looked at a fuel ex8 today
seemed really stretched vs my sj 120

looked nice, was light, good spec with the dcrv shock / abp back end

anybody come off an sj to one of these ??

also looking at the trance

opinions ??

ps tend to ride fire roads / woods / odd trail centre

No but I do vaguely remember there being quite a significant difference.

IS it something you could sort easily with an inline post (or just shifting the saddle) and a shorter stem.

If you are geeky enough you can dig up the geometries and compare the effective top tube lengths.

Coupl of us ride Stumpys in our club and plenty of others the treks. They all seem like good bikes, I chose the stumpy as it was cheaper at the time but would have happily had either. No idea on the Trance, was well reviewed when it came out.

Larger treks use to have very long stems, easily solved

spesh reach is also more seat height dependent as the seat post isn’t pointing at the bottom bracket. My hunch, based on a day on an fsr xc and owninga fuel ex is that the fuel ex has longer chain stays. For whatever reason I couldn’t keep the front wheel on the ground up hill on the spesh, but it was much esier to loft the front……

I test rode a ’10 Stumpy FSR Expert & EX9 on the same day.

I wanted to prefer the EX as it looked better, had nicer finishing bits on it & the bike I wad replacing was a Stumpy.

But, the Stumpjumper for me blew the EX out of the water. It was more confidence inspiring, the suspension seemed to work better, it had better traction when climbing on loose ground & the front end gripped better through tight singletrack.
We spent a while fiddling with the suspension on the EX, whereas the Stumpjumper was as it was when we left the shop & it just worked. 2 others who rode both felt the same.

Cheers all

Some interesting comments 😉