This is the Longbow, our Super D race bike. It is very similar to our Genken which is our Endurance D or "Euro-style" DH bike (some may call it freeride light). We are asking all of you, is 6" with a 67.5 deg. head angle and 71 deg. seat angle too much for super D?
Our Genken currently has a 66 degree head angle and a 70.5 deg. seat angle with 6.6" of travel.
Personally I was thinking the 2 bikes are too similar so I am proposing a change to the Longbow:
68.8 degree head angle 72 degree seat angle (with Fox 32 TALAS 140 at full travel)
but I want to know what all of you think. If the current geometry and travel sounds fine, we'll leave it. if you think we should go more shallow, we'll do it. Hit us up.
3 comments:
Hey, I know this response is a little late. Looks like you may have already made up your mind on situation... but in case you haven't...
As the two bikes sit now, I feel there is a little redundancy. How about you only produce one model, but engineer alternate linkages that would accomodate a longer travel shock for more rear end travel and offset a longer a-c fork, but wouldn't raise the bottom bracket too much.
So, with one linkage set, you could run a 2.25" stroke shock for 5.5-6" of rear travel and a 140-150mm fork up front. And then another linkage set would allow a 2.5" stroke shock for 7" of rear travel with a 160-170mm fork? Might save money in the long run,as well, since the factory wont have to retool for two nearly identical framesets.
Or if you don't want to mess with BB height too much, you could produce a proprietary headset/headtube interface that allows 1 degree of change by rotating either the headset cups internally or a headtube "sleeve" externally, like the Scott High Octane had for years ( and i guess several other manufactures are doing too now). I know proprietary kind of sucks in a day of International Standards, but since you're selling them direct as framesets to dedicated cyclists, the buyers more likely to stand up and follow, as well as support, what you're trying to accomplish with the design.
I considered that but the 2 bikes use different tubes and rear triangles, different BB shells and rear DO spacing making each one purpose specific.
We ended up dropping the Longbow to 5.75" with a shorter shock length and kept the angles the same. Marketed as a bike for a 140 or 150mm fork (rather than 160mm) the rider will have the steeper angles and lower BB for better climbing.
The bikes are so similar as it is that we were able to share all the tooling so that wasn't a big deal.
We will never use a sleeve head tube system, I just don't like it, they creak and can fail and that is one place you don't want a failure. I do like a "standard" however and want the rider of our bikes to be able to go into any shop and get what they need to keep riding if they need to.
Thanks for your comments, keep them coming!
Cheers.
Cool... I was wondering if the bikes shared a tubeset, but were just welded up with different geometries for the front triangle or if they each had their own tubing. That's good to hear your engineering each one specificaly for a purpose and not cutting corners and sharing bits between frames.
Sounds like, if I was the frame builder, I'd be the one over engineering a shorter travel bike making it too heavy or under engineering a long travel bike having it fail... All in the name of cost... Glad I'm not a frame builder!
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