Bike testing update(s)

I testrode two more bikes this week. The Niner Jet 9 and the Pivot Mach 429. Both bikes are way out of my price range but I still wanted to know what the fuss was about. Both these bikes are very competent and very fun rides. Both bikes use 29" wheels. Neither showed the constant rock/waterbar hitting problem that I noticed in the Tallboy, which makes me think it is indeed a geometry issue on the Tallboy. What follows are two sets of impressions.


1. The Jet 9 (pictured above) is a fabulous bike. It is fast, nimble and furious. I rode it up Chimney and in Apex/Enchanted forest. It feels like a very big bike (which it is) but remains very light surprisingly. I motered this thing up everything I threw at it. Even going up the sharktooth, which I haven't been able to do in years. I really liked this bike even though I will not soon be able to afford it. Still was fun riding it.


2. Pivot Mach 429 (pictured above). My favorite of the two. I got this on Friday, which means that because bikeshops are closed on Saturday, I can ride it until Sunday noon. I rode Chimney on Friday and this morning White Ranch on the Longhorn/Shorthorn/Longhorn/Belcher Hill singletrack/Mustang route. Even though the shop gave me pretty bad SPD pedals on this one and it was in a not superb state (one set screw is missing which is terribly annoying and the lever on the front brake is a tad dinky). I reached 40 km/h (25 mph for those used to archaic units) going down Chimney, which if you know the trail is almost death defying. But this thing made me feel quite secure. Riding it in White Ranch was a little different but very enjoyable still. Going down Mustang, which is a fest of deep drops, waterbars, rocky sections and such was fun. White ranch is a very nice park to go riding as long as you avoid going the route that is in the guidebooks. Most people ride it up Belcher Hill trail from the bottom, which is an extremely boring and crappy fireroad for the largest part. At the top it turns into great single track though. I ride this in winter often as it dries out quickly after snow storms. You want to get of the Belcher hill trail as quick as you can (which is the whippletree trail) when the weather and trail conditions are good however. An added bonus is that you will see almost nobody on the trail, while the Belcher hill trail is a highway of bikers and hikers.



This is the altitude and speed profile as recorded by my phone's gps:


As an aside, when I was picking up this bike it struck me that for the price of one of these bikes (~5k$) one can do demo programs at the local bikeshops for several years before you spend as much. This shop for example, gives you 6 day "rentals" for $150 and in a year you would need to sign up for about 10 of those demoprograms to get most of the riding in (I am excluding a large part of winter). So $1500 a year and therefore about 3 1/2 years of riding before you hit the price of a new bike. Extraordinary. Of course neither of these bikes is in my price range anyway. What strikes me still is that the difference in riding experience wrt to my old bike (which got stolen) and my even older bike that I broke the frame on is not very large. Those were far less valuable bikes that I both built from the frame myself.

Tallboy ride on smokey Chimney Gulch

Sorry for all the bike related posts. I have had very little time to go through my photographs (work is really busy) and my backlog is long.

Ever since my self built bike was stolen recently, I have been pining for a ridin'. And I need to get back in the saddle as they say. So I decided to a demo program at a local bike shop. In this case I selected Golden Bike Shop mostly because they carry brands I carry and because they treated me well when my Ellsworth frame broke last year. Even though it was far out of warranty they offered me quite a bit off a new Ellsworth frame. Of course for those who know the bike world, you know that the cheapest Ellsworth offers is over $2k. That is how I ended up with a Titus frame which I found online at JensonUSA for a very fair price. Of course that's all in the past now and I need to move on. So I need to find me a new bike. I have been debating myself whether I will build myself another bike from the frame, but for some reason I don't really feel like it right now. So I probably will buy a complete bike and upgrade the components over time when they go out. The latter is pretty quick for me as I do ride my bikes quite hard. Doing a demo program is a good deal here as the bike shops will credit you for the entire cost of the demo when you buy a bike from them. The demo programs are pretty comparable in general. The Golden bike shop's deal is pretty nice. For $150 (which will get refunded if you buy from them) you get to ride six different bikes on 6 different days. So basically 6 rentals for fairly little or nothing in the end.

Today I decided to go high end just to get that out of the way. I rode the Santa Cruz Tallboy in the higher end build. This is a twentyniner full suspension frame that they built up with quite high end components. The twentynine signifies that it uses 29" wheels instead of the standard 26" for mountain bikes. The bike runs $4700 or so as it is a carbon fiber frame. That is many times over what I would ever spend on a bike, so this exercise was purely academic. This is a fun bike that powers over more than what you can on a bike with 26" wheels. Since there is a wildfire near Golden that is making it very smoky here I decided to head a little further north for my test ride and got to the White Ranch trailhead, only to discover that they were using the parkinglot to fly the firefighting helicopters from. Looked pretty cool (sorry forgot to take pictures), but it meant I couldn't ride the trail there. So I decided to head South. When I came by Chimney Gulch I noticed that the wind had shifted more North and that that was surprisingly smoke free now, so I decided to ride it. This is a really nice, fairly technical ride with some good climbing on rocky parts and a lot of hairpins and a fast, fun downhill. The bike handled well but the suspension needed some tuning which I did later that night so that the next morning early I could do another test ride. The trail as captured by my phone's GPS chip is below displayed in Google Earth.



The height profile is here (in red):


As you see a nice slightly over 1 hour ride and nicely very close to my workplace. TO test whether tuning the suspension makes a difference, I rode Apex park with the same bike the next morning, including the excellent Enchanted forest trail. The track is displayed below:

The altitude profile is in blue two images above. This is a shorter trail that can be done in under an hour.

Observations about the bike:
When you tune the suspension, it handles really well. This is a general issue with suspension bikes. If you don't get the suspension tuned for your weight and style, you really cannot judge the bike from demoing it. It handled about as good as my old Titus even though the Tallboy is a far more expensive bike. I can indeed ride some more things that on my old bike were not always ridable simply because of the bigger wheels. The geometry was also very good. I rode down several very tight turns with waterbars that I normally have a hard time making. The bike's weight is very surprising. About the same as my old Titus that only had 26" wheels. Carbon fiber really helps there. Hydraulic brakes are great. They do indeed stop you in your tracks. I didn't like how the levers were setup. After the downhill my fingers were cramping due to the large distance to the levers and the brakes being set so aggressive. Probably an easy fix. Now for the negative points. The bottom bracket shell and consequently the pedals are very low on the frame and you almost sit up straight on this thing. The low pedals make it very easy to constantly hit rocks and waterbars with the pedals, which I found disconcerting with such a big bike. On the 26" bikes I have ridden I rarely hit the same rocks and bars. We'll see if this is a general thing with 29" wheeled bikes. I can imagine that being so because the rear wheel might be pushed back in the frame geometry in order for the rider to not be too high up. Perhaps a large frame would be better for me for this reason. I usually straddle the border between medium and large on these frames.

Here is the bike on the enchanted forest trail. I liked the (for me) patriotic color.


As an aside I saw the Indian Gulch fire quite clearly from the windy saddle on the CHimney Gulch trail. This is a point where the trail crosses the road up lookout mountain and lots of people were watching the firefighting efforts. Here is a quick iPhone panorama of the fire and the smoke (bigger in the link).