We got the gang back together to recap a whole bunch of the bikes and other gear we tested in 2023, and Simon Stewart, Dylan Wood, and David Golay picked a bunch of our favorites, including bikes across the travel spectrum and a variety of softgoods. Along the way, we get into bike design and geometry tradeoffs, headset cable routing, and much more. RELATED LINKS: BLISTER+ Membership BLISTER+ Real World Testimonials Blister Labs This Week’s Gear Giveaway Blister Mountain Bike Buyer’s Guide TOPIC...
Dec 28, 2023•39 min•Ep. 202
Forbidden might be *the* company most closely associated with high-pivot bikes, but Owen Pemberton didn’t set out with that goal in mind when he founded the company. We sat down with Owen to hear all about his journey through the bike industry, including a long tenure as an engineer at Norco; founding Forbidden; his philosophy on bike design and geometry; how he ended up settling on high-pivot suspension layouts; the new Druid V2 and Supernought ; and Owen teases some future Forbidden models, to...
Dec 21, 2023•56 min•Ep. 201
EXT founder Franco Fratton has more experience working on suspension than just about anyone, and today, we’re revisiting our first conversation with him that kicked off our “Very Deep Dive on Suspension” series, where we discuss all the details when it comes to suspension design and tech. RELATED LINKS: A Very Deep Dive on Suspension with EXT’s Franco Fratton, Pt. 2 (Ep. 146) A Very Deep Dive on Suspension with EXT’s Franco Fratton, Pt. 3 (Ep.173) Become a BLISTER+ Member Blister Mountain Bike B...
Dec 14, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 200
William Boisvert made his first bike frame — a machined front triangle for a Devinci Troy — in just seven weeks for a college project, and despite the challenges that arose (and the fact that that first frame didn’t survive very long), he’s continued the development of a CNC-machined high-pivot Enduro frame, and founded Tool to bring it to market. The prototypes are visually stunning (and quite interesting technically), and we sat down with William to hear all about their design and the concepts...
Dec 07, 2023•51 min•Ep. 199
A lot of companies have offered bikes with a degree of adaptability in their geometry and travel configurations, but the Albatross Apogee Module is a very novel design that opens up a much wider spectrum of options than most. We sat down with founder and engineer, Will Hilgenberg, to chat about the concept; what he sees as being the advantages of the layout; frame materials and ride quality; his plans for production; and more. RELATED LINKS: BLISTER+ Membership BLISTER+ Real World Testimonials B...
Nov 30, 2023•47 min•Ep. 198
Two races into the 2022 EWS season, Katy Winton hit a breaking point and pulled out of the rest of the series to give herself the time and space she needed to get her mental health back on track. Having made a successful return to racing in 2023, Katy is now ready to open up about the experience. We sat down with her to talk about burnout and what her experience with it felt like; when she knew she needed to punch out and step away from racing; what her recovery process looked like; how she mana...
Nov 23, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 197
Founding Intend (2:18) Fork design & the first Intend offering (5:24) Why inverted? (7:09) Selling inverted forks & market acceptance of things that look different (8:52) Designing a full fork (17:16) Damper design (20:16) The Infinity EN (24:42) The Bandit (38:32) The Hover shock (43:12) Brake design (48:17) Deciding which projects to tackle (57:07) What’s next for Intend? (1:00:26) RELATED LINKS: BLISTER+ Membership BLISTER+ Real World Testimonials Blister Labs This Week’s Gear Giveawa...
Nov 16, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 196
Neko Mulally’s Frameworks project has drawn a lot of well-deserved attention, and now he’s opening pre-orders for the production version of his World Cup DH race bike. So we sat down with Neko to hear all about everything that’s gone into the development of the bike this season; his experimentation with different frame materials; the wildly talented Asa Vermette joining the team; and a whole lot more. TOPICS & TIMES: Opening preorders for the DH bike (2:14) Refining the details (10:02) Chang...
Nov 09, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 195
The stats of the Tour Divide route — 2,670 miles and 192,000 feet of climbing, mostly on dirt — are imposing, and Lachlan Morton just covered it in a record-setting 12 days, 12 hours, and 21 minutes. So we sat down with him to hear about what it takes to plan, prepare for, and execute such a wild undertaking, how it went, why Lachlan already wants to go back and re-ride the course, but slowly, and a whole lot more. TOPICS & TIMES: The Tour Divide route Record ethos & riding self-supporte...
Nov 02, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 194
The Contra MC — a US-made, steel, high-pivot Enduro bike — is an ambitious project by any measure, and designing and prototyping the bike is just half the battle. So we brought Evan Turpen, the driving force behind Contra, back on the show to talk about refining a prototype design and knowing when to stop tinkering; what goes into bringing a design to production and the challenges that arise from that; what he’s learned along the way; and a whole lot more. TOPICS & TIMES: The MC (2:55) Desig...
Oct 26, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 193
Privateer has been working on the second-generation versions of their 141 and 161 bikes for three years now, and Dan Hicks, the engineer behind the project, has a ton to share about the thought process behind the updates and bike design in general — and does a great job of explaining all of it. So we sat down with Dan for a very deep dive into the new bikes, and he shared a ton of thoughts that are going to be interesting to anyone who cares about mountain bike design — whether or not you’re in ...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 192
When it was announced that Red Bull Formation wasn’t happening in 2023, there was a lot of hopeful speculation that, in its place, there would be women competing at Rampage for the first time. But that didn’t happen either, so we sat down with three of the top freeriders in the world — Casey Brown , Vaea Verbeeck , and Hannah Bergemann — to get their thoughts on how we got here, why they want a women’s category at Rampage (and what they’re doing to make it happen), why representation at the top ...
Oct 12, 2023•49 min•Ep. 191
Simon Stewart, Dylan Wood, and David Golay sat down to talk about a bunch of the bikes they’ve been testing lately, from the short-travel Cannondale Habit to the very not short-travel Canfield One.2 Super Enduro; some eMTBs including the new Santa Cruz Heckler SL; a head-to-head comparison of high-pivot Enduro bikes from companies very large and very small; and a whole bunch more. TOPICS & TIMES: Cannondale Habit (1:40) REEB Steezl (6:24) Santa Cruz Heckler SL (11:39) Devinci E-Troy (17:52) ...
Oct 05, 2023•45 min•Ep. 190
High-pivot bikes are having a moment. Mullet bikes and steel full-suspension frames are too. And while gearbox mountain bikes haven’t achieved widespread popularity (yet?) they’ve got their ardent supporters. The Archibald Cycles AC1 brings all those elements together in a Canadian-made Trail / Enduro / Park bike, and the end result looks pretty interesting. So we sat down with Archibald founder and designer of the AC1, Alex Troughton to hear all about the bike, his goals for it, when it might r...
Sep 28, 2023•49 min•Ep. 189
It’s rare for a small but well-established custom bike builder to make the leap to overseas-built production bikes, but Adam Sklar has done just that. While it might be easy to romanticize the idea of a custom hand-built bike made by a single builder, Adam speaks very openly about the ways running that version of Sklar had ceased to feel like the way he wanted to bring bikes into the world; the challenges (and high points) of building custom bikes; coming up with a production lineup after years ...
Sep 21, 2023•45 min•Ep. 188
We recently launched Gear Therapy over on our GEAR:30 podcast and now we’re bringing it over to Bikes & Big Ideas, too. For our first session, we chatted with Blister Member Andy Majewski about his bike quiver and the ways it’s evolved; how he might better dial in his current bikes to suit his needs; what bike would make the most sense to add to his quiver; why he needs the Philadelphia Eagles to go back to the Super Bowl for that to happen (it’ll make sense, we promise); and more discussion...
Sep 14, 2023•58 min•Ep. 187
Trek’s new sixth-generation Slash has changed a lot from the prior-generation bike — including a high-pivot suspension layout, some big updates to the geometry and suspension kinematics, and a default mixed-wheel size setup — and we sat down with Matt Yerke, the lead engineer on the new Slash, to learn all about it. Matt walked us through the design goals for the Slash; their early experiments with high-pivot Trail bikes, including prototyping the layout on what would become the current Fuel EX ...
Sep 07, 2023•40 min•Ep. 186
D3O’s non-Newtonian materials are used extensively in mountain bike protective equipment from a lot of different brands, and David Golay recently sat down with their Senior Vice President of Marketing, Kevin Franks, and their Head of Product, Kevin Fleer, to talk about the state of the mountain bike armor market; the ways it’s changed in recent years; where D3O sees it going in the future; the tradeoffs inherent in designing armor; testing standards for armor and how D3O thinks about them; armor...
Aug 31, 2023•43 min•Ep. 185
Chromag has been doing things very differently from most bike companies for decades now, helping to pioneer modern hardcore hardtails — and doing so in Whistler, BC, in the shadow of the legendary bike park — not exactly classic hardtail terrain. So when Chromag launched their first production adult full-suspension bikes late last year, it wasn’t a huge surprise that the Darco and Lowdown stood out from the rest of the bike market in a number of ways, from geometry to material selection and more...
Aug 24, 2023•45 min•Ep. 184
David Golay, Dylan Wood, and Simon Stewart sat down to chat about a whole bunch of the bikes we’re reviewing currently, from the Chromag Darco to the Commencal Supreme, with a ton of other ones in between, including the Pivot Shuttle AM and the Trek Fuel EXe AL. Along the way, we discuss bike design more broadly; eMTB drive systems and their tradeoffs; and a whole bunch more. TOPICS & TIMES: Chromag Darco (0:56) Pivot Shuttle AM (8:28) Trek Fuel EXe (18:31) Rocky Mountain Instinct Powerplay ...
Aug 17, 2023•49 min•Ep. 183
Aptos, CA is a small beach town that has produced an incredible number of world-class mountain bikers, and Ryan “R-Dog” Howard has a lot of great stories to share about the scene that gave rise to him, Cam and Tyler McCaul, and too many more to list — not to mention serving as the winter riding escape for the likes of Brandon Semenuk, Martin Soderstrom, and many others. And along the way, we chat about everything from Ryan’s incredible catalog of custom-painted bikes and where he gets his inspir...
Aug 10, 2023•49 min•Ep. 182
When Jacob Rheuban founded Prevelo in 2017, he had no engineering background and no experience in the bike industry, but identified a need for better kids' bikes, and set out to fill it. And now, more than six years later, he’s got a lot of great stories to tell and insights to share about both what it takes to start a bike company from scratch, but also what makes for a good kids’ bike, and how their needs differ from those of adults; what it took to get folks (even dedicated bike riders) to ac...
Aug 03, 2023•43 min•Ep. 181
Miranda Miller has done a lot of different things in her career, from winning DH World Champs to racing the EWS (and now EDR), but in the last few years she’s branched out more than ever and is having more fun than ever before. So we sat down with Miranda to chat about her DVRGNT Minds project and how she charted this new course for her career; getting into gravel riding as a gravity-oriented mountain biker; the Downhill Southeast scene and the return of grassroots DH racing; and a whole lot mor...
Jul 27, 2023•39 min•Ep. 180
When we first had Lal Bikes founder and Supre Drive inventor Cedric Eveleigh on the show about a year and a half ago, he’d just announced the Supre Drive — a wild take on reinventing the mountain bike derailleur — to the world. A lot has happened since then, including the first production Supre Drive bikes being delivered to customers, so we brought Cedric back on the show — joined by fellow Lal engineer Alex Ham — to tell their story of launching a new company and trying to get the industry and...
Jul 20, 2023•55 min•Ep. 179
Summer is in full swing and we’ve been testing a ton of new bikes and gear, so I sat down with Simon Stewart and Dylan Wood to chat about some of the things that have stood out to us the most, including a variety of bikes, SRAM’s Transmission (including the new GX version), and along the way, we veer off on a few tangents, including some discussion of the World Cup Downhill season so far. TOPICS & TIMES: Revel Ranger (1:56) Commencal T.E.M.P.O. (7:32) SRAM Transmission (8:28) World Cup DH (1...
Jul 13, 2023•41 min•Ep. 178
Deviate Cycles is well known for their high-pivot Trail and Enduro bikes, and that concept has gained a lot of traction in recent years, but getting consumers to accept new ideas can be challenging. Deviate co-founder Ben Jones has a lot to say about the balance of bringing new ideas to market without alienating potential customers; the tradeoffs of gearbox bikes and why they haven’t widely caught on; and much, much more. In this conversation, we also talk about Deviate’s recent efforts to explo...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 177
Beyond Racing started as a pipedream of Anna Newkirk and Abby Hogie: wouldn’t it be cool to have a World Cup race team that you run and race for with your best friend? Few people have the skills or determination to make it happen, though, and the story of what Anna and Abby — with the help of none other than Eliot Jackson — have pulled off is a great one. So we sat down with the two of them to hear all about the founding of Beyond Racing; why they chose to go that route rather than getting on es...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 176
We’re testing a ton of new bikes with more on the way (stay tuned!) so David Golay recently sat down with Dylan Wood and Simon Stewart to talk about the Revel Ranger and Commencal T.E.M.P.O. ; offer more thoughts on the new SRAM Transmission ; and give a rundown on a whole bunch of suspension we’re testing from EXT, Öhlins, and Manitou. TOPICS & TIMES: Commencal T.E.M.P.O. (1:15) Revel Ranger (7:08) SRAM Transmission (14:20) Orbea Wild (25:11) EXT Aria and Era V2.1 (34:14) Öhlins TTX Air (41...
Jun 22, 2023•53 min•Ep. 175
Making it as a World Cup Downhill racer is hard and, as we discuss in this episode, the new rule changes to the series for 2023 just might make it harder. So we sat down with Wyn Masters , whose incredible new Privateer Program — the escalation of his longstanding Privateer Award, whose past winners include Camille Balanche and Nina Hoffmann — to talk about all of it, including why he started the award in the first place, how the race landscape has changed over the course of his career, and a wh...
Jun 15, 2023•30 min•Ep. 174
EXT Suspension founder Franco Fratton is a wealth of information when it comes to all things suspension, and in the third installment of our deep dive on suspension series, Franco and I cover everything from the tradeoffs between air and coil springs to the history of coil springs being used on wheeled vehicles; EXT’s new Aria air shock; inverted vs. conventional forks; and Franco teases an upcoming EXT project as well. TOPICS & TIMES: Air vs. coil springs & their historical uses (1:28) ...
Jun 08, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 173
