I'm reasonably tall (about 6'1"). My personal theory is that the benefits in terms of traction, ride quality and "roll over" ability of the big wheels are relevant for riders of just about any size (within reason), but for bigger people there are other benfits that make 29ers even more compelling. Obviously bigger riders have a higher centre of gravity and one of the critcal issues in terms of bike handling and stability is the relationship between the riders centre of gravity and the wheels centre of rotation. With the bigger wheels the riders centre of gravity is lower relative to the wheels centre of rotation so you tend to feel like you're riding more "in" the bike rather than "on" the bike. Big pepole on big wheel bikes can achieve roughly the same relationship in terms of centre of gravity to wheel centre of rotation as smaller people on 26ers.

Personally the first time I got onto a 29er it just felt "right". There's also the added benefit that for bigger people the bikes look so much more in proportion. No more massive long headtubes, seatpost and stems. To be fair though, I've also sold Niners to shorter people (down to about 5'7") who are adamant that the benfits in terms of traction, ride quality and stability are equally relevant to them as they are to us tall timber.

We had to get Roscoe (our sponsored superstar) onto the Niner at least in part because he looked so ridiculous on his little wheel bike, and yes Slim, as soon as we get some I9's onto that bike we will post some pics.

I pretty sure 29ers are now ok for UCI races. I think there's still a couple of euro countries (Holland?) who have some sort of ban to keep cyclocross studs from poaching flat XC races on skinny tires.

I'm down in dirty old Christchurch. Yeah, I had been thinking about organising a bit of a 29er "gathering" a bit later in the year. I'm planning a trip to Vegas (Las not Roto) for Interbike and a couple of weeks of riding so I have to concentrate on the day job between now and then, so probably no other riding trips until October/November for me.

Thanks for the comments Nick, your Curtlo lokks pretty sweet to me! Funny about that head angle thing, I hated steep head angles on 26ers, and love them on Niners.

Yeah, I figured I somehow needed to make my obsession start paying me not costing me. I've got "meetings" planned in Moab, Gosseberry Mesa, Fruita...

blingpusher wrote:We had to get Roscoe (our sponsored superstar) onto the Niner at least in part because he looked so ridiculous on his little wheel bike, and yes Slim, as soon as we get some I9's onto that bike we will post some pics.

And he was riding a piece of tuperware!!!

The Niner frames aren't all that cheap so in order to keep the costs down we've actually ellected to sell dirctly to the public at this stage. We've got a website that shoud be up and running in the very near future which will be our "virtual showroom" (very much like the ninerbikes.com site in the US). We're going to do a "demo tour" this summer and hopefully have a bit of a presence at the races. As the 29er concept begins to gain a bit of traction in the marketplace we may well move to a more conventional retail distribution model but at this stage it's pretty hard to convince retailers to invest in carrying this kind of product. That said we're more than happy to work with your LBS.