Behold The Pole Machine

The Pole bike company (confusingly from Finland) has always done things a little differently. And rather than go to Taiwan to make a carbon premium frame, it decided to machine the whole thing from billet aluminium and put it all together in Finland.

The red decals make it faster, right?

Having announced the Machine, back in November last year, Pole was showing the final pre-production models at Sea Otter. The bike is different to anything on show here, being machined from solid billet 7075 aluminium and then bolted and bonded together.

Channels are machined into the downtube for cable routing

Natural finish as standard.

It’s not just the construction of the bike, but the design is pretty unique too. The Machine is a long travel 29er, with 180/160mm travel. The asymmetric suspension bike also features some pretty radical geometry, with a super-long reach (longer than a ‘Long’ Geometron)

Single sided shocks. There’s an air shock and coil shock version

The zip tie game here is strong

The frame design is nearly finished – the shock hardware here isn’t final though.

The Pole Machine features a 63.9° head angle and a super steep 79° seat tube angle. Why so steep? The bike has some long reach figures and it’s to keep your weight over the front wheel more. How long? This Large frame has a 510mm reach and a 1336mm wheelbase.

Long enough for you?

There’s a coil version too.

Pole reckons that the frame weight will be around 3.3kg without shock. Complete bikes will be around €6950, with the air-shock version going for €3450 for the frame.

You can see a lot of the bolts that help join the two halves of the frames

There are nine machined pieces in every frame

With the saddle down , you can see how long the bike looks.

Pole’s Machine has been one of the most talked about bikes at this year’s Sea Otter. It’s refreshing to see that you can still make a splash without having to have a carbon fibre super bike.

Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 23 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

Comments (5)

PaulPaul April 22, 2018 at 11:48 am

Jeez what an abortion of bike! Those brackets holding the shock on, they’d look out of place on a £250 BSO let alone a multi-thousand $$$ “super bike” (not to mention putting torsional loads due to an offset shock into the top tube is just stupid from an engineering perspective…….)

JamesJames April 22, 2018 at 12:35 pm

“putting torsional loads due to an offset shock into the top tube is just stupid from an engineering perspective”

The frame is made in halves so why not make one side with that in mind. You could do that with carbon and CNC lets you use Al in a way you couldn’t with tubes. Flip that shock to TT mount over to get a different geo. Seems reasonable to me. The whole CNC thing, well if it works and tests OK, why not.

ChippsChipps April 22, 2018 at 6:18 pm

As the story says, those brackets are the bits that aren’t finished yet, Max 🙂

obidogobidog April 23, 2018 at 4:19 pm

Dayum, good job you’re around Maxtorque, you know, I bet they hadn’t considered how the shock forces went into the frame… You could have just saved the day!

cynic-alcynic-al April 27, 2018 at 9:42 pm

$3K+ for 3.3kg frame. News making cos it’s a daft laborious way of making one.

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