We're living in the future now. 2020. What the hell?

Aluminium frames are cool again, high pivots are too. There's a polished, readily available linkage fork on the market. Bikes made for pedalling are north of 15kg. Coil springs are on trail bikes. Shimano have the weird hub standard and the halo drivetrain. 29 is the new big thing for the second time. Transition brought about the new fork offset standard. Hans Rey is off GT. Yeti are sponsoring freeride.

What is going on? I have no idea but I feel like it's just going to get weirder.

Weirder than that? I look forward to it.

Ive allways liked the way leading link forks worked, on motorbikes. My friends 1970's 125cc euro trrail bike had leading link suspension . Under braking they extend rather than compress, good for steep downhills or heavy braking , not so good on corners though. In the 90's there was even a conversion kit for dirt bikes to make normal forks act like leading link.
They allways looked like some steampunk suspension .
Its back to the future

:-)

This one definitely doesn't extend when braking. It's somewhat more supportive under braking at the top of the travel than a normal fork but still compresses slightly. The further into the travel you go, the more anti-dive it seems to get though, and it gets very firm through the mid/end stroke.

The high speed cornering is also probably the best thing about this fork!

Weird enough for a BOD on Vital, sweet.

Figured it was guaranteed given the oddness so submitted a couple pics that I took for this:
https://nzmountainbiker.com/products-re ... mpressions

Got a review of both the frame and fork in the next issue. I've been told to stick to a ~1500 word count for bike reviews but just for the Craftworks frame I ended up at 3140. Mostly me fawning over it whoops

AgrAde wrote:We're living in the future now. 2020. What the hell?

Aluminium frames are cool again, high pivots are too. There's a polished, readily available linkage fork on the market. Bikes made for pedalling are north of 15kg. Coil springs are on trail bikes. Shimano have the weird hub standard and the halo drivetrain. 29 is the new big thing for the second time. Transition brought about the new fork offset standard. Hans Rey is off GT. Yeti are sponsoring freeride.

What is going on? I have no idea but I feel like it's just going to get weirder.

I had a short spin on one of those and I found it a lot more subtle than expected. A lot of reviews really talk up the geometry differences, but this one wasn't an extreme case at all.

Motion who made the E18 fork have just gone bankrupt......

It took me a while to get used to it, and took me a while to find a setup that got the most from it. I like it in some ways and dislike it in others. I'm not sure I'd describe it as subtle, but it's definitely not "out there".