I was reading through a few MTB magazines while on holiday and it seems that some brands seem to make flawless bikes each and every time in the reviews.

I struggle to think the Santa Cruz are as perfect as Guy Kesteven says…and even when he finds an issue he still scores the bike top notch. See also MBR and specialized 1990-2016

Am I overly sceptical?

Yes.

I guess it depends on expectations.

I think of the Giant Anthem/Trance range etc, they’re just brilliant at what they’re designed to be.. no messing, no discussion… Just great… Giant seem to make superb bikes.. but won’t set the world alight for innovation etc. They’re the Ford of bikes… which is either great or terrible, depending on how you look at it.

Marin seem quite adept at making howlers………..

Depends on your definition of bad too I suppose.
I would include aesthetics along with many other factors that go to make up a good bike and so there are plenty of very efficient bikes that are ‘bad’ to me.

Well, a bike is created by a team of designers and engineers, potentially in collaboration with suspension and component makers and using (presumably) input from sponsored athletes, consumers etc.

It’s easy enough to see that if you design one good bike then:

– your design team is confident in their ability ands will build on the design for future models;

– other designers and engineers want to work in a team that creates great bikes;

– it sells well, giving you more consumers providing feedback into the design process;

– suspension and component makers with an eye on their OEM market share will be keen to hang their bits on your future products and to accommodate your needs;

– pro riders will want to be on your bikes, providing feedback, development etc. and influencing popular opinion that your product is great…

So perhaps a virtuous circle of increasing excellence develops? I’d have thought that Specialized’s chances of designing a bad bike (given that most of their bikes are excellent) are massively lower than (say) Marin’s (who haven’t designed a good one for what, a decade?)

There are ugly bikes, poor value bikes and poor spec bikes but can you name an actual bad bike?

There are ugly bikes, poor value bikes and poor spec bikes but can you name an actual bad bike?

To me, ugly, poor value and poor spec (for price so value again) are bad.

What exactly do you mean by bad – doesn’t ride straight, frame falls apart ?

And then there’s Pronghorn. …

What exactly do you mean by bad – doesn’t ride straight, frame falls apart ?

evil?

Your question is wrong it should be ‘is it still possible to make a bad bike?’

After all there isn’t really much to a bike, I mean with the last 20 years of Full Sus & hardtail designs you’d be hard pushed to make a bad frame and the rest comes from Shimano, SRAM, Fox, DT, Mavic etc. and just works.

depends who is reviewing the bike. some people like different things. I ride an alu 26 inch wheels bike with horst link suspension, thats not going to be as cool as the latest 650b VPP santa cruz bronson. My bike is unlikely to win any bike review

Perhaps the question is also “do those brands send a bad bike for review”?

I’ve sent other stuff for review (not bikes but clothing & parts) with the bike mags and we sat down first and decided what suited different magazines and what we had that was good, and what not to send. We also once sent a brand new product straight off the first shipment for review… that had a huge flaw missed by the design team and got a terrible review score. Lesson learned on that one!

I struggle to think the Santa Cruz are as perfect as Guy Kesteven says…and even when he finds an issue he still scores the bike top notch.

Well I for one can’t ride them, even in their modern 29er/long/low/slack iteration it still feels like trying to ride a roller skate down the stairs on a double decker bus. Something about them (geometry? suspension?) just feels like it’s constantly trying to throw me over the front.

Which either makes them shit, or reviews subjective. Maybe Guy really does like them.

DFS! 😆

Guy Kesteven

turn the page

Isn’t this just “are some brands favourites of certain MTB magazines and thus can do no wrong”, coupled with an accusation that the brands pay for good reviews 😉

I’m always a bit suspect of Whyte’s constant top scoring for example 😉

I mean with the last 20 years of Full Sus & hardtail designs you’d be hard pushed to make a bad frame and the rest comes from Shimano, SRAM, Fox, DT, Mavic etc. and just works.

You’d have thought so, right? I know people who are on their 3rd Whyte frame, and the person isn’t some hooning looney.

Having met a few Bike Journos I genuinely think they do the best they can, I don’t see any of them driving around in blinged up Bentleys on all their back-handers…They tend not to be that impressed with bling kit like XTR and whatever.

philxx1975 – Member
Guy Kesteven
turn the page

Not just me then. That’s good to know.

There must be a few formulas for different types of bikes, and as long as you generally stick to those the bike will be fine. Some will be lighter than others and some will be more durable. Then you get light and durable and pay the price for it. Stray to far away from the standard formulas and you could either find the next big thing or make something awful.

Some people just want to find fault with stuff though, but most people wouldn’t notice a major difference between most bikes.

Whats the value in saying bikes are shit?

Kesteven’s a pure fanny tbh, I hadn’t really noticed for a long time… (I just don’t pay much attention to who’s doing the review, unless it’s Jones, when you can’t really miss it because afer 4 pages you have no idea if it’s good or not, all you learn is that they don’t do an xxxxxl frame)

…but then he did that amazing review of the carbon 456 where it was simultaneously so flexible that you couldn’t pedal it, but so stiff that he was having to stop halfway down short descents to shake his arms out. And you just think either the fork was completely destroyed and he was too incompetent to notice, or he was just making it all up. But either way, hopeless.

But yeah, no manufacturer’s going to send in a bike they think is bad, and even the most reviewed brands rarely get everything they make reviewed, so they do have a lot of control there.

That c456 review was nuts. Sure it’s not the most flexy of bikes but nothing the review said related to my experience.

Added to that C456, earlier during a quick go their first impression was that that frame was comfy, fast and great geo wise! Pinch of salt taken since.

I don’t think Giant make any bad bikes?

The brakes on their Propel are/where known to be a bit iffy but that’s it.

What’s always bothered me about GK reviews is what quantity of flies and cowshit he must have swallowed over the years as his gob is constantly wide open. Did a mag shoot with him about 15 years ago (remember Maximum Mountainbike?) he was riding a Cannondale which had come out of the delivery box that morning, we got to a slippy off camber slate downhill and he came past me on foot having pulled the wrong brake and gone otb. It was set up US spec. AFAIK he lives about 10 miles from the SC importer Jungle, you do the maths.

pistonbroke – Member

Did a mag shoot with him about 15 years ago (remember Maximum Mountainbike?) he was riding a Cannondale which had come out of the delivery box that morning, we got to a slippy off camber slate downhill and he came past me on foot having pulled the wrong brake and gone otb.

TBH there’s a lot of reviewers that you don’t want to see on a bike… I’ll not name names but there was one in MBR I think, where they were enthusing about how their new bike took an innerleithen enduro race in its stride and was so fast and capable- the reviewer was mostly seen walking down the hard bits, and finished something like 10 minutes behind me. And I am not that good. That’s just plain ridiculous.

(not saying you have to be a riding god to review bikes, Chipps is a great example, his reviews are honest, he’s not making up shit about how great the bike he’s testing is at 50 foot gaps and vertical innerleithen deathmud, he’s testing it as One Of Us.)

Urm

I think sometimes it’s not companies making a bad bike but making the wrong bike, if it’s not following the current trends then even if it’s a good bike iys not going to compare to other brands which might be at the cusp of what’s popular.

You can certainly buy a bike that doesn’t suit you – Pivot, for example, make great bikes, but the Mach 6 is so ridiculously short in reach that even an XL would be way too short for a lot of average riders – equally, there are tall blokes who love them.

And you can buy bikes with flaws, like poor bearing life or snappy chainstays.

But most decent mountian bikes have pretty well sorted components form the big brands, have geometry that’s in a reasonable ballpark, and most frames are made by large vendors who know what they’re doing.

And brands like Santa Cruz have essentially been refining their designes for years, so even if they’r enot the most radical, they’re generally the result of a lot of years of polishing and most issues are ironed out.

We’ve never had it better, basically.

I had a go on a Mk1 SC Bullet recently – it was like riding a pair of scissors. Bloody awful. Had decent forks and shock but was literally the worst riding thing I’ve ever been on. Thing was, we’d been taking the piss out of the rider all week saying how rubbish he was (during a week in Morzine) and that he minced about over everything. Then he swapped bikes with us for a bit and we realised he was actually a riding god. I’m sure the Bronsons and 5010’s are pretty good but the older stuff is awful.

I’ve yet to ride an Orange I didn’t like (probably cos they’re all the same!) and most Cannondales I’ve ridden have been pretty good if not great.

Read this recently, it was interesting for 2 reasons.

Firstly, you can sort of see why the designers did what they did, it just opened flaws elseware.

Secondly, because I’m been riding and reading about bikes for a decent amount of time now, longer than all the bikes listed were out.

I don’t remember any negative reviews of them when they were new.

6 Flawed Bikes.

P.S. ignore the ‘brillaint’ bit, no flawed anythign can be brillaint, and none of these are brillaint.

Marin Kona seem quite adept at making howlers

Do I get 1/10 for an attempt at humour?

There are some bad bikes, heavy lumps with silly angles etc.
BUT…………………… a thousand times
Bikes should be judged with their contemporaries, some people seem to be a little too far in front of the wave, others behind – the ones that win the praise are the ones riding it.
Also some people don’t like certain things, it’s either real or perceived but it really doesn’t matter to them.
Size – again people get really hung up on the letter it’s not actually important at all, what is more important is how the bike is who cares if the letter on the label doesn’t match the other bikes.
Bad Kit on good frames… the one where the accountant won the argument turns the right frame into the lump
Great kit on average frames – such an amazing value bike..

then there is the bike where they strangely drop the mould or stamp on it till it’s dead by accident. When SC launched the APP stuff there was the nickle (short travel) and butcher (longer travel) a shop employee and good rider had been on the demo – the description was the Butcher put the devil on your shoulder and told you to go harder and got you out of it, the nickle was the same except the devil sat there and laughed as you binned it.

Sometimes it doesn’t work

Most bikes these days are ‘good’ in that they do the job and flatter a rider while representing reasonable value for money…you get the odd anomaly where a manufacturer specs a 70mm stem and narrow bars on a supposed AM/enduro machine but as said above; thats usually the accountant winning out over the design team and is easily remedied once bought and the mismatched components sold on eBay etc…

For me it comes down to frame/geometry and suspension….brakes are about the limit on what i’m prepared to splash out to make a ‘bad’ bike good for me…and with excellent Shimano Deore brakes for around £75 a set its no hardship….if i have to spend £500 on a new fork to make the bike good then something has gone wrong.

Reliability should be taken into account, with some of the more boutique brands costing the same as a decent second hand car i dont think its unreasonable to expect good (if not total) reliability from major components….sorry to offend owners but if i’d spent 5K+ on an Evil that then broke i’d be royally p##sed off, in fact if i’d gone direct sales and bought a YT for less than 2K and the frame broke i’d still be cheesed off….major load bearing components like that should last years not a few rides before something cracks, snaps or wears out….

….so i suppose yes, it is possible to make a bad bike.

In recent riding times i’ve had a varied selction of hardtails and full sussers and none of them have let me down….a selction of On-Ones, a Ragley, a Dialled Alpine, a Saracen Ariel, a Trance and a Dartmoor Hornet have all ranged from budget frame only builds to 2K+ full bikes….off the top of my head nothing currently on the market jumps out at me as being bad (if it works as intended!), certainly theres nothing i’ve considered in recent years and dismissed for being a ‘bad’ bike….in fact quite the opposite, theres so many bikes out there and such little time (and funds) to try them all!

Santa Cruz, up until recently were an independent outfit with a relatively small team of designers and engineers who are enthusiastic about what they do. They made good bikes because they’ve operated in a high price point and haven’t had to build bikes to please the accountants and shareholders.

Under those circumstances it’s easier to put out strong products. If they have needed to get a bike out at a low cost they spec it with a cheap parts, the reviewers know that so don’t hold the brand accountable for performance of ‘the kit’.

Plus they’re only building frames. Compared with brands like Cannondale, Santa Cruz are very conservative with their bike design.

There’s no reason Santa Cruz should put out a bike that sucks. Their current VPP bikes are evolutions of tried and tested designs going back to the classic Blur.

It’s reassuring to know not many people place too much weight on magazine reviews when deciding what bike to buy next. If they did, I probably wouldn’t have sold as many Dialled Bikes frames.

I always thought word of mouth from other riders was more important than mag reviews anyway.

Are dialled still up and running, Mike?

Always liked the products, would like to see new ones

Yes George, Dialled Bikes is still going. Thanks for asking.

Life in general (and my other bike brand, FTB BMX) took precedence over Dialled Bikes for a while. It was also frustrating designing MTB frames when the industry seemed in a constant state of flux over wheel sizes, headset standards, number of gears, etc.

However, I recently moved to America and am beginning to dedicate a bit more time to Dialled Bikes again.

Literally. No. Credence. To. Magazine. Reviews. Ever.

They’re evidently just seat-of-the-pants highly objective biased nonsense…