Last winter I did some experimenting with my Chisel. Put some drops on it and went from a 100mm -30deg stem to a 60mm -17deg. It’s a size small with a 100mm Sid. Road it a couple times only on a paved rail trail and it felt good.
But I decided it was just too dang ugly and built up a Fezzari Shafer with 50c’s instead. Here’s some pics…
And just because narrow flat bars were brought up, here it is setup rigid with 680ish bars with narrow grips and wireless blips for a gravel race that had a mtb class (no drops).
As for myself, I have already bought the RYET version of this fork. I posted earlier in the thread. it comes in about 100 grams heavier, which isn’t great, but it was also slightly cheaper. The fork blades seem to be narrower, reminding me a bit of the factor Ostro gravel fork blade mindset The plan is to paint it with a candy tint over carbon alongside my incoming SPCYCLE M Epic Ht clone.
Some great points have been made here, but for the most part surrounding maintaining the suspension fork and thus adapting the “nominal” geo.
With builds like mine and Upcountry’s, the front end is dropped using the rear axle as the pivot point. As a result, the stem length/angle might just be something that is played with until it feels right. Obviously guided by the write ups like that of FT’s, thank you for that. I’ll see if my LBS can lend me a few beater stems to experiment.
-Love the aesthetics of round beefy tubing like the Crux (i’m an industrial designer by trade) and the fork I chose pairs well visually.
-steeper HTA, to go with a 455 fork
-slacker STA, don’t want my ride too perched and stiff
-threaded bsa, i already have a dub bb set up ready to port over
-reach and stack figures are a few mm closer than the m06 to my current gravel bike set up.
-shorter wheelbase, slightly lower bb
-I will be running Red 1x12 mechanical, so to aid the shifting smoothness, i’m choosing less tight bends like an all internal set up has. I have this on my Ostro clone, it’s pretty intense in there. Also, i’m happy to have the shifter line snuggled up to the brake hose since that’s there regardless.
-And since at the end of the day, this is fairly budget minded, I want to emulate a cheaper >2022 Crux with big tire clearance. This will fit perfectly in between my road bike and short travel full sus.
-and regarding the chainring, I do want to run a 40t. I like that with an AXS 10-44. I snagged a used GX t-type crankset, it comes in ‘dub wide’. That will take my 40 tooth 8 bolt chainring offset and hopefully get my chainline about where it should be. I’ll likely have to play with that. If Keegan Swenson can run a 52t in the place of a max 42t, i’m sure I can make this work for me.
Late to the party but you can always reduce travel down by adding spacers to the negative spring side of the air shaft. You really only need a travel kit if you’re trying to get more travel.
If you fork has the type of air negative spring that works by burping air past a notch in the shaft then the notch won’t be in the right place, so you may have to add a notch, or come up with a mechanical system using spring/elastomers.
Hmmm I’ve never seen this done with modern air forks. Do you have an example write up or video?
I’m sure it’s technically possible but would require fabricating spacers and some specialty tools to disassemble the air spring. Unless you’re trying to go below the available travel lengths (80 or 90mm for example) it would make more sense to replace the air spring.
Removing the air spring shaft is easy and rarely takes more than split-ring pliers. The spacer could be any cylindrical object that fits, even a segment of garden hose if you’re just trying to do some quick experiments.
For example, see pp28-29, you would add the spacer between the red cap and the black rebound bumper.
Many air springs require at least shaft clamps to remove the seal head, although it isn’t totally clear what tools are required for the Sid example that you gave. A 3D printed split ring spacer would work well for this.
You’re misunderstanding how it works, you’re just adding a spacer so it doesn’t return to full travel. You don’t touch the air spring other than removing the pressure. Remove the adjuster knob, unscrew the 24mm(?) hex on top and snap on a spacer to the damper shaft. Reinstall. No need to 3D print anything, they will sell you them for $2-3.
In this image, you can see the red foot stud that would prevent you from removing the seal head to install a travel spacer, this air spring is from a previous generation rockshox pike, the new ones are the same way.
For that Pike assembly the piston head looks like it comes off just by pushing out the cross pin. I’ve never owned a Pike but I have seen it on some Xfusion forks I’ve worked on.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to make this complicated unless you have first hand experience on models where it truly is.
Well, a majority of modern mid-high end forks require more tools than your x-fusion fork. You shouldn’t offer your experience on a single brand of fork as a universal suspension modification. It is simply misleading.
I suppose the conclusion here is that all forks are different, look up the service manual for your specific fork before following advice from an internet forum and you end up with a garden hose in your fork.
While for sure there is merit to go into the very depths of front-center and what not I would encourage you to just do try such a conversion.
Why?
Well - those points of bottom bracket height here, balance there and so on are nothing particular to a drop bar conversion of a mtb to a flatbar but a thing you can debate and refine on on any bike category (be it a hard tail, a full sus, a dropbar gravel bike or any other bike).
If you found bikes you really enjoy riding in the past (and why shouldn’t you) then there is really nothing complicated in finding a hardtail platform you really like. How it rides, how it handles, how it turns.
That’s the gist of it. Ideally you should test riding it by yourself or you could go by the recommendation of others. But then - if some very basic requirements are met (a somewhat conventional and not super short stem, no integrated cockpit or special cable routing) then a dropbar conversion is quite straightforward and should lead to a great riding experience provided you already liked the flatbar version.
I would expect quite a bit of a more stable descending feel but at the price of some pronounced wheel flop. You would be able to see if you like it / can live with it already absolutely fine by test riding a stock Epic WorldCup with it’s normal flat bars.
Much of said wheel flop / steering characteristics would come from the (for an XC and certainly for a gravel race bike) slack head tube angle. Alas this is the current trend for XC bikes. Which makes sense if you want / need to tackle ever gnarlier XCO race courses and go for those 120 mm forks.
But therein also lies some sustenance. Since if you pair such a bike with not a 120 but a 100 mm suspension fork you gain degree in head tube angle “back”. You essentially steepen the front a bit again. Not quite into the realm of a 69° headtube, but better (for my taste in any case - since I’m not looking for a down country bike but for a nice overlander marathon mile muncher with also some technical abilities but not a XCO course beast).
For what it’s worth: I recently test rode the new Trek Supercaliber (with similar progressive XC front geo) and I didn’t like it. I already didn’t like it for what it is as a flat bar bike. Thus I also have no inclination to want to use it as a bike to convert to a drop bar.
Chris certainly got inspired a bit by me (I know since he asked a few things) and others (since neither I nor others have “invented” dropbar MTBs and as the contributions here show quite a few people run similar since quite a while already.
My aim certainly isn’t what you wrote but my aim is to get a mountain bike with at least front suspension since this is the most capable bike for “european” gravel or run-of-the-mill forest tracks. I want the squish and tires of a 2020-2022’ies xc mtb (no want that 2.4 inch 120 mm modern xco shenanigans ;-)) but the comfort, versatility and long range capability of drop bars.
Chris’ aim was to get a “gravel bike” of sorts with way more comfort (from bigger tires and from front suspension) since he broke a wrist. And he probably also saw it as an opportunity to do something with the new Cervelo Hardtail they pushed on / graced all their ambassadors with. So I guess win-win for him at that time.
No, he broke his wrist a good deal before. And had build the bike afterwards. As I just mentioned in my previous post probably also as a way to show off that at this time still new Cervelo Hardtail.
(and as an off-topic note on that forum settings: sigh… again I’m running into the “you can’t post more than 2 consecutive posts…” They do know that threads here are long? That presumably people visit the Forums only once in a while, go through a threat and might want to contribute and reply to quite a few posts of the history they work through? Aggravating…)
The plan is to paint it with a candy tint over carbon alongside my incoming SPCYCLE M Epic Ht clone.
