As a result, the mis-mitered tubes could be used to build a fun bike to be given to friends, and after some happy accident, I ended up with one—a steel, single-pivot, long-travel trail bike or, perhaps, a slightly sketchy enduro bike. While I’m not going to pretend to have ridden enough trail bikes or enduro bikes to be able to make nuanced observations about suspension kinematics, I have ridden enough hyper bicycles bikes over the past two decades to have a good idea about what worked for me and how the bike felt to ride. It’s a bold move to build a deliciously dynamic and forgivingly flexy steel trail bike in Germany, the heartland of stiffness being touted as the grail of bicycle manufacture in cycling media. I stripped the bike down to the carbon frame (2 pounds 13 ounces) and rebuilt it from the ground up.
It’s a little lighter but a lot stiffer and easier to adjust than the original lever, and the one from Oak significantly improves the braking feel in my books, although that is sort of a matter of taste. To start with, I marginally overinflated the shock, but that didn’t feel quite right, so after some research and chats with Chris and Joergan over at Sour, I added some spacers to make it feel a little more progressive, which felt suitable for the kind of riding I was doing. The SRD was my first experience living with an INGRID drivetrain, which differs from running one.
The frame was welded just outside of Dresden, Germany. While we discussed a basic bitch build kit as an intro to mountain biking, when I collected the bike it was built with some of the most esoteric, decently high-end made-in-Europe parts out there. The biggest problem I’ve seen is improper assembly and setup. hyper bicycles Even a big-name bike can give a miserable experience if it isn’t set up properly. And sadly, this is an area in which most big-box stores are lacking. There are instances where that may be somewhat accurate because there are certainly some questionable bikes I’ve seen on the shelves at big-box stores.
The SRD came with the classic Acto5 mountain cranks, nice and short in 165—because this bike has all the gears—and long cranks are for flat-earthers. Looking at a component in isolation, I really prefer the performance of SRAM electronic shifting, especially in wet, grimy conditions, but some people prefer mechanical shifting, and those people prefer Shimano. Looking at buying a $600 mech, I love the idea that individual parts of the mech can be replaced if they get damaged, that it will run with almost any shifter, and that I can swap the cage out to run short or long so it can be used on more or less any bike. The frame is made from custom butted and bent 4130 tubes and cast parts manufactured in Taiwan.
Suspension is just not something I’ve ever felt that I needed, so this is my first bike since owning a 1995 Pro-Flex 855 that has had suspension, and needless to say it’s a completely different box of frogs. I set the suspension up to the letter of the manual for my weight and rode it for a month or so like that to get used to it. Having never owned a proper bike with suspension and only having ridden one in anger a handful of times, I had very little to compare it to, but I do feel like 160 mm of travel on the front and 155 mm at the back are beyond my riding for sure. Overall, I increasingly rode a fairly niche bike relative to my location for normal stuff and having a great time.