Cr4w - It's one of those things where nobody can read those old Chris Porter interviews and conclude he was anything except correct and years ahead of his time.
I do think the quality of certain single crown forks will keep that game alive (Suntour, anybody?) - it's just the weight weenie demands on the same product that are why the CSU's creak all to hell, add some material to the equation (and worry less about weight than CTE mismatch) and that entire issue goes away. I do think ParkDuro setups will become more common, but that's already a limited set of options - 170mm single crown works so well that if you shoved one 2021 model back through a time machine one decade, it would be on the WC DH podium (though to be fair, Sam Hill showed us a few years back that it's arguably still true).
The 3D printed bikes are here, just that printed titanium (Atherton) in the right setup is still expensive compared to tediously hand-laid up carbon, and ends up slightly heavier, so might as well let Taiwan be a giant frame geometry heuristic algorithm and just buy the setup that happens to work for your application, and enjoy the cost savings... or go custom.
I think the 90's seemed crazy and wild because the limiting factors were everywhere - we're now seeing convergence which seems less fun because they're all so good that diminishing returns are a serious factor, and if a new idea has merit but doesn't work in the first iteration, it gets found out right away because the rest of the parts are good enough (in the 90's, a kinda bad prototype could get through a few design cycles before we figured out that the rest of the bike build wasn't the only part holding it back)
Jan. 5, 2021, 11:39 a.m. - Tehllama42
Cr4w - It's one of those things where nobody can read those old Chris Porter interviews and conclude he was anything except correct and years ahead of his time. I do think the quality of certain single crown forks will keep that game alive (Suntour, anybody?) - it's just the weight weenie demands on the same product that are why the CSU's creak all to hell, add some material to the equation (and worry less about weight than CTE mismatch) and that entire issue goes away. I do think ParkDuro setups will become more common, but that's already a limited set of options - 170mm single crown works so well that if you shoved one 2021 model back through a time machine one decade, it would be on the WC DH podium (though to be fair, Sam Hill showed us a few years back that it's arguably still true). The 3D printed bikes are here, just that printed titanium (Atherton) in the right setup is still expensive compared to tediously hand-laid up carbon, and ends up slightly heavier, so might as well let Taiwan be a giant frame geometry heuristic algorithm and just buy the setup that happens to work for your application, and enjoy the cost savings... or go custom. I think the 90's seemed crazy and wild because the limiting factors were everywhere - we're now seeing convergence which seems less fun because they're all so good that diminishing returns are a serious factor, and if a new idea has merit but doesn't work in the first iteration, it gets found out right away because the rest of the parts are good enough (in the 90's, a kinda bad prototype could get through a few design cycles before we figured out that the rest of the bike build wasn't the only part holding it back)