no, not THAT kind of big wheel...

Ever since the 29″ wheel rolled over the horizon in 1999, we’ve had people asking us to build 29″ bikes. At first, we were reluctant to go there because the infrastructure to build what we believed was a halfway decent mountain bike was nonexistent. There was only one tire available at first, and a relatively non aggressive tread pattern at that, the very few suspension forks available were abysmal, and wheels were not much more than touring rims and crossed fingers. After a few years, the quality of that infrastructure improved dramatically, and the number of people asking for 29″ wheel bikes grew.

Meanwhile, we’ve been involved in a very intensive revamp of our entire line of bikes. First, starting in 2006, all our single pivot models were redesigned. Then, immediately on the heels of that, we launched our next generation VPP bikes, starting with the Blur LT, followed by the Nomad and culminating with this year’s spring introduction of the Driver 8 and our new carbon fiber bikes. There was also a new V-10 in there somewhere, and a new Chameleon, and a new Jackal, and the Stigmata ‘cross bike. Bear in mind that our entire engineering department is six guys, and they do all the design, prototype building, machining and fabrication, as well as ALL our testing (and we test a hell of a lot more stuff than you can imagine), in-house. We’ve been pinned.

But we’ve also been thinking a lot about 29ers. A fistful of workers here ride and race them, our sales manager has been screaming for them, not to mention there’s this guy who posts on mtbr.com all the time who just won’t quit it with the email guilt trips. Those factors (well, maybe not the guy on mtbr.com so much. Yes, we mean YOU, davidcopperfield…) led us to spend a lot of time over the last year and a half building and testing and refining various big wheel mules.

Big wheels have some really cool attributes, as well as some pretty unique design challenges. Given how much of a hard-on we collectively have for chassis stiffness, wheel flex and frame flex resulting from long frame tubes being torqued by big wheels were concerns for us. So was the challenge of packaging some decent suspension into a bike and still having a manageable chainstay and wheelbase length. There were also some unexpected differences in the balance of pedaling performance, acceleration and bump absorption that needed more consideration than we were used to with our current bikes.

Anyway, we did a ton of research, ended up with something we’re really stoked about, and we’re going to make a 29er. It’ll be out before Interbike, fingers crossed. It’ll have VPP suspension. It’ll weigh a whole lot less than some other bikes of similar configuration. It’ll have kickass chassis stiffness, we promise you that.

Some of you might say it’s about time. Some might see it as jumping onto the bandwagon. We’re thinking more along the lines of hijacking the damn bandwagon. This bike is gonna rule, and for those of you who’ve been holding your breath, it’ll be worth every second of the wait. Keep watching this space, and we’ll fill in details as we get closer to the launch.