I just read about the Orange Giro I mean the 5 29er.

1) Its a Five
2) £3000 gets you cheapo cranks, no uppy/downy seatpost, apparently 9 Speed.
3) Fugly

Not much of a fan of the Orange brand at the moment…

3K is a bit steep for what you get.

I agree that it’s no looker, and I quite like the look of a Five.

I thought the spec didn’t look too unreasonable for the money all things considered, although Orange’s factory builds have never been particularly inspiring, especially in terms of wheels and drivetrain.

I imagine it should sell quite well, 140mm 29ers being quite fashionable of late.

I’d like to see one in a decent build – 1×10, wide, flat bars, good colour, good rubber etc…

Fox 34s, not 32s, with Kashima, and Kashima rear, not OEM, and it’s 10 speed actually…

Only rival bike I can think of right now is Tallboy LT or a Niner WFO which are crazy money.

Santa Cruz will give you X5/X7 mix with Sektors for £2900 on Tallboy LT, makes the Five29 seem alright tbh!

or the el guapo 29er when it finally arrives. which will be half the price.

oranges where designed in the dinosaur times!

hate the front triangles on all their bikes!
hate the single pivot!

its the 911 of the mtb world.

i do like the fact they are made in england

Orange are always up for spec tweakage. A few choice upgrades (Hope for Avid, say) and most whinges concerns will be taken care of.

I must admit I don’t understand the assertion that ‘it rides like a 160mm 26er’

Eh? How’s that work then?

For a 140mm 29er look at the Cube stereo 140 race 29. Full carbon, cracking spec £2900.

What’s it for? Why would I buy this? I’ve demo’d – and enjoyed – a Five, but I can’t really work out why I would buy a 140mm 29er as opposed to a 160mm 26er for example.

As someone trying to narrow down which bike to buy I am HATING having a choice of wheel size.

As someone who has been riding 29er for a good few years, IMO 26 are the ones to go for in the long travel variety, much better on the technical stuff.

Would double up as an effective boat anchor…..

x5 & x7 for £3000…HAHAHAHA they can kiss my ass!

2) £3000 gets you cheapo cranks, no uppy/downy seatpost, apparently 9 Speed.

£3k gets you a frame designed and built in the UK with all the benefits of a normal Five – reliability, fun handling, easy maintenance, easy to find ‘standards’ (headset, bb, shocks, etc) and great back up when you need it.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but can anyone seriously say they can tell the difference in performance/weight/etc between the Raceface crank and, say, an XT when riding? Surely a great frame and suspension is worth investing in, more so than drivetrain?

Surely a great frame and suspension is worth investing in, more so than drivetrain?

Agree. Drivetrains wear out/break relatively quickly, particularly the expensive ones 🙂

with all the benefits of a normal Five

Someone please tell me what these exclusive benefits are? I owned a 5 and didn’t notice any unique characteristics

Not necessarily unique, but take a new Stumpy for example. They ride well but try getting a new headset for one. IME Orange’s on the whole are easy to live with. Whether new or five years old you can still easily get suitable parts without any hassle, as well as being great to ride.

Each to their own of course, but £3000 Gets you a decent spec in my mind. Yes there’s no dropper, and crappy avids, but every complete bike that im interested in needs a few tweaks in the spec. I reckon the normal run will be a better bet, and spec it the way you want.

you either like oranges or you don’t I guess.

I can’t really see the point of starting a thread to say that you don’t like a bike. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. By all accounts, plenty will. Also, surely we’ve done the “why does a Five cost £3K” argument to death.

So, leaving all that to one side, why a 140mm 29er with a 66.5 degree head angle? Are Orange getting in early on the new wave of long travel hard hitting 29ers or have they missed the point and bigger wheels only really make sense for HT and short travel FS bikes?

The “it rides like a 160mm 26″ bike” line is the old argument that a 29er feels like a 26″ bike with 20mm more travel. But there are a few problems with that logic:

1) it only applies when your wheels are on the ground
2) if you want more travel why not just have more travel? It’s cheaper and weighs less.

It’s a bit ugly, and not good value, but that might still be worth it if it works as well as it might. I want a go, anyway.

Can’t wait to try one of these. Been holding off getting a new 5 so I can demo one 😮

I love my five its fun to ride and I have ridden everything on it right up to full on dh tracks, if I can ride dh tracks on it why do I need bigger wheels when for years mags have been telling me saving weight on wheels will have the biggest impact on the way a bike rides now they are ramming bigger heavier wheels down my neck!

As someone who has been riding 29er for a good few years, IMO 26 are the ones to go for in the long travel variety, much better on the technical stuff.

This +1.

Orange & 29, amazed you don’t all own 2 by now 🙂

Who cares about the price it must be better than everything ever invented……

nah, boring as shit steel hardtail 29ers are where its at now for the lifestyle mountain bikers, oranges are too mainstream.

As I said on the comments, I don’t want to like it, and its too expensive, but I quite want one. Or at least a go on one. Then hot cake sellers will use this as a benchmark for fast selling things….

pop a 26 & 29 (matching colours obviously) on the back of your Audi for the real effect though….. does look rather expensive like normal Orange prices.

As someone who has been riding 29er for a good few years, IMO 26 are the ones to go for in the long travel variety, much better on the technical stuff

+1

With a 66 deg head angle its going to have a silly long wheelbase and be rubbish in tight twisty stuff. Saying that Id still like to try one.

looks ok , a few upgrades , should be nice, still prefer the pop of a 26 bike.

As someone who has been riding 29er for a good few years, IMO 26 are the ones to go for in the long travel variety, much better on the technical stuff. Agreed again big wheels suit my local stuff and trail centres but much prefer 26,s on tech steep stuff!

I spotted a Black and Orange one in Cycle Surgery back in Aug and it looked ok from a distance, then I popped over to it and took a peek at the wobbly welds and horribly wobbly rear swing arm, grab the wheel at the top and pull backwards and forwards and watch as the wheel flexes 80mm or so.. I’m not too sure I’d like the wobbly feeling when hacking the trails.

Nicolai Helius ac 29er already available in 140mm variation with slack ha….

I saw something about new shock mounts leading to a lighter downtube. So maybe the 140mm Five29 wont actually be any heavier than the 120mm Gyro overall.

Anybody know whether the Five29 is 140mm at both ends. Even with a 110mm rear the chainstays on the Gyro are getting a bit long and presumably your options for controlling this are pretty limited with SP and a straight seat tube.

Still, not long to wait for the first (undoubtedly gushing) ride reports now I guess.

Well Stif have a demo day coming up so if they can get hold of one for that I’ll give you a full report 😀

bikebouy – Member

horribly wobbly rear swing arm

That’s one of the things I like about Orange tbh! Matter of taste, stiff = direct but flexy can add grip, as the bike can distort to track the ground. It’s kinda like horizontal suspension. But it is quite alarming to look at, I thought I’d broken my mate’s 224

boring as shit steel hardtail 29ers

As any monkey knows, it’s not boring if you can throw it around.

As always everyone on here is trotting out the same crappy ilinformed arguments. If the leverage rate hasn’t been compromised on this bike (by accommodating the larger wheel/swing arm) this thing must be the fastest descending bike outside a DH bike. Well, at least until the Enduro 29″.

“It will be rubbish in tight terrain with that wheelbase” Yeah like all downhill bikes.

“Just by a 26″ with more travel” This thing will eat a 160mm 26″. More cornering and climbing grip, more stable geometry = faster descending, lower rolling resistance so less effort required overall.

The only thing this bike will struggle with is weight. Eventually Orange will have to go for composite frames but when they do their bikes will exceptional as they have one of the only designs that actually suit being made from CF.

JCL – Member

this thing must be the fastest descending bike outside a DH bike

Yeah, that sounds like a well informed argument 😕 Have you considered a job at MBR?

It’s catching up…

As a comparison and to try to explain how this kind of bike and geo feels..This is my 150mm, it’s long at 1185mm, which is similar to a slack geo 26 (64.5/65deg) has short chainstays (for a 29) and I think works well in the twisties, yes you do have to use a more body English, which doesn’t concern me, and has a 66.7 deg head angle, the payback comes when you point it downhill on singletrack or in gnarr of (almost) any kind (on a DH rock field I’d rather have 180/200mm travel but it’s not designed for that)..it weighs 28.5lb with pedals.

I have some friends who have ridden the Orange in Proto and they say it’s similar to mine which makes sense, if not quite as manouvarable, which could be chainstays or BB height or lots of other things, could just be perception.
This Orange is also very similar to the production Nicolai AC29 which is 140mm and 67.5 deg, as previously pointed out, which is also unsurprisingly a monster descender and very confidence inspiring, but also a good pedalling bike for long distance ‘normal’ riding, just need to keep the weight down. From what I know the geo of the El Guapo is also similar, Mr Oxley likes the El Guapo a lot and I have a lot of respect for his opinion.
The frame weight of mine is almost the same as the equivalent 160mm 26″ AM bike.

I have had 160mm 26″ bike and I prefer this for ease of use, stability and confidence inspiring descending, especially entering corners and on rough, but not stoopid big rocks, ground, it goes without saying that if you jump big, for jumpings sake, more travel is better, if you jump to maintain your speed there’s not much in it. I wanted this bike for big days out and to be good in the alps singletrack and on Enduro races like The SuperEnduro series and Trans Provence, to be fast downhill but pedal better than a long travel 26″ bike.

In really nadgery tight tree tech it’s more of a handful than a similar 26′, again no surprise, but it’s a different bike, closer to a 150/160mm 65deg HA 26 than something in the 66s and perfectly manageable in those situations.

All in all, like most of these things, horses for courses, know what you like to ride and buy accordingly.

This picture was at the top of the descent at Golspie where I rode the same descent back to back on a slack 160mm 26″ bike, swopping with my (local) riding buddy and on that terrain I was way quicker on the 29er than I was on the 26″, so was he. It was a top end 26″, 66deg Labyrinth Agile with BOS both ends.. i have to say though I loved both for different reasons. The 26″ was loads of fun, really quite intense, was faster steering, but to me it felt almost nervous, probably cos I’m used to the 29 now. i could relax on the 29 and just concentrate on the trail and going fast. So if you like the kind of riding that you would find at Golspie you’ll probably like this kind of bike. Other similar stuff is the Banshee Prime, Transition Covert 29 (was the bandit last year), sort of the tallboy LT but that’s a lot steeper without an Angleset and at those angles (I have run mine as steep as 67.8deg) is noticeably more of a handful downhill, but with the corresponding benefit of being easier in the nadgery stuff.

I think people need to stop comparing them to 160mm 26″ bikes. They feel very different to ride and both ‘genres’ have their positive and negative sides.

P9100352

Race Face instead of XT, imagine what your friends will think 😆

Who cares???