dh 29'ers

Posted by: xy9ine

shots fired:

$ 10 000.00 ???

Posted by: xy9ine

shots fired:

all they need to do is ebike that thing...

Posted by: syncro

Posted by: xy9ine

shots fired:

all they need to do is ebike that thing...

Didn't that already happen...wait...that was 26.

So to recap.

Is watching UCI DH better now that they went from 26 to 27.5 and now to 29?

How many more units of fun are you having riding a larger wheel sized bike? 

How many mathematical doctorates were handed out to bike industry professionals for defending their proof on ideal wheel size?

To answer:

1) Fuck no, I don't care what they ride.

2) Kahneman, Tverskey, Ariely and a handful of others have written very easy to understand books on how shitty we think, and how easy it is for us to fool ourselves.

3) Zero.  They're throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. 

What a bunch of fucking crap.  There are ways to move forward without requiring me to buy a new fucking bike every fucking year, but then again as someone who actually rides one I might be one of the few who's affected by this fucking bullshit.  I love falling down hills on bikes but these fuckers are hell bent on getting me on a fucking dirt bike.

Posted by: ReductiMat

I love falling down hills on bikes but these fuckers are hell bent on getting me on a fucking dirt bike.

Wouldn't that be ironic if after a few years of ebikes the cycling masses start to realize they can have more fun and go farther on motos and start putting their discretionary spending into moto and only occasionally ride mtb - or worse abandon it altogether.

Posted by: ReductiMat

So to recap.

Is watching UCI DH better now that they went from 26 to 27.5 and now to 29?

How many more units of fun are you having riding a larger wheel sized bike? 

How many mathematical doctorates were handed out to bike industry professionals for defending their proof on ideal wheel size?

To answer:

1) Fuck no, I don't care what they ride.

2) Kahneman, Tverskey, Ariely and a handful of others have written very easy to understand books on how shitty we think, and how easy it is for us to fool ourselves.

3) Zero.  They're throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. 

What a bunch of fucking crap.  There are ways to move forward without requiring me to buy a new fucking bike every fucking year, but then again as someone who actually rides one I might be one of the few who's affected by this fucking bullshit.  I love falling down hills on bikes but these fuckers are hell bent on getting me on a fucking dirt bike.

Jeebuz man, no one's forcing you to buy anything.  This is the cutting edge remember?  It's going to be impractical and rapidly changing, that's the nature of "The Best".  Just let the early adopters buy the latest/greatest and wait for the standards to shake out.  I "actually ride one" and somehow manage to avoid buying a bike every year...

Posted by: tashi

Jeebuz man, no one's forcing you to buy anything.  This is the cutting edge remember?  It's going to be impractical and rapidly changing, that's the nature of "The Best".  Just let the early adopters buy the latest/greatest and wait for the standards to shake out.  I "actually ride one" and somehow manage to avoid buying a bike every year...

the problem is the rate of obsolescence is changing dramatically. wanna buy a  new frame and swap your perfectly good parts over? forget it. wanna upgrade to that stonkin new fork? looks like you need a new front wheel as well. it seems that if you blink there is a new standard for what amounts to negligible improvement for the avg rider that they probably won't even notice on the trail. the exception to that may be frame geometry and shock/fork tech, but it shouldn't have to come at the price of ditching a serviceable ride.

It does seem like the best of the best is changing more quickly than it used to, and with less backwards compatibility than their used to be, I'll give you that. But performance has also never been better at the "mid range", I think that bikes are a more mature product now and what were seeing now is less major innovation and more marginal gains, along with the marketing that comes with it. It's up to us to decide if we want to pay that or if our desires are met by the more mid range stuff that is now pretty amazing and changing more slowly than the fancy fancy stuff.

My experience: I've bought two mountain bike frames and one fork in the last 2.5 years and each time swapped parts easily, even stuffed my fav Shimano (originally triple!) cranks onto a PF shell, if I had chosen a Boost frame there are conversion kits available for my hubs...my most recent bike is a 2014 yes, but the 2016 Transition's I was looking at were going to be pretty easy to swap my nice stuff onto as well. I'll be choked when the time comes that I can't move my wheels over, but so far my DT's are pretty easy to bring up to date.

IME all you have to do is take a tiny step away from the latest and greatest and the highest end and it's a lot easier to maintain compatibility. I ride pretty hard and have been doing it a while and seem to be well served by aluminum frames, SLX and XT level parts and the best suspension I can get my hands on. I'd love to ride a $10k Yeti dripping with XTR and the latest carbon wheels, I'd even appreciate the differences, but the gains are too marginal to justify based on my spending money and priorities.

Back on topic, lets hope for some good conditions next round, I wanna see these bikes run! I love niners and understand their drawbacks but I expect that they'll be faster for the right rider and course, which I think there may be a lot of.

i can understand the industry' s seeming lack of concern re: backwards compatibility. unsurprisingly, the business is largely based on selling bikes - complete bikes. the custom build / frame only / parts upgrade market is relatively small. mountain bikes as a species are evolving nicely, but even now progression is stifled by adherence to standards imposed by archaic systems.

I was disappointed in the lack of aluminum frame only options available when shopping for a frame recently, but I'm not surprised.  I think most of the folks that want to move their parts over are more into carbon frame territory, and even their numbers are small relative to the market as a whole.

Posted by: ReductiMat

So to recap.

Is watching UCI DH better now that they went from 26 to 27.5 and now to 29?

How many more units of fun are you having riding a larger wheel sized bike? 

How many mathematical doctorates were handed out to bike industry professionals for defending their proof on ideal wheel size?

To answer:

1) Fuck no, I don't care what they ride.

2) Kahneman, Tverskey, Ariely and a handful of others have written very easy to understand books on how shitty we think, and how easy it is for us to fool ourselves.

3) Zero.  They're throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. 

What a bunch of fucking crap.  There are ways to move forward without requiring me to buy a new fucking bike every fucking year, but then again as someone who actually rides one I might be one of the few who's affected by this fucking bullshit.  I love falling down hills on bikes but these fuckers are hell bent on getting me on a fucking dirt bike.

To be fair, is the whole UCI DH thing not about who is fastest down a hill? 

Since we are chatting about the F1 of mountainbiking here, I think it does not matter what wheel size the riders are rolling on. 

The weird thing is not the position of the paid professionals in this, but that of us consumers. As has already been mentioned. 

I am right now pretty happy about my antique STD. If I ever buy another bike park bike I'd go used. At the end of last year's season I saw killer deals on Kona and Giant DH bikes.

Posted by: tashi

Jeebuz man, no one's forcing you to buy anything.  This is the cutting edge remember?  It's going to be impractical and rapidly changing, that's the nature of "The Best".  Just let the early adopters buy the latest/greatest and wait for the standards to shake out.  I "actually ride one" and somehow manage to avoid buying a bike every year...

Did you just gloss over everything I said?  It was in direct response to the nauseating trope, "cutting edge".

I ride close to 1,000,000 vertical feet a year.  I can't not be impacted by bullshit like this.  I'm forced to buy a new fucking bike every year and a half because I will run out of fucking parts to maintain the one I have now.

If you "actually rode one" like me, maybe you'd feel my pain.

Posted by: Mic

To be fair, is the whole UCI DH thing not about who is fastest down a hill? 

Since we are chatting about the F1 of mountainbiking here, I think it does not matter what wheel size the riders are rolling on. 

The weird thing is not the position of the paid professionals in this, but that of us consumers. As has already been mentioned. 

I am right now pretty happy about my antique STD. If I ever buy another bike park bike I'd go used. At the end of last year's season I saw killer deals on Kona and Giant DH bikes.

Negative.  The whole UCI DH thing is to make money.  They could care less who's the fastest.

That said, DH is a spec on a wart on the ass of all that is UCI, so they don't give a shit what's happening there.

It would be so easy to say, "DH is this wheelsize: <XXX>" and be done with it. 

How long until we hear how better 30.5 rolls better than 29?

and all the new standards that will have to come out to make it work but I wouldn't be surprised...  maybe a size that's between 650b and 29?  I know that was proposed between 2 bike companies years ago.