Reba / Bottomless tokens / Bike misuse :-)

cooldad

Those are Gnarly Trail bikes, the Canyon is Non Gnarly Trail bike.

Those are the official #Enduro terms, I believe.

Or not.

I see XC as max 100mm, with lots of carbon bits, XTR, and lycra as mandatory.

rockmonkeysc

Anything with a 69 degree head angle is very much xc in my opinion.

larkim

Canyon's current version shows a 69.5deg head angle but MBR's 10/10 review shows it as 68.4deg. Not sure if they measured things differently? You'd expect Canyon to be right of course.

Out of interest, is there a rough and ready estimation for the effect of sag and full compression on head angle? A bike with a 67deg head angle which is then put in the hands of a rider who likes 30% sag will have a different head angle than a rider who likes 20% sag, and obviously the length of the bike (from the rear axel centre point?) would also mean that a shorter bike with the same head angle and travel length would "dive" more than a longer bike with equivalent head angle / travel (assuming both fully compress). If those differences create a very small impact, perhaps they are irrelevant, but in the Nerve's case presumably the XS model would have some different characteristics vs the L model (the one in our household) when in actual practical use?

larkim

Tried to do the maths on this today using the triangles that are available from the geometry. Not sure if this is interesting or not.

By my workings, using the stack height (559.6s vs 611.1s), head angle (69.5 degrees) and wheelbase (1049mm vs 1135mm) I think you can calculate the length from top of the head tube to the front axel and the fixed angle (assuming no rear compression) drawn from rear axle, top of head tube, down forks). Then you can calculate the length of the fork when compressed (i.e. as above, less 120mm) and therefore the head tube angle with that shortened front length.

On the Nerve, the XS has a figure of 76.2deg and the L has 75.1deg.

In comparison, the 160mm Strive in L has a HT angle when fully compressed of 73.0 deg.

The Rookie

Those numbers are way off, 70 is about the steepest head angle you will get on an MTB, and that is XC only.

rockmonkeysc

Those are figures with the fork compressed? What about rear suspension?
Are you taking in to consideration that an xc fork is much more likely to dive on big impacts than an enduro fork with different damping? There's also the behaviour of the rear shock and the riders weight distribution is different on an xc bike than an enduro bike.

larkim

I was just doing the maths assuming full compression. It was interesting to me!

Rookie, think you've misunderstood. RMSC got me interested in how steep the effective head angle gets when the front fork fully dives. And no, I wasn't taking rear suspension movement into account, which is wrong.