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10mm is not a big different, but the difference in intention between a 120mm bike and a 160mm bike is pretty enormous. Frame weight and frame flex should be radically different on both platforms because of the much higher peak forces you expect a 160mm bike to be absorbing, as it's basically going to get ridden like a DH bike by a subset of the population. I would imagine a 120mm bike with the same layup as a 160mm bike would feel like it's made of 2x4's.
Additionally, it's shockingly hard to keep head angles, seat angles, bottom bracket heights, etc in a reasonable place when you're using the same front triangle on two bikes with wildly different travel numbers. A longer travel needs to have a higher BB height because the frame sags more and the bottom bracket gets lower at bottom out. Also, a longer travel bike should have a slacker head tube angle and a steeper seat tube angle than a shorter travel bike*. How do you make a head tube slacker while making a seat tube steeper... on the same front triangle?
There are a lot of compromises that have to be made to get the same front triangle to work across platforms. If you're in the same travel bracket and just changing wheel sizes from 29er to mullet, it's manageable but typically requires multiple changes (i.e. rear triangle, a link, multiple links, etc) to keep parity across the models. When you're changing travel brackets, it's a nightmare.
*Seat tubes on full suspension bikes get slacker when you ride them, and this effect is amplified as you go up in travel because bikes sag further and further into the travel. This is exacerbated by steep climbs that shift your weight off your front wheel and hands, and onto your rear wheel and butt. Winch and plummet bikes tend to be longer travel and benefit from winch-and-plummet-friendly steep seat angles. MTB's for rolling terrain tend to have shorter travel and benefit from slacker seat angles. Please note that I said "slacker" and not "slack." I'm not saying we should go back to the dark days where a 120mm 29er had a 65 degree effective angle. If you think XC bikes should have 79 degree seat angles, I dare you to build one and ride it. Even better, build one and try to sell it.
Agreed. I have seen the crossover point to be 130mm rear travel. Two frames could cover XC to Trail and all Mtn to Enduro. We could also skew it downcountry to all mountain and enduro to dh.
Yes yes I know my definition isn't the industry standard one. We cyclists are terrible at naming things ("clipless", "pedal bike") but I suppose "downcountry" isn't the worst offender. My 5010 was still my downcountry bike because I did in fact ride it like a downcountry bike and even did a few XCM races on it for fun. We're forum nerds talking about modular/customizable frames here! There's going to be some coloring outside the lines of a bike's "intended purpose" handed down from the marketing department.
I really appreciate your thorough response. I think those are valid points in theory but I don’t know if the differences are so dramatic in practice. At the least those points are all things that could be overcome with minor tweaks to setup / also maybe even non-issues to some riders.
Another point I was trying to make is that these are statements that sound absolute, but they are really just opinions about certain aspects of the bikes designs. There are a lot of and suspension specs that 10 years ago were unthinkable. The fact is that all of this stuff is malleable and very much open for interpretation and reinterpretation
So what you're saying is
Downcountry isn't in your bike
It's in your heart ❤️
Very true, especially when it comes to the term modular. That can be taken to mean a single frame for all travel numbers and categories, like Kavenz, or a single flip chip that barely changes anything, like Santa Cruz's. It's not a black and white thing, and while I think a lot of modularity leads to compromises that I don't want, especially in weight and stiffness, some modularity is nice to have, like progression changing flip chips. I also like head tubes that accept reach and angle adjust headsets, I would count that as a modular feature.
Exactly, we're talking about modular/customizable frames. I'm saying that you finding your 5010 - a bike designed to be a trail bike that leans enduro as far as it can at it's travel number - to be a good enduro bike after modifying it with a bunch of stuff specifically manufactured to make it have more travel like an enduro bike isn't a surprise.
You saying that you took a bike designed for pedaling ups and flats while still being decent at moderate descending (a downcountry bike) and made it into a great enduro bike is inaccurate. Because that's not what you did. Downcountry is a known term that you've applied incorrectly. You took an enduro bike in all but travel amounts and changed the travel to be more like an enduro bike.
I'm not trying to be a dick. I too wish I could buy a part or two and completely overhaul my bike into an capable-in-a-way-other-than-initially-designed beast. We're talking about how we can go about getting the most out of our bikes. I think getting a downcountry style bike with the intention of making it more enduro will leave you with a bike that gives you the least rather than the most.
p.s. I've never thought about nor talked about this term so much. I went from thinking of it as an apt descriptor to being sick of its use. I'm converting to the recently-brought-back-by-Significant Other Bikes "funcountry." I don't even care about bike categories. I ride a short travel trail bike on trails most people would call XC but I ride them like enduro race stages I sprint and huck and gap on with little regard for any long distance efficiency. I'm not a "categories" guy...but I am a person who recognizes that humans like to label things because it helps us have common language when we talk about them and its confusing and misleading if those categories are evoked in conversation and then used inaccurately.
I think you’re having trouble accepting the fact that there are a LOT of mountain bikes that are made by taking a bike and giving it more travel and calling it a new category. The 5010 is not an enduro bike. Sorry! But thanks to a lot of work by the rider it fits the bill. (Edit: there was a speech to text bit here that made no sense and I can’t remember what I meant …)
What’s crazy about mtb is how much overlap there is between bikes. Between LOTS of bikes. Some of its physical, some of it philosophical. Ultimately these bikes are all more similar than they are different. These differences are magnified in our minds to fit the supposed categories the bikes belong to, but those categories keep changing over the years. They're so subjective (as we have seen in the downcountry debate just now) that really it makes more sense to ditch the categories than to work to refine them further.
The rise of modular bikes is a result of economic pressure removing arbitrary distinctions between models of bikes and leaving manufacturers with limited ways of selling you the same bike with 5 different suspension configurations. Now they’re straight up admitting that these parts are interchangeable or at least should have been, and we will get to benefit from that (someday.)
I read most of this but skipped over the Santa Cruz stuff because they don't make a modular bike. I've owned 2 and still have them both, my 18 year old's Guerilla Gravity Shred Dogg and my Ibis Ripmo v3.
A critical criteria in whether a modular bike can give you meaningful flexibility is whether you have one MTB or you have a stable. If you have multiple bikes and they're all meaningfully different then you probably don't have much need for a modular bike excluding very simple things like mullet or 29 rear wheel. (You might own 3 cross country bikes or 3 all over 160mm travel but that's your own fault or you simply don't ride a range of different trails, maybe.)
But if you only have one MTB then the modular bike is much more useful to either serve multiple roles, which is rare, or more likely give you the flexibility to make that one bike optimal for whatever you value most. I've only owned my Ripmo since late Fall so I'm just getting started, but I'll have meaningful differences between Ripley and Ripmo modes. But if I owned 2 bikes clearly I'd save 30-60 minutes of reconfiguring my Ripmo and if I had a mechanical issue I would have a backup bike. My son's at college without his bike so I do actually have a backup now .. but when he rides with me, 2 bikes in the garage and 2 riders means it's useful to be able to optimize.
I changed almost nothing on his Shred Dogg until very recently. I couldn't pass a deal on a fork, so I mulleted it and it's a better bike for either of us with the 29er front wheel instead of the dual 27.5. much less twitchy, and more fun being stable at speed. Oh, and he did go from short reach to long when he grew into the bike. But changing this bike to a full 29er, I might as well just build a completely different bike.
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