I was facing the same choice, demo’d a knolly endorphin this weekend – bought one, nuff said!
Long version (mmel will already have seen this as it’s the email I sent him):
It’s the first bike I’ve ridden that has managed to combine the plushness of an FSR design with a good ‘platform’. The Four by 4 linkage is essentially a linkage driven FSR arrangment BTW. When I first got on it I thought it was going to be another pillowy type bike as it smoothed out the trail chatter under the tyres in the same way that the Rune did. I expected that this would make it hard to get off the ground and pop, and would kill pedalling efficiency.
A quick note on setup – it was fitted with Fox 34’s at 150mm, Fox CTD shock, and a decent SRAM based build. It was a medium size with a 70mm stem, and I had to push the saddle all the way back. After I moved the saddle the front end became a little light on steep climbs, before it felt very planted, i’ve bought a large frame to stop this and will find out on thursday how it rides with the extra ETT. I ran it almost entirely in Trail 1 or 2 (as I was finding the sweet spot), although I did experiment with the descend mode on The Beast.
I rode two loops on it, the first was the Cotic demo loop, so I could get a direct comparison. Smooth climbing it’s probably not as efficient as the Cotic, but not a million miles off, and a lot better than many of the bikes I’ve tried. Coming down the rocky chute it was much more capable of dealing with the ‘chunder’, smoothing the worst out so I could concentrate on picking a line rather than correcting. I turned round and rode back up the chute to test technical climbing – really good, better than the rocket, probably because of the reward axle path of the FSResq rear end, it was also fairly easy to lift the front and rear over the edge of steps. I managed to climb back to the top albeit with a couple of dabs. Coming down the last descent into Calver it was easy enough to pop off the little lips and bumps, probably not as poppy as the Cotic, but similar the SB66.
After that I popped over to Hope (In the car!) and rode up though Aston, down the beast, back up to the top and down the Roman road into Hope.
The ride on the beast was interesting – I picked lines that’s I’d never have gone for on my Orange Five (2005, so steep head angle version), it’s a shame I haven’t ridden the Rocket on it too. It had a very reassuring feel to the suspension coming off drops – it felt like it had a lot more travel than the Rocket – even though it’s actually a 140mm bike. I didn’t get close to bottoming it out either, with about ~8mm of shock travel left according to the o-ring.
Anyway long story short, whilst it wasn’t quite as poppy as the Rocket, it did a better job of merging FSR plushness with single pivot.
John Booth at Shorelines was a really nice guy to deal with, if you want a demo I’d recommend you give him a call. He also has a bunch of shiney machined bits that aren’t on his website yet, the Chromag pedals are a work of art.
