All the while being simple and, in my experience, maintenance-free with four sealed bearings between the swing arm and the frame. It weighs in at 356 g and is machined in two parts, a heat-treated hyper bike steel part for the first nine smaller cogs, and a hard anodized aluminum part for the three largest cogs to save weight. It offers amazing and consistent performance throughout its 520% range.
As for the dropper, I fiddled with it a few times at the start but otherwise just got it out of the way so I could ride. The dropper is designed for super quick and easy bleeding, which refreshingly takes significantly less time to do in reality than it takes to watch the 18-second video on their website about it. It’s nothing about the effects of tires, suspension, and steering geometry, hyper mountain bike but the stiff bars worked nicely in the context of this bike. The BEAST rims also felt incredibly stiff both vertically and laterally, but again complemented the dynamic handling characteristics of a big squishy bike quite well. They were very light and felt incredibly solid, sustaining zero permanent damage from being repeatedly smashed against rocks when the tires bottomed out.
There were perhaps three weeks after I’d brought the bike home, it sitting in my living room, where I just looked at it a lot, half in disbelief that I owned a real mountain bike and half worrying about not riding it properly enough. After three weeks, I took it out for the first time on a familiar route to try to ride it up and down some sets of stairs or to drop off street furniture to get a feel for it before taking it out on trails. Chris took one of ten tubesets that didn’t work out as an opportunity to redesign the swing arm to accommodate a simplified single-pivot suspension design with just enough room for a 29×2.5″ tire and some mud clearance.
I’m normally a fan of flex everywhere but in this instance, the super stiff BEAST parts kept the bike feeling positive and surprisingly efficient on climbs. And surprisingly, he often finds a diamond in the rough — or at least a salvageable build he can later modify. (In fairness, he finds total lemons too.) So I caught up with him to find out why he loves box-store bikes, whether it’s ever a good buy, and what you can do to make a 200-plus-dollar Walmart bike a respectable ride.
Our lightest and lowest volume internally framed pack, the Waypoint is designed for on-trail or off-trail backpacking for a range of users and trips. At 35L and with integrated shoulder strap pockets, this pack is suitable for long trails for the more experienced ultralight hiker, short overnights for those still working toward lower volume kits, and technical pursuits when 40L is just too much. With the pivot point inline with the chain I didn’t NEED the lockout at the rear, while it might have saved a watt or two up hills the difference was negligible and probably balanced against the increased off-road climbing performance with the shock active. Through riding it every which way on everything, a bike that I initially found intimidatingly over-specced for my riding became a simple, easy to maintain, solid and enjoyable platform that has proved an invaluable addition to the bikes I already owned.
Bikeyoke is relatively obscure outside of Germany but I hope that changes, as everything they specced on the bike looked great and was a joy to use. I’ve always been a fan of Dresden-based Acto5 hyper bike and their absurd CNC-machined frames. Conceptually wild and, in the flesh, a sight to behold. I will never need the performance that they offer, so thankfully, they make cranks for fanbois.
The frame was welded just outside of Dresden, Germany. While we discussed a basic bitch build kit as an intro to mountain biking, when I collected the bike it was built with some of the most esoteric, decently high-end made-in-Europe parts out there. The biggest problem I’ve seen is improper assembly and setup. Even a big-name bike can give a miserable experience if it isn’t set up properly. And sadly, this is an area in which most big-box stores are lacking. There are instances where that may be somewhat accurate because there are certainly some questionable bikes I’ve seen on the shelves at big-box stores.
The SRD came with the classic Acto5 mountain cranks, nice and short in 165—because this bike has all the gears—and long cranks are for flat-earthers. Looking at a component in isolation, I really prefer the performance of SRAM electronic shifting, especially in wet, grimy conditions, but some people prefer mechanical shifting, and those people prefer Shimano. Looking at buying a $600 mech, I love the idea that individual parts of the mech can be replaced if they get damaged, that it will run with almost any shifter, and that I can swap the cage out to run short or long so it can be used on more or less any bike. The frame is made from custom butted and bent 4130 tubes and cast parts manufactured in Taiwan.
Consisting of the Elevate 22, Daybreak 17, Summit 30, and Stuff Pack 30, features range from complete simplicity to those needed to accomplish creative, technical missions. I find intact collarbones to be both beneficial and desirable in my line of work and as a self-employed person, so I was overly cautious to start with, riding an alien-feeling bike on things that I can’t ride. It’s a good-looking bike with a concise and consistent design language used throughout the frame, with all the castings for the pivot points matching the dropouts and gusset shapes. It looks pretty minimal for a long travel mountain bike. Bike Yoke is a brand with which I was not previously familiar, as they are best known for their droppers, mountain bike specific saddles with integrated suspension, and alternative yokes for rear shocks.
At just over 400 euros it’s not inexpensive, but it’s built to last and offers an insane range for the weight. Tires are, for me, one of the most important choices for any build. Most people, including Schwalbe themselves, seem to think that the “G” in Schwalbe’s G series of tires refers to gravel, however, it actually refers to wildman and all round good egg Grant. Grant works for Schwalbe in the UK but in his spare time is also a tire nerd, who indulged me and my fantasies about the kind of riding I might do for far longer than reasonable. It was built under the ambiguous and slightly tongue-in-cheek Sour SRD umbrella (more on that below). It’s neither an enduro bike nor their new race-proven ultra-distance/XC prototype we saw at last year’s Bespoked.