Forum menu
I’m unconvinced that anyone under about 6ft2 needs a 500mm reach. If it was actually faster then more Pro’s would be riding their sponsor’s XL’s with slacksets or we’d see a return to one off alloy frames that only shared a silhouette and sometimes a tubeset with the one you could buy on the shop floor.
Let's not confuse what works for racers (ie the fastest possible) with what works for everyone else.
On those Pinkbike EWS bike vid checks a lot of racers seem to use a size smaller frame than what you'd want to use for everyday use.
chiefgrooveguru
The prototype Geometron combined all three but the effective seat angle looks to be only 74 deg. However I bet Geometron were the first to steepen that up but I’m not sure when it happened…
77 here, on the early production bikes (there was ain initial run of 25, i think)
Very little between effective and actual here
Scienceofficer
IMO niche and small scale purveyors have been pushing LLS since 2012/13
I've seen people claim Pole were ahead of it all, although the company was only formed in 2015
As someone who bought/demoed a decent amount of bikes between 2011 and 2018 I'd say the general consensus has it right:
2010-13 had niche brands doing bits of it but no-one with the whole package.
2013-14 saw long reach/short stem go mainstream with Nicolai leading the way.
2015-6 saw smaller brands experimenting with LLS to varying success.
2017 on and the likes of Cotic, Bird and the like had it pretty much sorted.
2018 saw the mainstream manufacturers catch up.
Then the whole 29er thing blew up and the geometry got better and better for all bikes.
As soon as one manufacturer went all-in on the new geometry the rest quickly followed as through group tests and demo days the ones that were behind the trend really stood out.
The Mondraker and Geometron influence has been really significant.
That was exactly my point, well the opposite of it.
All but one of those Large (or equivalent) bikes in your list is closest in reach to the shortest Geometron, and the longest is still shorter than their 2nd size.
And all are the same size or shorter than the previously mentioned Specialized Pitch, which was cost-cut version of the Enduro frameset from 13 years ago.
The Geometron might be the first bike to put a 515mm reach on its Median ("Longest") size, but it's also still pretty much the only brand to do it too.
So if the question is "the a date at which modern geometry was broadly introduced?", then the reason why it's not related to the geometron is in 2 parts.
1) Longer/Lower/Slacker bikes with ~6" travel that match current bikes have been available for a lot longer than that.
2) The Geometron doesn't/didn't/won't influence what the majority of people have bought and ride. There hasn't been an industry shift to suddenly copy it.
The real problem/question is why some brands previously just put more travel on XC bike geometry to make them trail bikes rather than shrinking their longer travel ones. And why was there half a decade where designers churned out 29ers with steep geometry, which are really what made the subsequent 8 years of bikes look longer and slack despite it really just being marketing re-hash for going full circle to where we were over a decade ago before 26" wheels died out.
Thanks all - good learning for me.
@nedrapier - I get what you're saying about the Dekerf and probably the Niner, and as 99% of my riding is (relatively!) fast, flowing singletrack, nothing too technical or certainly gnarly, I've always been v content.
It's a slight case of fear of missing out, but more so just trying to understand the whole geo thing as I find it gets a bit confusing!
Some of this “modern” geometry is just returning mountain biking to its roots, after the road bike obsessions of short rear ends and snappy steering messed up headangles and chainstay lengths
It's not quite as simple as this obviously, but there's a lot of truth in it. I have been riding and racing off road for 50 years, in the early days we were on single speed rigid that were steepish and more in liking to road bikes of the day. Then along came the first mtbs and they were really slack in comparison - the Dawes Ranger in the early 80's was a gate with wheels, with something like a 67' or less head angle and enough space between rear tyre and seat tube for a babies head. Within a couple of years I was on 72 74, 16 inch chainstays and a very high bottom bracket. We've been working our way back from then ever since it seems. So although I feel we have seen all the extremes before, it's just the combinations are different now I think.
At the end of the day they were all brilliant in their time, and I loved riding each and every one over the same terrain through the years. What is interesting is that the triple triangle style frame still hasn't been bettered
I'm actually planning to sell my second batch (which means it has internal dropper routing) Geometron frame, size Long, at the start of December (when my Swarf 155 arrives). Looking for £600 posted with Float X2 shock (that needs a service), Hope headset, and seat clamp.
Geometry as follows:
2015 Yeti SB5c was reported as longer and slacker than other offerings at the time. H/A is 67 I think.
I’m a recent convert to really long geometry with both a Geometron and a Nicolai. Both XLs, 540 each on the Geometron and 519 on my Nicolai. At 187cm I’m tall but not lanky-giraffe tall, both feel long but spot on for me. Interestingly they felt natural despite moving from far shorter bikes with 470 and 475 reach.
I reckon, starting around 2013, and still not finished.
You can point at a lot of individual bikes or designers but I reckon the single most important switch was long travel 29ers- or rather, the moment they decided to stop trying to package 29er wheels like 26ers, and started making bikes that worked on their own terms. That pushed wheelbases and reach up in a hurry, and though the head angles were a bit slower to get where they are, the bikes still "felt" slacker. Up til then, 26ers were getting longer but mostly in baby steps and 29ers were desperately trying to be shorter and apologising for their chainstays.
So you get, like, the 2013 Trek Remedy 29. It wasn't especially long but they made it with a small front triangle and no Bloody Stupid Massive Seatmast so you could size up easily, and literally everyone did. It wasn't massively slack, but it had adjustable geometry and could take a longer fork and anglesets with ease. It wasn't that low but it sat low in its travel so even with a longer fork it's low-ish. Trek clearly didn't do it on purpose, they were trying to make a trailbike and accidentally built the most succesful enduro bike of all time (*), but that's one of the first big brands that really put most of it together on one bike. And ended up selling it almost unchanged for about 5 years.
(* yes I always say that, yes I still ride one and love it. I'm 5'10 and ride an XL with an angleset and a 160mm fork and offset bushings, which are all signs of how they got it wrong, but what a bike)
monkeyboyjc
Full MemberGary fisher if we are talking big wheels and xc geo – he introduced shorter stems on xc/trail bikes with 29r wheels in the early 2000’s iirc, just didn’t kick off all that quick and become mainstream for several years…
Yeah but, they were not very good. Fisher had some of the ideas right but it's kind of like gothic architecture, it's only when you put it all together that you really get a great bike, and generally if you tried one of them in isolation or without really putting it together with other changes, it just didn't work that well. The G2 fork offset became pretty much standard for a while though, that one definitely worked- though ironically not always on the bikes they put it in.
<blockquoteedd>
Full Member
I’m actually planning to sell my second batch (which means it has internal dropper routing) Geometron frame, size Long, at the start of December (when my Swarf 155 arrives). Looking for £600 posted with Float X2 shock (that needs a service), Hope headset, and seat clamp
Shame - can't you grow it to a Longest ?
It’s a slight case of fear of missing out,
If this is just a "should I buy a new bike?" thread, then the answer is yes!
Probably.
It could be that you're a "fast, flowy, singletrack" kind of rider because that's what's always been the most fun on the bikes you've had.
Maybe pushing the boat out and getting something more aggressive than you'd though, might open your world up to whole different realm of riding. Maybe a latest gen Solaris max, a Pipedream Moxie, Stif Morph, Sonder Signal, Stanton Switch9er would set you on a different course of fun?
Trouble is, that's tricky to find out on half-day a test ride!
And if fast, flowy singletrack is what you've got locally, then that's what you're going to be riding, whatever bike you're on.
Shout out to to Gary Fisher for looking to the future with G2 geometry and the Mondraker with their fwd geometry.
For me when I got my Process 153 in 2014 it was a huge step up.
Id demoed a bronson which all the reviews raved about and not thought it was anything special at all but the Process was just so much more fun and felt 'in' the bike more than any other I'd ridden, which is good as I bought it without a test.
No its geo looks like an xc bike, so you can't say it's settled now.