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 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
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 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