Yes, sorry folks, but I thought I’d post some observations just in case there is anybody left who cares.

As I mentioned on another thread, my Trance X2 had to go into the shop for some warranty work and the very nice people at Edinburgh Bike Co-Op (Aberdeen) have lent me a Specialized Carve Comp 29er to play with while my Trance gets fixed.

For it’s first run today I picked a route that I’d seen on MTBTrails, but hadn’t got round to doing before. It was billed as a four hour ride on the Glenfiddich estate and was virtually all on Landrover tracks. Quite rocky, loose, rough, but not at all technical. The sort of bumpy XC stuff that 29ers are supposed to excel at.

Obviously, being a route I hadn’t ridden before it was hard to make direct comparisons with the Trance. But my initial impression was that there was nothing particularly dramatic about the larger wheels. Maybe it did roll a bit better, accelerate and steer a bit slower, but it was hard to tell on its own. Overall this hardtail with its 80mm of coil suspension just felt a lot like the 26″ short travel hardtails we were riding ten years ago. Certainly the sometimes quoted notion that a 29er hartail feels like a short travel full suss seemed like it was probably just marketing BS and after 4 hours of getting knocked about I was definitely missing my Trance.

Going down the larger wheel gave a bit of extra confidence, but this was more than offset by the steeper head angle (presumably to stop the steering being too slow) and while the 80mm of travel felt OK when the wheels were on the ground, coming off little drops (as little drops is all I do) I certainly noticed the lack of travel.

I’m not really knocking the bike. It didn’t feel barge like or any of the other insults that sometimes get levelled at 29ers. It felt like a very well sorted short travel hardtail. When I was feeling fresh it climbed well, when I was feeling knackered it didn’t climb so well. I’ll obviously need to ride it on some trails that I know a bit better before forming any firm conclusions. But I guess that’s my point. It wasn’t dramatically good, or dramatically bad, enough to be able to come to any conclusions from a single test ride on an unfamiliar trail.

Cheers,

Andy

It wasn’t dramatically good, or dramatically bad,

Doesn’t that say more about Specialized than 29ers?

£1k hard tail in not like a £2k 5″ travel Susser shocker! 😆

The Carve is a prime example of “29er tax”, the spec is awful for a grand. For a fair test you need a £2k 29er or a Trance 29. 😉

Fair play OP – good review.

A Trance X2 29er would be a better comparison. As someone else said, I think you get what you pay for with the Spesh Carve at that price point.

Good review though nonetheless.

I’ll obviously need to ride it on some trails that I know a bit better before forming any firm conclusions.

If your aim is comparison vs 26, yes.

It took me a couple of rides to go from sceptic to convert. Then I was getting to the ends of trails thinking “I remember that trail being longer”. I was going quicker but not getting beat up.

Good review, coming from a trance though with the fantastic me astro suspension I guess a coil shocked hard tail would be a struggle no matter what the wheel size. If I was going to buy a hard tail though I would defo have a 29 over a 26 any day

Thanks for all the positive (and negative) comments. I guess a comparison of a sub £1K hardtail with a nearly £2K full suss isn’t fair, but that’s my main frame of reference so I can’t really help making those comparisons. Also, some of the stuff you read in the press makes you think that 29ers are some magical new development that totally transforms a bike into something much better. As far as I could tell from a single ride the Carve feels pretty much like you’d expect a sub £1K hardtail to feel like.

I’m keeping an open mind for now though. While I didn’t feel any dramatic advantage to the bigger wheels I didn’t have any great objection to it either. Maybe the advantages will outweigh the disadvantages in the end, but I think it will be closer than I was expecting.

It will be interesting to see how the times compare on my usual routes although I’m not quite sure why speed is considered so important with mountain bikes (unless you are racing of course). If I want to ride fast I’ll ride my road bikes. Off road trips, for me, are measured in time rather than distance and a four hour trip is a four hour trip. I’m not sure it would be any more fun just because I went 10% further. But, as I say, I’ll reserve judgement for now.

Cheers,

Andy

To me the biggest advantages of a 29 er are better grip going up loose stuff and the ability to iron out ( to a degree) the terrain as it will skim over smaller hollows- also I can getvdown steep t.echnical stuff with more confidence as it feels more stable

While I didn’t feel any dramatic advantage to the bigger wheels I didn’t have any great objection to it either.

It depends what you’re doing really. I habitually ride a HT not a FS, and I’m not on rocky terrain so my benchmarks were different to yours Andy. I enjoyed the smoothness and speed of the 29 compared to my 26. I guess in the same duration ride I’d go further! I found the 29 harder work than my 26 actually, smoothing over the trail niggles meant longer periods in a certain gear putting the power down.

The 29 was less ‘agile’ but I realised I don’t really use the agility anyway, to the degree it mattered (this isn’t BMX racing). The flipside was the 29 was more stable, and that applied once cranked over for a bend too. It went where I pointed it.

Horses for courses. Like you say if all we care about is speed and smoothness, we’d all be roadies.

OK, time for an update. I’m afraid this may be a bit long and rambling, but I don’t have time to make it shorter. If you want the executive summary: I took the Carve Comp 29er on a route I know well, but the conclusions haven’t really changed.

So, I had a bit of time today and took the Carve up to do the Red route at Pitfichie. For those that don’t know this it consists (at least the route I did) of a fire road with a few downs but mostly climbing (and bottom gear steep in some bits) for about half an hour; a top section which has a number of rocky obstacles (natural and man made) and still more up than down, so mostly slow speed; a fast down section with switchbacks, rock “staircase”, loose rocks, singletrack etc, but not too technical then the fire road back out. So, plenty of variety and I rode it on the Trance last week in pretty similar conditions (light winds, not too hot).

The fire road climb took me 29:31 to the lookout point on the Trance last week and 29:28 today. That’s right, the 29er hardtail was a whole 3 seconds faster than the 26″ full suss bike. Of course, this is one ride on each bike. Conditions and my energy levels may have been a bit different, but I would still have expected more of a difference than that, if only because a hardtail should climb fire roads much better than a full suss.

The top section has lots of obstacles, only a few of which I can clear. Unfortunately I can’t compare times on this section as I went back and tried a few of the obstacles multiple times on the Trance, where today I was pushed for time so it was just one attempt. I wasn’t able to get over any of the obstacles that I’d failed on with the Trance and failed on a couple that I’d cleared last week. That might just be luck, or it might be that the rocks were a bit wetter today. I felt that, at very low speeds (i.e. walking pace) it was perhaps a little harder to get the larger wheels to go where I wanted, but that may have been in my head. I also felt that it didn’t cope with square edge hits as well. But that may have more to do with the difference between 80mm RockShox coil shocks and 125mm Fox air. But it was disappointing to find that I wasn’t able to suddenly bound over obstacles that had caused me problems in the past. Overall (as with the climb) I’d score this section a draw. Basically, if I want to clear more of these obstacles I’ll just need to work on my skills !

On the fast downhill section I thought the Carve felt fine. The switchbacks didn’t cause any problems and it generally went where I wanted it to at speed. I did think that it was carrying speed a little better. It wasn’t dramatic and may have been in my head, but I was quite happy with it on this section. Being a hardtail it jumped about a bit more on the bumps and looking at the times it took me 8:40 to get down today, whereas I got down in 7:34 on the Trance last week. So the Trance was over a minute faster here. even though it didn’t actually feel as fast.

The final fire road out is a repeat of some of the climb. It’s more down than up, quite fast with a surface that gives a fair bit of chatter. Here I did feel that the larger wheels made for a smoother ride and the times, kind of, support that; with the Trance taking 16:26 and the Carve 16:10. Top speed was also a bit higher at 33.5 mph (compared with 32.4 mph for the Trance).

So, on the four sections, two where a draw, one went to the Trance and one to the Carve. The overall difference was minimal though (less than a minute in a total of around one hour twenty minutes).

Where does all that leave me? Well I started out thinking that, being given a 29er to play with would allow me to decide whether I liked 29ers or not. In fact it hasn’t really helped much there. I can say what I do and don’t like about the Carve Comp. It’s not the bike for me, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the wheel size. It rides like what it is; a £1000 hardtail. I notice that it has mounts for a rack, which hints at the intended use and I’d say that it would be a great choice if you want a bike that can double up as a commuter and still hit the trails.

I’m not an expert in bike design, but I get the distinct feeling that you could build a 26″ version of the Carve with everything the same except for a slightly slacker head angle and maybe a bit more travel and it would feel pretty much the same. Maybe one would be a bit better than the other, but the difference would be so close that you’d need a pretty well designed experiment to spot it. Nothing I’ve seen in the literature on 29ers (including my own observations) comes remotely close to being a proper scientific study.

In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that the 6 hours or so that I’ve spent in the saddle on the Carve have only really served to confirm the opinions that I had at the start. I came to this test thinking that 29″ wheels were just another design option open to bike designers and I’ve come away with the same opinion. But, of course, we have to accept that any observational study like this will suffer from a huge operator bias. Somebody who really wanted 29ers to be better (e.g. if they had just spent a chunk of cash on one) would probably come to totally different conclusions. That’s just the nature of observational studies. If the observer isn’t blinded to the product they are testing they almost always get the result they want.

But it’s not all bad news. Having ridden one I’ve certainly got no objections to 29ers on principle. Although the Carve isn’t the ideal bike for me, I’m confident that a good designer could make a bike that suited me very well out of 29″ wheels.

Like all format wars the winner will be decided, not by what is best but by who has the biggest marketing budget. So, I’d expect that 29ers will dominate for a while. Then we’ll get the headlines claiming that the 26er is back! In fact, I suspect that 26″ wheels will suffer the same fate as touring bikes. Twenty plus years ago we all had road bikes with relaxed geometry that could take mudguards. Then we were sold race bikes that were cool, and stiff and fast. There were still a few beardy blokes in the CTC telling us that the old classic tourer wasn’t dead and was actually a better option for most people. But nobody listened to them. Now we’re all getting old, are realising that speed isn’t everything and are tired of beating our bodies up for our hobby (and getting a wet arse whenever it rains), we’re starting to be sold these new bikes that are more comfortable (and some of them even take mudgards). They aren’t called tourers of course (you always need a new name to sell new stuff), but they aren’t far off.

Anyway, I’m getting well off the point, so I’ll stop now. The bottom line for me is that 29ers don’t offer any huge advantages but they don’t cause any big problems either. A good bike is a good bike and when I’m next in the market for one I’ll look at whatever is available regardless of the well size.

Cheers,

Andy

I don’t have time to read that.
In other news MEH.

I struggle with long sentences, and no one still cares.

Quick a good sum-up, I thought….

A good bike is a good bike and when I’m next in the market for one I’ll look at whatever is available

Ever though of becoming an STW tester? 😉

You compared a full suss 5 inch travel 26er to a 3 inch hardtail 29er. 😕
Dumb comparison.
The biggest and most noticeable difference would have been the lack of rear suspension.
The notion that hardtail 29ers behave like short travel duellys is also complete bollocks IMO but its a phrase that gets repeated alot for some reason.

Here’s my reason for going across to the land of 29ers:

160mm AM FS Spicy chasing a 100mm Trek Superfly down a run at Afan.

Thanks for the feedback. As I said, it was a long and rambling review, which I mostly wrote in order to collect my own thoughts. But the Web is a great rubbish bin for such things, so I posted it in case it was of interest.

Given that; I cant be too upset that somebody didn’t start again from the top of the thread, but we’ve covered the stupidity of comparing a full suss with a hardtail and why it came about. To those of us that obsess about bikes these are chalk and cheese. But I made the comparison again because I was struck, not by the differences, but by the lack of difference. Yes, the two bikes feel different, but at the end of the day they are both tools designed to do a similar job and for much of the time they do it equally well. A difference of 3s on the climb and 16s on the way out is within the variability that I’ll get from day to day depending on how I feel anyway. The only area where there was really a clear difference was the “downhill” where I needed to take more care picking a line on the hardtail. But even there you can’t say that one is better than the other. Some people like the challenge of picking a line, where others love to smash through stuff with a big shit eating grin. Both are perfectly valid choices.

Given that I can’t even say that a full suss is better than a hardtail I’m now pretty sceptical that anybody can really say that they prefer a certain wheel size. You can say that you prefer one bike to another, but it is never just the wheel size that is different. In order to tease out the effect of the wheel size in isolation you’d need a very carefully designed experiment, which none of us can really be bothered to do. If you are really going to conclude that one wheel size is better based on a “race” between two different riders with different skill levels on different bikes then good luck to you 🙂

Cheers,

Andy

Andy this is the perfect bike for you then

http://www.giant-bicycles.com/en-gb/bikes/model/trance.x.29.er/11852/56867/

Its getting some good reviews

Don’t. I’ve been deliberately avoiding reading any reviews of that Trance 29er 🙂

Seat tube looks funny though doesn’t it? Hard to believe it’s 73 degrees looking at it, but I guess that’s just down to the radical kink needed to clear the wheel.

Here’s one thing that confuses me though. The chainstays on the 29er Trance are 1.7cm longer than on my 26″ model. Top tube is 0.2cm longer. Head angle is exactly the same. Fork travel is only 0.5cm different. Yet the wheelbase is only 0.8cm longer. How does that work? I guess the A-C length is shorter by more than the 5mm suggested by the travel.

Anyway, I bet it’s a great bike.

Cheers,

Andy

Andy,

I read it all. Great write-up, very thoughtful and you rightly pointed out that it had flaws. I have been wanting to read something like this for a while – you clearly don’t have a drum to beat for either 26″ or 29″.

(Somebody will be along soon to tell you that of course it’s all rideable and you could easily do the last section at 82.4 mph…!) 😀

Thank you for posting.

Got a link to the Glenfiddich trail you rode? If it didn’t take in the descent off Corryhabbie hill then that is a crime. To say it’s not technical would be wrong IMO but whatever it is it’s proper grin inducing. It’s the main reason we hike a bike up there a few times a year.

The Specialized Carve doesn’t sound like a very inspiring 29er. Thanks for the review.

I made the comparison again because I was struck, not by the differences, but by the lack of difference. Yes, the two bikes feel different, but at the end of the day they are both tools designed to do a similar job and for much of the time they do it equally well.

My life would be so much cheaper, and simpler if I agreed with you.
Well done, I’m jealous.

oneoneorage :- Thanks mate, I appreciate that. My sort of long winded navel gazing isn’t for everyone I know. To be honest I’m surprised anybody bothered to read it all. But if one person gained anything from it then it was worth posting.

devs :- The Glenfiddich trail was the one on the MTBTrails site

MTBTrails – Glenfiddich

The pictures are the ones I uploaded, so you can see what a lovely day it was. Judging what is technical is always tricky, but you are right; the descent from Corryhabbie was the toughest bit. It’s just a steep path covered in very loose rock, but it was enough to make me get off and drop the seat a bit. I’ve only been riding off road seriously for a few months though, so I just assume that anything I can ride will seem trivial to most folk.

hugor :- Don’t be jealous. Just because I’m incapable of saying that one bike is definitively better than another doesn’t stop me lusting after new toys. In fact I’ve just put the finishing touches to a build of a 2006 era Orange 5 frame that I bought off ebay in a moment of madness. Can’t think of any good reason why, other than it seemed fun at the time.

Cheers,

Andy

Paceman :- I wouldn’t want to be too negative about the Carve. It’s an ~£800 short travel hardtail and a pretty decent example of one I’d say. I reckon that sticking some better forks on it (i.e. upgrading from the Comp to the Expert or Pro models) would make it feel a lot better though. And you are right, it didn’t exactly inspire me.

Cheers,

Andy

Top of Corryhabbie down to Suie is an awesome descent. If you didn’t find it techy enough you weren’t going fast enough! Having said that the only real tech skills you require are hopping over gulleys and lateral hops at speed. Oh and drifting through curling stone sized boulders. We incorporate it as a bigger ride from Aberlour. I’ve done it on a Nomad, a 456 Summer Season and a Tallboy. Overall the Tallboy wins hands down with its 29er wheels. You need to ride it again on 26ers to appreciate the benefit, you get less beat up trust me. It’s very tough in winter (stupid actually) and spring where the trail holds variable density snow until May. Best enjoyed with mates so you can split your sides when they go through snow bridges or OTB. 🙂

I’ve done it on a Nomad, a 456 Summer Season and a Tallboy. Overall the Tallboy wins hands down with its 29er wheels.

The Tallboy is a whole different kettle of fish to the Spesh Carve, a true 26er destroyer in the right hands.

I personally found these cheap oranges to be no where near as good as my expensive apples.

The Tallboy even in Alloy spec is going to be twice the price of his Trance but it’s a good bike to start with if you want to see what the 29er fuss is all about. The Orange Gyro is also VERY surprising!

Good few moans from people because theyve clearly bought a 29er and can’t handle the difference of somebody elses opinion. I thought it was a good honest write up and can agree that it wouldve been nice if theyd given you a £2k one to play with.

Althought I think that Trance 29er looks a bit of a mess.

robowns – Member
Good few moans from people because theyve clearly bought a 29er and can’t handle the difference of somebody elses opinion. I

Well, I take a different interpretation. Andy makes some interesting observations about his experience of riding two bikes that have different design, different characteristics and different target markets among the MTB population. From this he struggles to reach any firm conclusions (hardly surprising) and in his own words concludes, “I guess a comparison of a sub £1K hardtail with a nearly £2K full suss isn’t fair.”

Hence the apples/orange type comments or the more what’s the point of the post comments. As interesting as his observations of the two bikes are, I have some sympathies with the other views!!

How about comparing an Anthem 26 v 29 or in a few months, the same with the Trances. That might stimulate more interest?

Good few moans from people because theyve clearly bought a 29er and can’t handle the difference of somebody elses opinion.

Ok, what would your response have been if he’d ridden a 29er that was more than twice the price of his Trance and he raved about how revolutionary 29ers felt and that 26ers were clearly redundant?

Especially if I then turned around and said you’ve only got your back up because you’re still stuck on 26ers and refuse to move on?

If anybody wants to send me some more expensive 29ers I’ll be happy to test them for you 🙂

Of course this was never intended to be a definitive test of the pros and cons of larger wheels. Mind you, I’ve yet to see anything that comes close to that anywhere else either. Everything I’ve seen written on the subject is highly subjective, totally unscientific and written by somebody who either has a vested interest (i.e. has just spent a lot of money on a bike) or had a lot of preconceptions. Against that background I reckon this test is probably no less valid than any others and it has allowed me to refine my thoughts a bit.

What was surprising was not that the Carve didn’t feel as good as the Trance. It’s not even that it failed to beat it on a climb (although surely a hardtal should beat a full suss on a fire road climb). It’s that, to me at least, it didn’t feel markedly different to any other £800 short travel hardtail.

Tucked away at the back of my shed I have a 20 year old fully rigid steel Specialized Rockhopper. Just for a laugh I dug this out yesterday and did a quick spin on both bikes. I didn’t do a full test over varied terrain or anything as I didn’t enjoy riding either of them enough to want to waste any more time. But you know what, the Carve really didn’t feel that different to the 20 year old Rockhopper. The front suspension helped a bit, but even 80mm of coil wasn’t that much plusher than the old steel forks.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on for long enough about this. Yes, it was a flawed test (but they all are). If you found it pointless then I’m sorry for wasting your time (and wouldn’t disagree with you really). But I had a bit of fun with it and a few people seemed to get something out of it, so that’s good enough for me.

Cheers,

Andy

I think they are fair observations made by the OP. I think there is possibly an element of being used to one bike so much that you can approach obstacles with the old bike mind in, and haven’t adjusted full to the new bike and how it behaves.

I’m just waiting on a 29er to come to me, and the aspect which you note the 29er won out on was the last section of trail where the chatter was notably less on the larger wheels. Its this type of trail I ride mostly, so thats why I went down the 29er route.

Ok, what would your response have been if he’d ridden a 29er that was more than twice the price of his Trance and he raved about how revolutionary 29ers felt and that 26ers were clearly redundant?

Back copies of What Mountain Bike are available for such a review 😉

Roverpig’s review is both interesting and valid, as TeamHurtmore said, some interesting observations about his experience of riding two bikes that have different design, different characteristics and different target markets among the MTB population.

The Tallboy is a whole different kettle of fish to the Spesh Carve, a true 26er destroyer in the right hands.

Your hands??

The Tallboy is a whole different kettle of fish to the Spesh Carve, a true 26er destroyer in the right hands.

Your hands??

Only when riding with you guys 😉