Ha ha, I’d be the first to agree that it looks mis-matched, but I like to poke and prod at things and see what gives.
😉
Unhelpfully, it’s hard to describe why it seems to work, other than to say that it just feels ‘right’ – I couldn’t get settled on mid or low risers, nor on Carnegies here, but these just seem to work. I’m a bit of a show-pony about riding ergonomics too – a properly set up bike is such a contrast to one that’s only nearly there.
The type of riding plays it’s part maybe – I’m not a very technical rider (ie, not very good) so I tend to ride through things, rather than try to pick the front up and go around too much, but that said, making sense of stuff like tractor ruts gouged in soft greenlanes never bothers it/me.
Some of that ride assurance might [only] be because it [now] feels *very* similar to the Kona, which is fitted with 29er forks, not the 26″ versions it was built for 100 years ago, and, because I’ve ridden about 100 million miles on that bike.
Dunno why it works, but it just seems to – maybe it’d be different if I rode different stuff …
They do need more time spent to set them up properly, but it’s well worth it – I can’t see I’d ever go back to conventional bars now. They do need longer cables and hoses than you’d expect tho’ – I couldn’t *just* swap the bars as you’d otherwise just get away with, I had to remake the hoses, and use new gear cables.
If I change anything on this bike, it’ll be the forks first, these are frankly best summed up as a bit odd: they have a fair bit of sag initially, seem to blow through their travel quickly, but I’ve never found the bottom – reliability is great but at the expense of being heavy and overbuilt – happily I can lock them out on climbs or they’d be ridiculous. Even saying all that, I still think they probably are the ‘right’ fork for me / this bike … (although it’d also work brilliantly well as a fully rigid, single speed bike).
Dunno that’ll help much tho’ it all seems a bit too random?
🙄