Rigid In My Thinking

Further to my recent Outside column about the joys of voluminous tires, I see that a new suspension fork has hit the market with great fanfare:

Now I should begin by saying there's certainly lots of room for improvement as far as suspension forks.  I should also say James Huang knows his stuff, so if he says this fork addresses many of those shortcomings I'm inclined to believe him.  Nevertheless, as a cloyingly smug rigid bike enthusiast it's hard not to read stuff like this and wonder, "Why?"

“On every telescopic fork, when you come into a corner, you want stability. But what happens is that you weight the front of the bike, the fork dives, you get less mechanical trail, and the bike gets less stable. We humans have learned, over 120 years of riding telescopic forks, to just deal with it. The brain is good at just making it work.

“But I wanted to know what happens if you make it more stable? Is it worse? Does it not make any difference at all? Or is it super better? So I designed a device to answer that question. It was this crazy-ass test mule, a big Terminator-looking thing that weighed 7 1/2 pounds (3.4kg). I built it up, bolted it up, and went for a ride in the middle of January 2014. I got two corners into it and was like, this is way better.”

Sounds like he's managed to invent something that handles nearly as well as a rigid fork with high-volume tires.

Then there's the price:

As groundbreaking as the Message clearly is, my guess is that Trust may still have a tough time getting people to buy into the idea. For one, it may offer some genuinely tangible performance benefits but it also comes with an outrageous price tag of US$2,700. That obviously leaves an awful lot of room to expand downmarket with a less-expensive version, but for now, it’s only deep-pocketed buyers who will even consider this.

I strongly disagree, and in all sincerity I think $2,700 is way too cheap.  Two grand is the going rate for a wheelset these days, and the most expensive telescoping forks are already well over $1,000.  Why not just price the thing at $5,000?  Not only will the Mountain Freds gladly pay it, but they'll be more likely to pay it because with a price like that it's gotta mean business.

Anyway, hopefully this fork takes off and they have to start designing bikes around it, which will make pretty much every mountain bike currently out there obsolete.

As for me, I've been reveling in smugness recently by riding a bike that lacks not only suspension but also derailleurs:

I know I said I love the plus-sized tires--and believe me I do--but I also love flicking around a light, singlespeed bicycle with "skinny" tires:

Actually, it's not even that light, but after riding the Jones it feels like it weighs like fifteen pounds.

It's been just over seven years since I first took delivery of my artisanal handmade Engin, and while commissioning an expensive bicycle that can't be shifted may seem no different than paying $2,700 for a suspension fork that works almost as well as a rigid one, I congratulate myself for doing so every time I ride it.  I'd been a fan of Drew's bikes (check out his Instagram by the way) since I went down to Philly with some friends years ago to check out his workshop, I'd never had a custom bike, I wanted one because I was a newly-minted author and celebrity bike blogger, and here's why a singlespeed made the most sense for me.  For one thing, I have the most fun on them because they bring me back to my BMX-and-tube-sock days:

(© Danny Weiss)

For another, while you can put together a pretty sweet singlespeed mountain bike for cheap, most of the frames are suspension-corrected and/or designed to be run with or without gears or just generally funky because they're for people putting together their sixth or seventh bike out of stuff from their parts bin.  I, however, wanted a nice, clean, rigid, purpose-built singlespeed, and the way to get that was to go custom.  Sure, you can't tell from my shitty zoomed-in photo, but you don't get awesome rocker dropouts like that on a Surly:

Instead you get something like this:

And that's in no way meant as an insult to Surly, who I applaud for their versatility.  But I wanted a really nice singlespeed, not a giant adapter, and so Engin it was.

Then there was obsolescence.  No velocipede is more obsolescence-prone than the mountain bike.  Suspension; frame spacing; drivetrains...all of these things are way different now than they were just seven years ago.  However, it's hard to imagine a time when I won't be able to find the necessary parts for this thing, and geometry fads aside, an awesome-handling bike is an awesome-handling bike.  Best of all, since it's designed not to use gears or suspension it was already "obsolete" the moment Drew finished welding it, so what do I have to worry about anyway?

In any case, the joy one gets from material things is always fleeting.  Nevertheless, thus far my rationale for commissioning this bike has been borne out, and I'm also glad I got in the queue when I did because now he only builds in titanium and on a limited basis and probably wouldn't even give me the time of day.  Really, if you think about it, my ordering this bike was like getting in on the Google IPO.  (Assuming someone would give me like $25K for it right now, that is.)

Wonder how it would ride with one of those Trust forks...