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Oh ok you're one of those. Cool. Please define what you consider a "chainstay" succinctly in a way that actually covers all suspension layouts. I understand suspension dynamics and the concept of leverage quite well. The final year of my degree was mostly concerned with mountain bike suspension design and a fair amount of my experience in engineering has involved linkage systems. You're just assuming I'm a moron because i said you had a shit take on something, and I'm a guy on the internet. Nobody in mountain biking understands that word to mean what you insist it means, and...

Posted by noideamtber:

chainstay length itself is also the distance between rear axle and pivot point - this is why the actual length matters so much, that pivot could be infront of the BB or behind it. which has quite a role in anti squat, leverage of the stay etc - it also directly relates to where the BB ends up.

That's nonsense though, and nobody else I've ever talked to considers that word to mean that. There's no way to define that length for a virtual pivot bike in a way that makes sense unless you want...

I saw something about coaching and flat pedals vs clipless pedals a few posts back and it reminded me of something that I've been thinking of recently that isn't enough of a topic for its own forum. Current bike wisdom says that riding clipless pedals can lead to bad riding habits, like an over reliance on them to clean technical climbs, pulling up with your feet for jumps and drops and stuff like that. But are those actually bad habits? Sure, there is technique for all riding that works for both flats and clipless pedals, but it almost seems to...

Ibis has always been a boutique brand. Their frames are made in the same Vietnamese production facility as Yeti; they are very direct competitors. Almost as direct as you can be.

specialized logic: closing offices in affordable regions to save money while maintaining their HQ in one of the highest COL regions of the nation.

i still fail to see the issue, like every single biker had wheelsets they keep swapping around for fun like lego blocks

One of the reasons I think Jeff's right about the barbell theory of pricing is that there's so much stinking money out there at the top end of the tax brackets right now. There's a shocking amount of people who live in Makebelieveland and are just looking, itching, for new ways to burn money. There are so many people for whom a $10000 Vado Sl 30 pound e-bike is a rounding error. And for people like this, having the newest, the most expensive, or the most exclusive can serve as the entire USP for a product purchase. Bike companies will...

Looks like Specialized is taking your advice of " be deliberate with how you are positioning a product in the market". https://www.specialized.com/us/en/vado-sl-2-ltd-s-racing/p/4293307?colo…

Shimano got rid of a component level because there was too much similarity between the groups, many parts basically just had different paint and pricing. Arguably having too many groups can result in there being too many bike models, which gets the bike industry in trouble. Once a physical component set was eliminated, the decision on which name to retain remained, it's just the name. Deore is a name they've used since the 80's, it's a name which begat Deore XT (still in use for MTB ), which begat XTR (still in use for MTB ). The SLX name had...

The value gap was too narrow between Deore and XT. Deore did everything SLX did at a lower cost, and XT spec kept getting pushed down because the name (and product of course) holds a ton of value for customers.

I can't help but wonder if getting ride of SLX was based on SKU reduction or if the production costs were too close to XT to justify having both....

I understand your point, and I'm not really trying to be critical of you citing his relevant economic ideas. The info dump I posted above is just too important not to post anywhere and everywhere that intelligent people can read and understand it. On the surface it all sounds like some meth addict conspiracy theory, but these people are out in the open talking about their plans, and not nearly enough people are aware of it. I'll stop derailing the thread now. Giant has some killer deals on clearance bikes right now (2022 Stance 299 for $800!?). I just picked...

I'm sure Marc is vastly more intelligent than myself, but he's also a malignant narcissist whose vision of the of the future is terrifying if you dig into it. He doesn't explicitly state it in his manifesto, but he's clearly all in on accelerationism and the Neo-Reactionary (NRX) movement AKA the "Dark Enlightenment". Tech billionaires are attempting to trying to destroy America and rebuild what they are calling "Network States", which are essentially corporate fiefdoms. This is part of the reason why they are trying to sell off public lands. They need land (and farm land) to accomplish this. https://thenetworkstate.com/...

Good read. The only issue I have with this idea is that the makeup of the mtb consumer population is different from say the general shopping population which are looking for mid-priced goods. If I were to speculate, it's that we will see a shift away from the high end product towards mid-end product for the reasons you've laid out. We already see that sentiment here in the forums, on new product launch articles, with fatigue over electronics taking over from their mechanical siblings, or the swing back to high end alloy components over their carbon counterparts. Mountain Bikers that...

Nice read, and I think in the future you'll be able to extrapolate this theory out even further with the hollowing out of the middle class. PS, fuck Marc Andressen. He is a parasite who is part of the intentional collapse of America in an attempt to move toward corporate fiefdoms AKA "Network States". Marc quotes Nick Land in his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto". Land is blatant racist whose ideas include "hyper-racism" (literally).

Great read, and a pretty brief effective summary. Sadly... I agree with your analysis. Sad because middle is nice, and extremes are tough. But yeah.

My latest mulling over the barbell effect and how it might apply to bikes. In essence, in this post I play with the idea that we're seeing a hollowing out of the middle, both with respect to company size and product pricing. // Substack // Blog EDIT: I've given @sspomer permission to post any of my stuff in full here so you don't have to click through to anything. Plus, I'm totally cool with him editing it (which I very likely need). If you all want me to aim at anything specifically for next week just let me know!

I have to say I completely agree with what’s already been said here. This type of mudguard solution is not new, other brands have been doing it for years. Personally, I run an EXT Vaia fork and bought this version of their fender: https://visionvelo.eu/product/ext-vaia-racing-mudguard/ In my experience the quality isn’t great, the hose clamp actually broke after just two days of bike park riding and for the price it’s honestly pretty crazy for what’s essentially a mudguard. But regardless of the quality, the point is that this exact concept already exists on the market, so trying to claim novelty here...

Darren, I feel like you probably already know this, or at least you should already know it, but this is a ridiculous claim and isn’t a defensible patent based on prior art. There are multiple previously existing fenders for inverted forks have attached the fender to the stanchion guards. Off the top of my head: 1.The Manitou Dorado has had fender a fender that is integrated into the stanchion guards since at least 2019. 2. The EXT Vaia Has a similar type of fender that attaches to the stanchion guards. 3. There are a multitude of motorcycle forks the have...