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Did a 55km, 1900m ride yesterday, and some winch and plummet enduro trails today in Hafren Forest.
My thoughts are, for long distance the hardtail is (unsurprisingly) more efficient than my 150/160mm full suspension.
My bum did feel a little tender, but not any more so than I think it would have done on the full sus.
Downhill, it’s great fun, but definitely gives more feedback than the full sus. If my body position is wrong then I very quickly start to get bounced off the pedals on the downhills. Similarly if I brake in a silly place, the back end gets super squirmy. Which is good, because it stops me comfort braking. Jumps and drops it encourages a full send approach, just because that makes them feel comfortable and smoother.
All in all, the same good techniques apply to riding it, but more so, as it’s less forgiving.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it feels to get back on my full sus after a few months riding the hardtail.
I’d be interested to know if rider weight makes a difference to comfort on an HT.
In my riding groups most are committed FS riders, but some will use an HT for longer more adventurous rides. They complain about feeling beaten up, which is something I don’t particularly notice.
It could be just because I only own hard tails. But I don’t feel any different after riding a hired FS. But I wonder if being a somewhat heavier (30kg) than most of them makes a difference. Relative weight difference to the bike meaning I’m not getting shaken about as much???
Seriously all this shittalk.
Just get on with it whatever you’re riding
Heretic!
If the geometry is like your full-sus then you don’t need to change much/anything else.
Yes and no. The head angle steepens as the fork compresses on a hardtail, but with a full suss bike, both ends go squish. This means that an already long TT on a modern hardtail (if it's doing the long, low, slack thing) will get *longer*.
I went from a Stache with slightly old school geo (but not that old school) to a Fuse M4 which has the same ETT as my full suss bike; I pretty much just swapped everything over. It wasn't a bad change at all - the Fuse just feels a lot more stable on the steep bits and a bit less fun on twisty bits. I like twisty bits, btw.
One other thing is that the forks I swapped over have the 'old' 52mm offset, and the Fuse uses 44mm offsets, so if anything the handling should be faster with the forks I was using.
The thing is: it's a bike you can ride offroad, and it's a bit harder to ride really smoothly on it than if you have a foot of travel at each end, which irons out lots of little mistakes. I remember going from a Mountain Cycles San Andreas that had sort of become my default bike back to my DeKerf about 20 years ago and having my hat absolutely handed to me by that bike on a fairly pedestrian trail, simply because I'd got a bit lazy.
Long and short, it might take a bit of getting used to, but a change is most definitely as good as a rest.