- These are all my mountain bikes,
or, well, it's not really all my mountain bikes
but the other ones are just there
for demonstration purposes.
These I actually ride.
They're always running.
They have fresh sealant in them.
I care about what parts they have on them,
how they're adjusted.
And so today I'm gonna tell you all about them.
(upbeat music)
So before we get into it and talk about individual bikes,
let me tell you a little bit about my fleet as a whole
because for the first time since starting
this YouTube channel, I'm really, really happy
with my fleet.
I feel really good about it.
Now, when you have a bunch of bikes
that are designed for the same thing,
it leads to decision paralysis.
And now I can easily decide which bike
I'm gonna ride depending on what I'm gonna be doing.
(upbeat music)
It should go without saying
that if I'm doing some dirt jumping,
I'm gonna take out my dirt jump bike.
If I'm exploring, really pedaling and going places,
I'm gonna take my Titanium Sage.
If I'm riding with my daughter
or if I'm hitting weird features on Berm Peak,
I'm gonna take my black hardtail.
And if I'm gonna be going down a really long chunky descent
or riding a bike park,
I'm gonna take out my Revel rail
because that's what it's built to handle.
Now you might have noticed by now
that these bikes are all kind of dirty.
(groovy bassy music)
And that's because I wanted to show you the bikes
in their natural state.
They're only clean for like a minute every week or month.
And so let's start with this one.
So first of all, what a strange bike.
I posted a video last week
about this thing and I didn't even go
over all the things that are weird about it.
So we'll start with the fact that it has a lefty.
It's mixed wheel 29 in the front, 27.5 in the rear.
It has a Chinese electronic shifting system
and as far as I know, it's the only one
working right now in North America,
'cause as soon as we posted the video,
the whole website vanished, which is strange
because this EDS wireless shifting system
has been performing flawlessly.
Also weird about this bike, we did a video where we filled
at least most of the down tube with expansion foam
and we found it actually made the bike quieter.
Also weird, Berd spokes, it's almost like building
your wheels out of string,
but this is very well engineered string.
It's strong.
The wheels have a really, really good ride quality.
It's almost like an acoustic property to the wheels.
As you're rolling down the trail, the vibrations you feel
and hear through the bike are just different
and I think they're better.
Another weird thing about this bike,
this is a wireless dropper seat post and as far as I know,
it's the first wireless dropper seat post
to ever hit the market.
It's a Magura Vyron.
It's reliable enough but it's not perfect.
There's a big delay when you hit the button
but I'm used to it and like I said, it's reliable enough,
I haven't had any problems with it.
Also weird, rev grips.
We did a video a few years back basically
bashing these things because they're $90.
How could you possibly justify a $90 grip?
Well, once you buy the $90 grip,
you can replace the casings that go around it
for I don't know, 20, 25 bucks or something,
which is also kind of expensive,
but I still have 'em on my bike.
In fact, this is another pair
of them because I grew to really like them.
So of course last week we put the Lefty Ocho
on this bike and this is a cross country fork
with 120 millimeters of travel, but we know it's stiff,
we know it's strong and so that's why I put it
on this trail bike to just make it weirder
and make the geometry work with the mixed wheels.
An older set of TRP G-Spec brakes on this bike.
I love 'em.
They honestly don't feel any different
than any of TRP's new brakes, they're all good.
And we've got an oblong chain ring
on this bike also from 1UP.
So since doing this experiment with the Lefty
and the mixed wheels, I'm kind of re-honeymooning this bike.
I wanna ride it all the time
'cause it just feels really cool
and I think the conversion actually made it better
for the Mac Ride.
There's enough stack over here to attach
the little Mac Ride adapter.
I'm never riding anything that rough
when I'm with her and so a hardtail is good.
It pedals well and my other hardtail
is like a titanium masterpiece
and I don't wanna put the Mac Ride adapter on it.
And so this is my dad bike.
(groovy music)
So this next bike is my Revel Rail and this is my big bike.
And when I say big, I'm not talking
about the size of the rider that would ride the bike,
that would be small, but the travel on this bike
is pretty big even for an enduro bike.
It's got 180 millimeters in the front and 165 in the rear.
And so you can take this thing
to a bike park, this will handle anything.
Now as many of you know, I don't have a downhill bike
because I wouldn't be able to ride it
enough to even get used to it.
That could change now that we have
both Kanuga and Rock Creek within striking distance.
But for the meantime I use this kind
of like a downhill bike.
If I'm gonna ride something big and gnarly,
this is the one I use.
And if I'm gonna go on a big ride
that I know has lots of chunk,
this thing pedals just fine, it climbs great.
Now this bike has 27.5 inch wheels,
that's like becoming less and less popular.
Even my bike fleet is starting to become more 29
but at the same time, I'm a small rider
and so 29 inch wheels feel pretty big to me.
They actually change my ability to handle the bike
and so if I'm going over big jumps
or through really technical stuff,
I just wanna stick to what I'm comfortable with.
And so indeed this is 27.5.
This bike has SRAM AXS.
That means the shifting
and the dropper post are both wireless.
So I have fewer cables up here and looks cool, works great.
And speaking of the dropper post,
there's a really weird story about it.
As you can see, the battery is on the front
underneath the nose of the saddle.
If you're you're familiar with SRAM AXS,
you know that the battery is normally on the back
but because this bike is a size small, when I went
off a big jumps and drops and bottomed out the rear
of the bike, the back wheel was actually hitting
into the battery and ripping it out of the dropper post.
We did this whole video where we tried
to figure out a solution to it.
In the end, I just hack sawed this little limiting screw
out from inside the dropper post, spun it around,
and then found a seat that would clear the battery
and that's kind of a perfect solution.
Now the rest of the parts of the bike was specked with,
I had absolutely no reason to change.
It's got Industry Nine, hubs XO1 cranks.
You got a RockShox zip up front
which is amazingly smooth.
Now unless you've been following this channel
really closely, it might come as a surprise
that I have tool storage on this bike.
I have everything you would need, flat repair,
inflation, all of it and you can't see it anywhere.
And so here I have a set of wrenches
that is by no means a complete set of tools.
So here in the handlebar, made by Lezyne,
we can pull this little guy out
and then you're gonna see here I have a tubeless insert kit
but that's not all.
Over here, you can see this Fork Cork, you turn this
and then this guy comes out, a CO2 and an inflater.
Now this Fork Cork is a product
that's available from Miles Wide.
You can find on Amazon, all over the internet.
And I took one piece of it apart
and 3D printed this, just pressure fits a CO2 in there
and then I lightly screwed a little inflater on the top.
And so I have my tire inflation up in here.
The only thing this bike is missing, tool-wise,
is a chain tool, but I believe Lezyne makes one
that I can put in the other side of the handlebar.
(groovy music)
This is my dirt jump bike and it was actually given
to me by Eric Porter and he set most of it up
but there are a few things that I changed on it.
Now first of all, I believe this is
a 2014 Diamondback Assault and Eric had changed out
pretty much everything on it
but the wheels came from me.
These are Industry Nine wheels made right here
in Asheville and they're real light, real nice.
And we tore this down and re-powder coated the frame.
It's like a semi matte black color.
I don't know, I probably would've gone glossy
if I could do it over.
I like a glossy dirt jumper.
So I haven't been getting too technical, but I do wanna talk
about dirt jumper geometry just for a minute.
Now, if you're not into dirt jumpers
and you had to guess the head tube angle of a dirt jumper,
what do you think it would be?
Most people will probably say, "Oh yeah,
it's gotta be slack like a downhill bike
because its made for hitting jumps."
Wrong, dirt jump bikes have steep head tube angles.
This has a 69 degree head tube angle.
By comparison, my black hardtail has a 66 degree
head angle and even my Sage that I use for kind
of exploring has a 66.5 degree head tube angle.
So it's got a steeper head tube angle
than some cross country bikes.
On a dirt jump bike, you're doing bar spins,
you are doing little twitchy things
to position yourself for jumps.
You're also hitting these big steep lips.
That's an uphill thing.
Steeper head tube angles better.
Now as I said, Eric Porter set up this bike.
Eric's a really big guy and so one change I made
to the bike was slam the rear wheel
and the dropout try and shorten up the chainstay.
I'd imagine a significant amount of you
don't know what that means.
This is the chainstay and the length of the chainstay,
where your wheel sits in it can have a pretty big effect
on how the bike rides even if it's a little tiny bit.
I'm 5'4", I like a really short chainstay.
I like short bikes in general.
And so I was actually able to move the wheel
in the dropout and get it closer
to the front of the bike by shortening the chain.
And in order to do that I had to use a half link chain.
Each link is actually half of a normal link.
You can accomplish the same thing
by taking a normal chain and putting one half link in it
but half link chain looks cooler.
(groovy music)
Now I have Crankbrothers stamp pedals on this bike.
I use the same pedals for dirt jumping
as I do for trail riding.
Eric had some bigger platform pedals on it.
Especially for dirt jumping,
I prefer small platform pedals because if you take your foot
off the bike and put it back on, if the pedal
is a kind of a weird angle, it sort of walks your foot.
To the smaller the pedal, the less it walks your foot.
Now a lot of dirt jump bikes just have one brake
just in the rear to kind of adjust your speed a little bit.
And Eric put a Magura MT8 on this bike.
It is fantastic.
The way the lever feels,
I barely have to do any maintenance to it.
It's just a fantastic brake.
And the only reason that I don't have MT8s
on every single one of my bikes
is that I'm just not a good enough mechanic to work on them.
Every time I have to align the caliper or something,
I just feel like an idiot.
But you can't deny that they're unbelievably
amazing brakes when they're working right.
And this one is.
(groovy music)
There's also a Fox 36 on this bike.
Fox now offers Marzocchi products for their dirt jumpers.
It's more or less the same as the Marzocchi stuff
with just better parts everywhere.
But he put a Fox 36 on it and reduced it to like,
I don't know, it must be 100 millimeters
of travel or something.
Not only do dirt jumpers have head angles similar
to cross-country bikes, but they also have travel similar
to cross-country bikes because you just don't need
a whole lot of travel when dirt jumping.
And in fact a lot, of travel can be detrimental.
You want the bike to be really stiff and responsive.
Now this bike is at least eight years old now.
It's pretty old for a bike in my fleet
and you could consider it out of date,
except that dirt jumpers just don't change all that much
from year to year.
And so I have no plans to replace it.
I feel really comfortable, really confident
on this bike and I'll probably have it
for as long as I have the wherewithal to go dirt jumping.
(groovy music)
This is blue, my titanium hardtail
and I use this for any time I know I'm gonna be pedaling.
I use this for long rides,
rides that are gonna have a lot of ups and downs.
This is kinda like my cross country-ish bike.
And the main thing that makes it so good
for that is I designed and planned it out that way.
I wanted a bike that fit me perfectly.
And so I worked with Sage, a manufacturer
of titanium hardtails to modify the geometry
of their Sage power line to fit me perfectly and it does.
Now another thing that makes it great
for exploring and getting lost
in the mountains is it has two bottle cages.
Not all bikes can fit two bottle cages.
And when you're a small person like me, it's even more rare.
Now we went into like two videos worth of detail
about this bike and so I'm gonna keep this pretty basic.
The fork is a Fox 34 and it has 130 millimeters of travel.
I find that that's the sweet spot for all around riding.
It does have SRAM AXS all around, dropper post end shifting.
Didn't have to hack up the dropper post
because it's not a full suspension bike
and so never gonna hit the rear wheel.
As you can see, I have a fast rolling tire
in the back and I have a knobby one up front.
For the type of riding I do with this bike,
that's gonna give you less rolling resistance
but still enough grip up front
to make it through loose turns.
And because I always want to be prepared,
I have some pretty comprehensive tool storage here.
I have a 1UP EDC up in the front
and I have this little RockBros Amazon pump
that's actually quite good
and you can even screw a CO2 into it.
And if I want to carry other things,
I had them install this mount on the top of the frame.
It's a little rivnut and I can 3D print things I've shown
in other videos and attach 'em
to the top of the frame, carry some extra stuff.
Now if you take a close look at this bike,
you're gonna notice it's got some really good
high-end parts on it.
And that was kind of the goal.
I wanted to build one bike where I just pull
out all the stops and really treated myself.
And so it's got a set of 29 inch bird wheels.
I have Industry Nine hubs, front and rear made right here
in Asheville and also made right here in Asheville,
Cane Creek, eeWings titanium cranks.
And these ones are 165 millimeters.
They're a little bit shorter
than almost any crank that would come with a bike.
I have short legs, feels really good
pedaling on some shorter cranks.
You'll also notice I have mallet pedals on here.
I have clipless pedals.
Like I said, this bike is for exploring
and I really like clipless pedals
when I'm not trying to do anything crazy.
I prefer to have that immediate extra power
if you find yourself in a weird situation
and you need to get up a punchy climb
or through something technical.
Now I chose titanium for the frame material
for a lot of reasons.
First of all, I've always wanted a titanium bike.
They're beautiful, they're light, they're extremely strong.
And titanium as a material provides
a really nice ride quality.
But also it's infinitely repairable because doesn't fatigue.
This can last my entire life.
Carbon fiber frames will actually experience some fatigue
over their lifetime, even alloy frames.
And so titanium's really cool.
So part of me having this bike built completely
custom was the paint job.
They actually talked me into the paint job.
I just wanted it raw.
I wanted it titanium from top
to bottom with nothing written on it.
But I'm glad I went with the paint job
because it makes the bike a whole lot more unique.
And the painter was able to hide all sorts
of Easter eggs in the paint.
I'll show you a couple of them.
We got North Carolina back here on the seat stay
and we got Drama and Oscar hidden in here in a few spots.
And on the front I have a few features from Bern Peak.
Now lastly, I actually put Rev grips on this bike as well.
You can tune them so that they actually move a little bit
and provide a little bit more cushion.
And on a hardtail, I feel like they're a good fit.
If you wanna know anything else specific
about this bike, on our other channel
there's a two video series as I mentioned, just building
and testing this bike and going into incredible detail.
So as you can see, even though these are all mountain bikes,
they all do very different things and it's easy
for me to decide which one I'm gonna grab
if I'm doing any sort of riding.
And so I'm really happy to give you a rundown
on my current mountain bike fleet.
I hope you found this video entertaining, useful.
I hope you learned something today.
And if you didn't, I hope you at least found
this video entertaining.
Thanks for riding with me today, and I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)