I heard a rumour that the published HA is pulled out of a hat. Has anyone actually measured the head angle of their 456? Wondering what it woudl be on mine with a 130mm Magura (same a-c as a 120mm Rockshox) with 25-30% sag…

depends what fork you have on but yeah, published and manufacturing do differ

66.7 so I have been told for the normal 456

Generally the numbers are close enough to be used (assuming you believe they were all measured with the same fork and no sag). I had a 456SS (supposedly 66.6) and you could see it was slightly slacker than my intense, which was supposed to be 68.

Why d'you need to know? I mean it's not like it's going to make any difference to your day really is it? How does say; 69 deg differ from say 68.5 deg to the overall scheme of things?

I'm guessing it's going to be somewhere between a really really slack 65 deg DH, and a rather flicky/nervous 72 deg of a race bike…That's narrowed it down a bit…

Hmmm. I know it's not really that important, but I still want to know. Maybe I will try to measure it meself.

it's easy, just get an angle finder, check it against a spirit level, measure on a flat floor then flip the bike end to end and remeasure, average and then take off 1 degree per 20mm of sag.

it's not important, but once you find a set up you like it's nice to quantify it for comaparison against other bikes you may buy in future.

Exactly – what james-o said 😉

but then one day you'll ride a very different-angled bike that's nicely balanced in other ways and feels great and all your benchmarks go out of the window.. )

According to MBR April 2009, the head angle is 66.7 degrees and the seat angle 69.2 degrees with no sag on a 140mm QR Revelation.

MBR didn't realise that this was a 456 at the time of the review, but the colour is correct and the top tube and seat stays are in line at either side of the seat tube. On the standard inbred the seat stays meet the seat tube above the top tube.

Why the worry about the static head angle?

Static head angles kinda mean naff all on a hardtail running a suspension fork. A Rigid bike, or a full sus bike with similar travel both ends, fair enough, but on a hardtail with a suspension fork it only really matters to the man drawing the design in the first place really!

Hmmm

I've been thinking about this too. I'm about to buy a fs to replace my ti456. The only problem seems to be that most of the bikes that fall into the 140mm "do it all" catagory don't seem to have as slack a head tube "on paper" as I'm guessing the 456 has- and I do like the slack angle on the 456.

Oh well, I'm testing a bunch of bikes tomorrow so I can make my own mind up rather than what it looks like of paper.

One question, does anyone know if published(magazine reviews, company websites etc) angles are taken at rest unloaded or with sag applied? If unloaded I guess the head angle of the FS will be slacker in action as the back end squats down a bit. Conversely a hardtail will steepen a bit. All conjecture mind.

Do you think WikiLeaks would be interested?

😆

headangle, smegangle

is it raggable? fun to ride? who cares (unless you have a mondraker summun with a 60 degree HA)

oh, and you can get an app for that…..