Is it enough, or too much?
Would your next bike have the same, more, or less travel?
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My hardtail only has 100mm but I rarely ride it. My fatbike however has a rigid frame and I prefer it that way - less maintenance.
My rigid bike is 0/0, which is just about right for what I use it for.
160/135. I would be perfectly happy with 140/115. I hope to keep this bike for at least 10 years, and by then I will be old enough that I should probably stop doing the things for which the 160/135 is nice.
168 rear, 180 front.
I think all mountain bikes should have more travel and better suspension designs.
You know all the common designs are now so old their patents have already expired? (VPP, DW-Link, Mac strut etc). Bikes are stuck in a very strange design dead end for over 20 years. I think suspension quality is the current weakest aspect of bikes.
I have a fully rigid carbon fat bike I’ve been riding since 2019. I only ride XC so it’s perfect. Gave up on 2 3-4” dual suspension bikes when I switched over to it and have never looked back.
Ok, I have a point to make about how weird mountain bikes are.
Think about cars, motorcycles etc. They all have same or more travel on the front than the rear. This is always the case with moving vehicles.
Now choose a modern mountain bike. An enduro bike in a lot of brands will be stock 165 rear, 170 front. At a glance this seems ok on paper.
My criticism:
165 is the actual wheel travel of the rear wheel. (Nobody cares about the 65mm stroke number.)
170 is the telescoping front travel, like the shaft stroke of the fork leg. But keep in mind, that’s not vertical travel, that’s moving on an angle (around 62-65° to start). Decomposing the vertical component of the motion, its around 150mm of vertical wheel travel. (Remember trigonometry?)
So a brand new enduro bike will move the front wheel 150mm, and the rear end 165. You can definitely FEEL this riding. Speaking of myself, it’s completely weird and ridiculous feeling going down the trail on a bike like this. It makes you ride very strangely in hoe you have to compensate with body position.
On my bikes I always bump the front travel to be the same (at least) as the rear (which gains even more from considering static sag % 30 rear / 20 front). Which means doing trigonometry when I spec the build… Because bikes are labelled in this irrelevant method.
Anyhow, how did this whole arrangement come to be seen as somehow normal? Like all these brands do this, it’s a common industry practice to produce bikes with smaller front than rear travel but to use wacky nomenclature that obscures this.
( * Have any of you ever ridden bikes with any bicycle brand product managers? It is eye opening to say the least.)
Most “hits” are coming from an angle that is not straight 90°, so the suspension travel in an angle is a “happy accident” that just works out perfectly.
Keeping this in mind, measuring the fork travel just makes sense.
Moreso when you think of the historical context. Suspension forks came to markets before rear suspension, so forks adopted the simplest possible measure, while rear suspension required some calculations to figure out sensible measure
Sure.
Whichever convention you measure it is fine, but I think you’d have to do the same system on both wheels. Stroke, wheel path or vertical travel, just pick any one system and use it consistently.
Currently what’s going on is that each wheel is measured from different systems.
The RESULT is that FOR NO REASON bikes are specced with significantly less REAL travel on the front wheel than the rear wheel. You can absolutely feel this just riding. My issue isn’t with which number we use, it’s the actual bike spec is crazy.
Like, ignoring the numbers/naming, the actual motion isn’t close to correctly matched.
The ONLY thing that matches are the reference numbers from two dissimilar naming systems, which is where the insight comes from that the product development is very, very poor. Who is actually thinking? Who tests this gear?
(I think somehow they decided they can get away with this through marketing. Presumably a LOT of customers are over-biking and don’t even notice or ride at a level where this is relevant.)
You might think this is splitting hairs? So why then does a mid travel bike have 150/130 or 140/125?
An enduro bike has 160/160? A downhill bike has 200/200? These bikes are even more slack! Come on, this is just so stupid. There is literally no reason not to just run a longer fork.
Well… Ok, there is a reason, but it is embarrassing for consumers.
