I have a spare 90-130mm Talas fork, and I’m wondering about fitting it to my son’s GT Avalanche 1.0. Is this a bad idea? Would it be better to buy another frame, which is specifically designed for a longer fork? Or would the frame be fine with the fork travel reduced for climbing and full out for descending?

It may well be warrantied to 120mm and manufacturers probably built in a fairly large factor of safety so it should be ok

But… Note the use of “may”, “probably” and “should” – don’t be hitting any big jumps/drops just in case

Why not just run it at 100mm if you are concerned, or even try it and see.

Fork length based warranties are more about what a rider used to a longer fork will ride – more gnarly stuff, jumps etc, if he’s not heavy and or doesn’t ride like that, then may well be OK as you suggest.

ha ha… yeah right! 🙄

Oh…go on…do enlighten us 🙄

The frame is well past worrying about warranty – its more the handling I’m concerned about. If the frame is designed for 100mm, will it corner like a dog with a longer fork?

I did this and it was fine – IT is not great on switchbacks /techy turns but not that terrible either.
Pointing it downhill and ploughing through it handled fine.
Re how safe no idea but it would not overly concern me tbh

ha ha… yeah right!

another helpful and insightful contribution from cycling’s very own self appointed technological guru.. 🙄

I stuck a 110-140mm Maxle Rev on an Avalanche. Was ok at 110-120mm, but bit slack for me. Was a bit of a project while FS was being serviced & after a few years on steel / FS frames it was harsh as hell.

It would feel slow and unwieldy at full travel, but you’d probably get away with 110-115mm of travel quite happily.

I used to have an old GT Ruckus, designed for 100mm forks but warranted up to 130. I put some 130mm Shermans on it and though it was great for ploughing into things, the steering was too slow. Ended up with some travel adjust Recons on it that were usually sat around 110-115mm of travel.

Didn’t some Avalanches come with 120mm forks from new?

I have a set of 90-130mm Recons on my Kona Kikapu Deluxe and they work well.

I normally run them at 110mm as the originals were speced at, and open them up to 130 when I do trail centre stuff.

With experience of putting a 5″ fork on a 4″ hardcore hardtail, these are the things I learned:

1) steering goes out.
2) Cockpit issues: Need a longer stem, lower riser bars, move the saddle forwards.
3) fork bushes have a massively reduce life.

And it’s not soley about the length of travel in the fork. Measure the top of crown to QR. That’s the difference. An XC fork generally has a shorter sitting height than a hardcore fork. Therefore an XC frame, built to take an XC 4″ fork, which gets a 5″ hardcore fork put in it, feels like you’ve put a 5.75-6″ XC fork up front.

IIRC some avalanches came with 85-130mm Recons as new (IIRC MBUK said they handled like an overforked XC bike rather than a hardcore hardtail – cant really remember)
If so, a Recon at 130mm will be 9mm taller than a QRdropout Fox 30/32mm @ 130mm. So your 110mm talas setting should be equivalent to a RS Tora/Recon @ ~100mm, which avalanches must have come with at some point?

ill buy the toras of you then you could get him something with less travel 🙂