The Trust Fork Ride Report!
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New suspension fork designs have been creeping in on the scene of late and Jeff’s been riding this fork for three months now. He has ridden it in Washington, Arizona, Texas, California, and Puerto Rico. When he first received the fork, he apparently wasn’t fully sold on it, and even brought a back up unit to Tucson, AZ, just in case he didn’t get along with it. So now? Here’s Jeff’s own take on it…
After that first ride, I saw that the fork is legit, and I then accepted a sponsorship from Trust.
This fork has really impressed me with how the bike’s stability remains constant through the travel. This is a hard concept to explain, as “stability” is often seen as a subjective claim, but with some simply geometry, it becomes much easier to understand.
A bicycle’s steering geometry is often boiled down to its trail measurement- that’s the distance from the steering head axis through a vertical line coming down through the axle of the front wheel. This measurement (when the bike is static) is affected by head angle, wheel size, and fork offset.
On the size medium Mojo HD4, with a stock Fox 36 160 fork, the trail measurement is around 120mm, which is actually pretty big- close to the trail measurement of downhill bikes from a couple years ago. However, as that fork bottoms out, and the offset (and wheelsize) does not change, the effective head angle does. A 160mm fork, on a bike with a 1192mm wheelbase, will steepen the head angle by about 7 degrees, up to 71 from the stock 64.5. This actually reduces the trail measurement by about 50%- literally, the bike is half as stable at bottom out than at top out. That’s nuts! We’ve literally been designing bikes around this fact for decades.
The concept of changing the fork offset as the fork cycles through its travel is not new by any means, but no one has implemented it quite like this. The Message, through my very rough measurements, starts at around 50mm of offset, creating a very lively and flickable bike at the top of its travel. Then at bottom out, the offset is reduced to around 20mm. While the head angle changes quite a bit, the corresponding change in offset counteracts this, creating a front end confidence that must be experienced to be believed.
Have a look at the new Ibis Cycles Ripley 29 at Jenson USA.
#trusteffect #trustperformance #kendallweedclassic
Check out the new Trust Message 130mm travel 27.5/29 fork here at the Trust Performance website.
Big thanks to these guys for making this all possible! Any purchases from these links will directly help support this series as well:
Jenson USA: http://bit.ly/JensonJKW
PNW Components: http://bit.ly/PNWComponentsJKW
Kitsbow Cycling Apparel: http://bit.ly/KitsbowJKW
Kali Protectives: http://bit.ly/KaliJKW
Wilderness Trail Bikes (WTB): http://bit.ly/WTBlocaloam
Ibis Cycles: http://bit.ly/IbisJKW
Camelbak: http://bit.ly/CamelbakJKW
Industry Nine: http://bit.ly/IndustryNineJKW
My additional sponsors:
Trust Performance: http://bit.ly/TrustJKW
Check out our podcast! http://bit.ly/KendallVSKendall
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