Vikb profile

HTP likes short CS normally. Here is his review of the BFeMAX.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnVF14VuKKE&ab_channel=hardtailparty

Unfortunately I'm leaving town for a month and bringing my Daambuilt as it's better suited to the less gnarly riding where I am headed than the BFeMAX so it will be a while before I get back and can get time on the Cotic.

One issue with the BFeMAX is the next batch are not due until Dec 2020. Add in a COVID supply chain delay and shipping to Canada and that could easily slide to Jan/Feb 2021. So if you want a bike to ride this winter it may not be rolling on the trails early enough to meet your needs.

I finally caved and put a Tannus Tubeless insert in the rear of my HT. I am/was a insert doubter so it will be interesting to see where I land on the issue after a winter of use.

I would love it if they provided 25% sagged and static geo numbers for hardtails. I mean once you have the CAD program fired up it's not that big a deal to offer both sets of numbers. It makes comparisons easier [since you come across both types of geo numbers] as well as understanding the shape of the bike when a rider is aboard.

MBB - I have a hack that could potentially save you the hassle of the collar re-lubes. I have stopped doing them for a long time [over a year]. I just wipe the stanchion clean and put a small amount of slick honey on it pre-ride. I have not had any issues with seals wearing out and I have not had to open up either of my 9.8 droppers. I use a Mudhugger rear fender so my dropper stays, somewhat, clean even in winter.

The nice thing with these droppers is that you can swap them back and forth between inline and setback heads. On my COTIC with its super slack STA I have gone back to an inline head.

> I assume these are issues for the >200lb crew. Not an issue for me.

Cam you don't have to be particularly heavy to bend/break saddle rails that are clamped at the front of a saddle to get a slacker STA. You have a very long lever trying to support your weight while bouncing along.

Reini - I have no issues with the BFeMAX. That's not what I typed. It's too early to have a real opinion. I give any new bike 6 months to earn its keep or I move it on. So I'll make a call on the BFeMAX in the spring just like I would do with any new bike I started riding in the fall. At the moment I am not planning on selling it.

> And wouldn't this be solved by pushing the saddle back on the rails?

You've got a small amount of rearward adjustment on most saddle rails if your STA is too steep. The problem is that with your weight focused on the rear of the saddle if you slam the clamp to the front of the rails you will bend then break them. 

So if the STA is really close to what you want sure you can adjust that last bit to hit perfection by moving the saddle rearward. If you need a significant amount of rearward movement you really need to get a dropper with a setback head. 9.8 is currently the only quality dropper that I'd recommend with 1" of setback.

Interestingly if the STA isn't steep enough you can move the saddle all the way forward on the rails since your weight is now right above the clamp and you aren't putting that force through a long lever.

Thanks for the review. The Honzo ESD is the first Kona I'd be keen to own. Unfortunately I just got a 2nd aggressive HT in a Cotic BFeMAX and even I can only justify so many MTBs. My custom Daambuilt has short-ish CS and I intentionally got a 2nd HT with longer front and rear centres in the Cotic to see what that's like. I have been a short CS person the last 8+ years and I wanted to make sure I gave the alternative geo a fair shot. If for some reason the Cotic doesn't rock my world after this winter I could see myself swapping the parts over to this Honzo frame.

I would have told you HTs were silly for Costal BC trail riding until I got the Daambuilt and experienced the "modern aggressive" HT geo for myself. I kept riding that bike more and more until I was riding 95% of my normal FS bike trails and loving it.

As I explained to a friend...I don't ride a HT or a SS bike because it's "better" than FS or gears. I ride HT/SS because I love the experience of riding them and they also happen to have some interesting benefits I can point to which is a bonus.

The BFeMAX CS are 444mm.

Posted by: gdharries

This also makes me miss mine terribly.

A steel HT is the perfect excuse for a 2nd/backup/spare/guest bike.

Posted by: rwalters

Or maybe I'll just machine my own solution ;)

If you have ISCG tabs I am curious why go to all the trouble of a crank mounted bashguard when it's not falling to hand easily?

The WT bash is the only non-ISCG tab bash I am aware of for modern splined cranks. If NSB makes another option that's great. If your chainstays have clearance for you to run a non-Boost ring that will give you a better chainline in the easy gears which I would consider a bonus.

Posted by: trumpstinyhands

^Thanks! I lusted over the Klein 'Backfire' paintjob circa 1989 and 30+ years later I have it ha ha. Welding by Mike Truelove and paint by Chris Dekerf. I'm used to riding hardtails but I'm still really surprised how well this rides downhill. There's nothing that I've ridden on my last 'enduro' type full suspension bike that I've not been able to ride on this. 3" 29er tires and F&R Cushcore help the 'plough' factor but it handles really well too.

Wow! Looks amazing. I love a bright coloured bike for our deep dark forest riding. Pops in photos and just feels more cheerful in the depths of winter. I'm also a 29+ fan. Two of my three steel MTBs are 29+. I'm with you on appreciating how capable these aggressive geo modern hardtails are. I wasn't expecting that based on my old school geo HT experiences.

Posted by: Cuprinol

Dropper and a new wider bar and thicker grips for this year. Trying to keep everything on a budget. The wider bar made a bigger difference than I thought it would. 

I've been pretty lucky with my droppers lasting a long time, but I do love putting a fresh dropper on the bike. The Ragley looks great. Have a blast on it this winter. :-)

Posted by: RAHrider

Loving the cotic. With the colored housing, have you ever gone a totally different color? Might look good also. Whats up with the frame bags? How long are these winter rides?

Thanks. I'm pretty happy with the way the Cotic turned out. If you look at the purple Daambuilt I posted earlier in this thread it has blue housing which I think looks nice contrasting the purple frame. I have done a blue frame with white housing in the past. I thought it looked decent, but not good enough I wanted to replicate it on this bike. Of the housing colour options I could get my hands on for brake and shift there were no contrasting colours that I liked so I just went with blue. 

The frame bags are for holding stuff. What's up with all these hydration packs people wear??? ;-)

The lower bag is for all my tools/spares/pump. It doesn't get accessed often. The upper bag will most often hold a few energy bars and my phone. If it gets warmer than expected my windvest/ear warmers will go in there. I don't wear a pack/fanny or carry anything on my body besides my clothes/protective gear. Compared to people I ride with I generally have less cargo space so it doesn't seem excessive to me.

I typically ride from home so a short ride is ~4hrs and a long ride is up to ~7hrs in the winter. My GF will sometimes want to drive so the shortest ride we'd do would be 2hrs in that case. Although other than water and maybe an extra energy bar my gear load for long or short rides doesn't really change.

Looks great. I like the colour. Enjoy the build and riding it. :-)

Posted by: Tremeer023

Good looking Cotic Vik. Double bottle cage; are you planning any longer bikepacking type rides with this? I'm in the middle of transforming my Moxie to a winter set up with 150mm fork (have to wait until late Oct for it), but it will end up with similar geometry to this I think. Would be interested to know how much distance you can comfortably cover with it.

At this point my only plan is to run the Cotic as my main bike this winter on Van Isle. Although I am not driving to the trails often so a typical ride is 40K-70K long. I have a custom steel HT [purple Daambuilt ^^^] setup for bikepacking that is only a bit less aggressive than the Cotic. So most likely I won't bikepack with the Cotic. Mostly because I'd want to use the dropper and that means either no gear behind the saddle or I'd have to come up with DIY rack hack. Since my other HT was designed for use with a rack it would just make sense to ride that instead.

Info on my purple Daambuilt is here: https://vikapprovedblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/daambuilt-mega-krampus-bike-review-part-1/ [there are two more blog posts linked at the bottom of this one if you want more info]

I've done up to 170kms with lots of climbing in one day so far on the Daambuilt with camping gear aboard and not had any issues.

The Cotic can take a 3rd bottle under the DT and there is room for 2 of the 3 bottles to be really big. So I can definitely see this bike going on some epic alpine rides. So far the Ergon saddle is the only thing I am not sure about. Beyond that I don't see any reason why I wouldn't happily pedal this bike all day long.

In terms of using your Moxie for bikepacking or epic single day rides it should work fine. Obviously you have to address your personal fit/comfort issues. There is no way to know what those will be aside from just riding the bike longer distances and taking notes on what parts of your body start to complain then address those issues. That might mean a different saddle/bar/grips than you'd run for trail shredding missions.

I finally got my winter bike built just as it's starting to feel cool and moist here on the island. It's a large Cotic BFeMax with 160mm Lyrik and 29 x 2.6" DHF/DHR. So far I've just cruised around the 'hood. I'm on the mend from an injury so it'll have to be a slow and gradual introduction of the new whip to the trails. I am looking forward to see how she rides when things get really wet. :-)

Posted by: Xorrox

My other dig at the local bike shop was not with the supply chain issues they are experiencing (which I totally understand), it is with the absolute crap communication and organization I've experienced. I was told my stuff was on order by one employee, kept phoning (roughly once a week) to ask if they had any ETA, kept getting the we don't know and then, about 5 weeks later got a response of "You ordered what? We can't find your order but we can order that if you want." Re-ordered and this time they said they were in stock at the local distributor and should be in in a couple days, called again in a couple days, still not there "should be in after the weekend". That was roughly at month ago. I've stopped calling but have not got a call back from them yet. Guess I have to try again one more time to see if it actually showed up. Will not deal with this shop again after this. All I want is to do is go on a website, find what I need, confirm price, ship/pickup and lead time and order it, all without wasting any time on phone calls with people that don't know what they are talking about or are going to lie to me because they don't actually know. Also, at least if everything is online I can use screen shots and confirmation emails as a record of the transaction in case there are any issues.

I've had the same experience again and again and again and again with LBS's. I have made an honest attempt to buy stuff locally, but the results have been disappointing something like 75% of the time.

Just one example that exemplifies the situation. My GF needed brake pads for her bike [2 year old SRAM brakes] so I sent her to the LBS with old pads in hand while I completed other maintenance on her bike. Local pads would cost 50% more, but it seemed like a reasonable way to give the shop business and get her rolling ASAP. She calls to tell me the salesperson has informed her it's not possible to get pads for these brakes and the only option is buying new brakes. I tell her that's crazy and to get the salesperson to look again. She gets the same story. So I told her to come home. We had the correct pads orders from Jenson in 5 mins and delivered 3 days later for significantly less money. Of course we ordered 4 sets of pads so we didn't have to deal with the LBS next time.

I can tell stories like this ^^ all day. At first I thought I just hit on one bad apple, but I tried different shops and different people at various shops. I had so many more disappointing experiences than acceptable ones I've given up.

I use Velofix for the few maintenance tasks I can't handle myself. I buy all my parts online.