of product manager/finance nerd and realized its highly unlikely anything close to what I asked for will come to fruition (outside the mega niche type companies). As much as I hate creaking CSUs and as much as I feel a USD dual crown setup may fix other problems, there is an obvious "Path A" which is for the major fork companies to simply fix the manufacturing issues. I'd bet money there is a way to make...

That is true, sometimes spacing the hub 0.15mm wider is all it takes to get the stanchions to drop in the lowers. I worked at DSD for a few years and pulled many forks apart for chassis/bushing "adjustment". Fox is far and away the worse, I'd say 90% had some degree of binding. For RS it was more like 30-40%. The Fox floating axle system seems to have issues with the axle bore alignment between legs. They will be fine until you tighten the pinch bolt, then it binds. Hard one to fix as well as it seems to be...

I am stoked to see the damper forward setup starting to gain momentum. As a kid, I grew up riding and racing haresrambles on the east coast. The first thing we did to every bike was have the forks and shock re-valved and different springs installed. Our suspension guy swore by the philosophy that the spring's only job was to hold the bike up, the damper does all the work. That set up still was hit and miss for people, TBH. Some people (me included) loved it. The bike was glued to the ground. You went through 1/3 or more...

I don't know about smart, but I know it's shtty of me to act like I can read people's minds. I don't really know how people are thinking about this. But it comes up a fair amount and it seems like the next logical step for everyone who is measuring bike stuff. The questions we can see being asked about bike performance seem totally legit to me. Which PB bike test bike gets up the impossible climb fastest? Did my lap times improve when I changed tires? Did the rider of the DH bike with the tuned mass damper experience...

I have also noticed the tolerance situation of CSU vs lowers, bought the bushing sizing tool, used it, didn't make a sizeable improvement. I think that fork probably had some misalignment. I also think the above discussion about tolerances also highlights that there are some riders now that are sensitive enough to feel imperfect tolerances. I think it's best to realize that the mass produced forks are exactly that, and they're made to satisfy most riders. My solution was to buy a Push NineOne. That fork rides great and I would guess a chunk of the cost and design is...

I'd bet it would be. What it comes down to is how many parts you are trying to align in "one part" vs "several parts". Long post coming up. Sorry in advance. Fork Tubes: In a USD configuration, its very easy to get a single overlapping fork tube aligned properly. Even if you don't go with a floating bushing design, you are far more likely to nail this 10000 out of 10000 times than a single crown setup where you are trying to align multiple things in each phase of the manufacturing process. Crowns: The crowns in a USD setup...

Mechanically speaking, nothing is gained with a 15mm axle over a 20mm. What we gained by going with the (mechanically inferior) 15mm axle is the rapid and widespread adoption of thru-axles across all mountain bikes, then road bikes, then gravel and CX bikes. If the axle choices in 2012 (or whenever) were viewed as a binary choice between lightweight XC-oriented QR axles and a heavy DH-oriented 20mm thru axle, I think it would have taken a lot longer for product managers to go out on a limb and spec better forks and axles. 15mm axles gave product managers needed cover...

Slightly off topic, but what I don't understand is why we continue to go the route of press fit CSUs. There has to be a better solution. Also, plenty of people (myself included) used to say "it just creaks, at least it won't fail" which I now do not belive to be true. I've seen CSUs go from creaking to the steerer coming out of the crown (Fox). Some ideas... 1) Explore the use of an adhesive: Whether something like Lord's adhesive, which is strong enough to bond critical chassis components together in snowmobiles and cars or something else, this...

I'd say this is pretty solid. Love it.

For 2) it's a combination of feel and sorta-quantitative measurements; a section of trail I ride a lot and have very consistent times on (according to Strava, so big grain of salt there). I also ride almost every day and track a bunch of metrics w/ a Whoop so have pretty good baselines established, and I try to replicate as many factors for each run as I can (sleep, recovery, etc). I don't have a power meter though, so controlling for fitness is a guess; I go w/ RPE and call it good. tl;dr a dash of metrics and healthy...

One thing to add and one question... 1) I'd love to see an end to the creaking CSU. This continues to happen to me and I hate it. Off topic, I know, but this is my #1 compliant. 2) For those playing with setups, how are you assessing "good"? Just going off feel? Any objectiveness (IE, timing/PRing stuff) added to the equation? If so how do you control for conditions, fitness getting better etc.? I say all of this well aware how easy I am to "trick" into thinking I have a great setup, but really I'm just riding better...

'Lots of smart people out there' is a great point. Bikes are generally great these days but excel in slightly different use cases, or feel slightly different but the knowledge base seems to have exploded over the past few years and engineers are making the most out of the available platforms. Since bikes are getting so good at what they're designed for, I think demos/testing to develop and understand your subjective preference is becoming more relevant. I've recently rented/demoed a good chunk of modern trail and enduro bikes and it was sick to see what I got along with or...

According to Dave Weagle they changed the name because Santa Cruz couldn’t spec them on their team bikes with the EVIL logo. Have a listen to Nigel Page’s “Stay on Your Bike” podcast with him. It’s a good listen

Team Scully DH

The truth is out there

I'll also add, there's so much dogma in the bike industry, you can't do X because it has such bad Y...etc. We're not totally impervious to this thinking, but with this project we made it a point to actually test these assertions and sort fact from fiction. An example, from the start I felt we had to do a 20mm axle because everyone says so, it was Darren that commented how much it sucks to get a new fork and then realize your wheel doesn't work with it. So we tested and found the diameter has much less influence compared...