Santa Cruz Carbon Nomad 6

NOMADc

No, this isn't an April Fool's joke, and yes, this is the official release for the new carbon fiber Santa Cruz Nomad. Do not confuse it with any of the previous, most likely inaccurate, information that has leaked already. There's a lot of ground to cover here, so we apologize in advance for the length of this email, but bear with us.

The new Nomad-c marks our fourth carbon fiber bike, and is the culmination of what has been a very enlightening process for us, pun intended. In this case, the move to a carbon fiber chassis has chopped a whopping 1.25 pounds off the weight of the aluminum Nomad, while at the same time increasing strength and stiffness by large margins. The existing aluminum Nomad isn't exactly a porker in terms of weight or a wilting violet with regard to strength, so being able to reduce weight by that much and at the same time increase strength and stiffness, without skimping on any features, is about as much of a win-win scenario as we could hope for. It's light. We are seeing frames weighing in at 6.1 pounds with a RockShox Monarch 3.3 shock.

The suspension on the Nomad-c is the same as found on the aluminum Nomad, featuring our latest generation Virtual Pivot Point design with 160mm of travel. VPP is defined by a pair of counter-rotating links that offer a falling- to rising- shock rate, and instant center migration traits that minimize chain growth and maintain lively pedaling with a designed-in degree of anti-squat. The shock rate allows for plush, compliant suspension behavior in the early part of travel, letting the shock react quickly to trail garbage and smaller impacts. Then, as the shock rate flips a to rising rate later in the travel, it offers a nice progression to resist bottom out near the end of the stroke. The end result is a suspension that performs exceptionally well over a very diverse range of terrain AND at the same time pedals with an efficiency throughout that outshines many bikes with less travel.

Alongside the carbon fiber makeover, the VPP suspension, and the trickest pivot hardware in the world, we added an impact absorbent protection strip underneath the downtube and along the drive side chainstay and seatstay. There's a metal plate where the chainsuck gremlins usually strike. You'll find cable stops for dropper seatposts integrated into the frame. An ISCG05 chainguide mount is molded into the bottom bracket area during lay-up, as are the disc brake tabs and dropouts. There's a 1.5" headtube up front, since we figured this bike would probably be getting treated with a bit more abuse than most taper-steerer forks would be intended to see. You can have it any color you want, so long as you like white with black decals or a matte carbon color with gold pinstripey decals.