The Bossnut is back! Calibre’s bargain bouncer goes 29

After a total of five incarnations as a 27.5in bike, the new Calibre Bossnut rolls out on 29in wheels front and rear. And a bit more travel to boot. 2 …

By ben_haworth

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The Bossnut is back! Calibre’s bargain bouncer goes 29

That looks really impressive, great all-round trail bike geometry and very upgradeable.

Is the front (where the top tube/downtube are joined) just particularly minging on the XL?

Is the front (where the top tube/downtube are joined) just particularly minging on the XL?

That bit alone spoils the whole aesthetic of the bike for me. Otherwise, quite an appealing package. Possibly the type of thing for mini a11ys in future if I don’t go secondhand.

It does look much less offensive in the smaller sizes.

All of this for just £1,500? Calibre’s Bossnut is back, with more travel, bigger wheels and a higher quality frame

Nice video and chat with the designer there too.

Is the front (where the top tube/downtube are joined) just particularly minging on the XL?

Presumably a necessity to get the middle of the down tube steep enough to create space to squeeze the bottle in there at the back and allow the fork to compress at the front?

I really like the look of that, I’d heard rumours for months of a new design and I may have been tempted with it for my first full suspension but went for a fatbike. It’s the price that I think we should be expected to pay for a decent bike. Sensible. If anyone wants to lend me one to test around The Peak District, send me a message!

That looks, well, boss.

Great value bike. I’d be willing to look past the head/downtube interface for that.

Always been a fan of Calibre bikes from riding their fatbike for years and years.

It’s got a front end only it’s mother could love, but that’s a good value offering again.

I’m more shocked to see MBR is still going!! 🙂

Isn’t it just a rebadged Polygon Siskiu?

 

I’ve had another look – external cable routing, Shimano parts and a strong looking front end, what I’d want if in the market. The Shimano brakes are perfectly adequate for most users too, maybe not for the Alps but ok everywhere else.

Isn’t it just a rebadged Polygon Siskiu?

Probably manufactured by Polygon using very similar tubes & bits, but it’s obviously built to Calibre’s spec.

The geometry looks a bit better than most Polygons, with the 445mm chainstays for example.

The video I linked is a good watch.

Shame they didn’t Horst it.

Looks good. Proper thing at good price.

Anyway if you’re about to buy one, Go Outdoors mailshot I’ve just opened has a voucher/code for an extra 20% off valid until the end of November so that bring it down from £1500 to £1200.

 

(I’ve read the small print and can’t see any gotchas or exceptions that would apply)

spannermonkey
Full Member

Isn’t it just a rebadged Polygon Siskiu?

This is all pretty tangled. At some points the Siskiu was essentially a “rebadged” Bossnut, it was developed for/with/by Calibre/Gooutdoors but made by Polygon and they had the right to sell their own. This is one of the reasons gooutdoors got so completely wrecked in the pandemic, Polygon just stopped supplying them with anything they could sell themselves, which was pretty much everything. Up til then it seemed like a pretty good mutual partnership, after that not so much! And then of course gooutdoors ended up selling siskius.

As far as I can tell this one has specific differences and is not the same as any current Polygon, but maybe that just means they’ve got a little out of step and there’ll be a new siskiu along.

Looks good, a quality base level full suspension bike. Shame there is no UDH, this would have been in keeping with the design concept of keeping the frame upgradeable over time.

Nice video that.

Just thought I’d add, I noticed the Calibre account teasing a higher spec version in the pipeline in the comments on the Pinkbike article about this.

Intresting that it’s a new factory, wonder if that means a complete break from Polygon?

I think it’s pretty much a completely different development team now but it feels like the same smart ethos- my Calibre, the Dune fatbike, was a super tight budget bike and you could see they’d spent so much effort sweating the details, making the core bike as good as it could be at the price while avoiding any of the horrible standards costcuts that most cheaper bikes take, everything’s “good enough” to work out of hte box but at the same time it’s going to be reasonable to upgrade if you want as the core parts are solid. Not many £500 bikes that I’d still be riding 9 years on, sure I’ve replaced about half of it but that basically tells a story of what a good job they’d done, that it was worth doing all that.

Also not going to lie, I still like that it’s a supermarket bike 🙂 Nice contrast to my Bird and my titanium hardtail and my ancient nichier than thou Cotic.

I think the design is quite well thought out. I bet the front end is pretty stiff. It has room for a water bottle with its little pop belly. The top tube is low for stand over, stiffness and less material/weight. The suspension is nice and low for weight distribution. The head angle sounds about right.

What weight do we reckon, 17kg?

I’d like to give one a go.

That video reflects my IRL experiences of the crew behind the Bossnut, who I’ve had chance to hang out with a few times over the last year and a bit. Lots of actual riding and testing of prototypes and different budget components to see what actually works/is worth spending the extra on. Enthusiasm and care for what they’re creating, good riders, and stoked on riding. Feels like the kind of commitment and happy vibe you usually see with a small/passion/boutique brand, yet they happen to sit inside the JD Sports megastructure. I haven’t ridden the bike, but I like the cut of their jib!

Looks brilliant! I loved my first gen BBB and still have my Sentry Pro; that is my wife’s now although I still ride it and it’s a superb bike by any measure, I look forward to seeing these in the flesh, I’m sure they will bring lots of smiles to the miles for many people. 🙂

The video linked above sums it up nicely!

Hey guys, Sam from Calibre here. Thanks for the kind words! Just to jump in on that headtube comment – I ride an XL and very much care about the aesthetics of the larger frames, when I saw this sample the first thing I said to Jonny is there is no way we’re letting that go to production. The XL production bikes have the angle of that downtube/headtube junction tweaked so it does look way better. I still think the extended welded section there isn’t particularly pretty and something to improve on but its definitely an improvement on this prototype 🙂

Aaaand the never ending “Is it just a Polygon?” comment – this is why we dove so deep into the development process in the video above (https://youtu.be/dRBC0yCTX_w), it’s an all new factory, new tube set, new forgings and designed from the ground up in our little office in Sheffield. Kudos to Northwind though for the most accurate comment on this I’ve seen to date, all the Calibre bikes have been Calibre’s own designs over the years but have shared the Polygon factory hence the similarities, forgings etc. have often overlapped but geo, spec, tubes have always varied from the Polygon bikes (with the exception of the Vander models which were the bikes that the factory had produced for Calibre as Bossnuts/Sentry but sold as Polygons when they cancelled all Calibre orders during the pandemic).

Well, whilst in Go Outdoors last night I thought that I’d go and have a look at the new Bossnut. It took some finding, not displayed in a prominent location in a cycle section that was devoid of customers, and staff. It really is a quality looking bike, the deep gloss paintwork and finish are excellent. If I’d not bought my bike for this twenty year cycle I would be buying one. It demonstrates that “cheap” (a term used in different ways depending on your circumstances) doesn’t have to be poor quality, and, all the features that I would want too!