Review: Salsa Timberjack SLX 29 – how will you ride yours?

This review is part of the Bike Test feature ‘Hard Tails for Trails’ from Issue 137 of Singletrack Magazine. Price:  £1,870.00 From: Lyon Equipment lyon.co.uk Salsa has been around since the early 1980s, and in recent years the brand has become synonymous with the carrying of luggage over improbably long distances, or to impossibly remote places, and quite probably at a pace that will hurt. They’re bikes for the serious adventurer who is willing to pay to have kit that works. This Timberjack is a slight departure from that image. With an alloy frame and some pocket-friendly components, this is a hardtail that sits within reach of the rider who might like an adventure sometimes, but for whom ‘far from home’ might be a couple of rolling hills away from the local pub, rather than a thousand miles of tundra.  The frame is fairly typically ‘modern trail bike’ in its geometry, with a 66.35° head angle and 75.1° seat tube angle. Reach is 454mm on our test medium, and there’s a trick in the tail with its adjustable dropouts, giving a chainstay length of 420mm or 437mm. It is an either/or – it’s not a sliding dropout, but instead is a separate bolt-on dropout with two different bolt threads to give the 17mm difference. It’s an easy switch to do – so easy you could manage it on the trail if for some reason you wanted to.  To remind us it is a Salsa, you get a pair of top tube...

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