Find this funny...

[MikeD]

They're mostly for 100mm+ forks. There's the Ragley TD-1, which is "rigid specific" but 29in wheels. Singular do a 29er designed for a short (by 29er standards) rigid fork too. For 26in wheels I don't know of anything contemporary.

 

[petitpal]

Not the same geometry and not all that recently either -- certainly before CEN came along

Ah, sorry for that then - I thought the 25th anniversary one was a pretty much exact copy. (Btw, anything since 2000 is recent in my book, last thing I seem to actually remember was in the late 90's somewhere. lol )

 

[dbmtb]

Retro-style MTBs are the new fixies?

Won't catch on for a good few years. Basically we are all still using them and we are all extremely uncool. Ergo - they won't catch on until we pass them on to our kids when they go to college.

 

[We_are_Stevo]

Don't Singulars come in both flavours?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=singul ... d=0CEMQsAQ

...and surely a frame designed for a 100mm travel fork can be retro geometry??

 

[Drencrom]

Retro-style MTBs are the new fixies?

Won't catch on for a good few years. Basically we are all still using them and we are all extremely uncool. Ergo - they won't catch on until we pass them on to our kids when they go to college.

Maybe the fact that we use them for what they were designed for makes them unlikely to ever be the new 'whatever'.

I'll say it again and again; old mountain bikes are not cool to the hipsters, or to the kids. Never were, never will be. It's just us.

On the plus side, we get all the fun.

 

[petitpal]

I'll say it again and again; old mountain bikes are not cool to the hipsters, or to the kids. Never were, never will be. It's just us.

I'd agree. Every generation of MTBs is cool to the generation that rides them. 90's bikes were cool in the 90's and so on. That's sort of life isn't it? (Obviously when I say cool I don't necessarily mean any good or necessarily appreciated by the likes of us) When the new stuff comes along it looks weird for a bit, everything starts to look like it and then suddenly what was cool is now old hat / retro / whatever-label-gets-applied. Don't think that's only true of bikes, tbh.

Ultimately I think that it's probably all down to sales figures. If you invest heavily in building retro-style MTBs they're really ever going to have a big appeal to people like us. And we're likely to slag it off for being retro-wannabe, mutter about over pricing and keep buying our solid old retro steeds. Sadly, it's always going to be difficult to sell the benfits of a fully rigid bike to a market lead to believe that full suspension is better is going to be difficult. Easier to keep making what everyone else is, I suppose.

 

[We_are_Stevo]

Retrobikes can be just as bad in certain respects;

Fashionable boutique alloy framed MTB with nil or neglible travel suspension that isn't fit for purpose?

Form an orderly queue at the trough...

 

[Raging_Bulls]

Also, I suppose, if the industry is geared around producing components for modern geometery it might be less economical for them to produce something based on old; suspension forks, for example: seems to be tricky to find anything very modern that fits old frames.

You can always alter the parts.

I'm lowering a modern 100mm fork to 50mm in order to put it on my Sbike 729. Needs a CK Devolution headset or some shims too, as the fork is 1 1/8 and the frame is 1 1/4.
It takes some planning an one or 2 custom parts (in this case some spacers to stop the legs from extending completely), but it's very doable.

 

[MikeD]

Don't Singulars come in both flavours?

The Swift comes with a rigid fork, but it's designed to run with suspension as well, hence the extra length in the fork. To my mind (and I accept that I may be in the minority here) a true "retro geometry" bike would be designed around the shortest fork possible -- no yawning chasm between top of tyre and fork crown. Singular has the non-suspension-corrected Gryphon, but that's designed for drop bars as well for ubernicheness

...and surely a frame designed for a 100mm travel fork can be retro geometry??

See above. Obviously it's all in the definition, but in my head the kind of bike we're talking about would be 71/73 angles with a fork no longer than 400mm axle-to-crown. The Ragley TD-1 is the closest contemporary thing I can think of -- 440mm fork, but 29in wheels that fill it nicely. Typical 29er rigid forks are 470mm.

 

[petitpal]

Also, I suppose, if the industry is geared around producing components for modern geometery it might be less economical for them to produce something based on old; suspension forks, for example: seems to be tricky to find anything very modern that fits old frames.

You can always alter the parts.

I'm lowering a modern 100mm fork to 50mm in order to put it on my Sbike 729. Needs a CK Devolution headset or some shims too, as the fork is 1 1/8 and the frame is 1 1/4.
It takes some planning an one or 2 custom parts (in this case some spacers to stop the legs from extending completely), but it's very doable.

I agree, but I suppose I'm thinking in terms of a manufacturer planning to build a small run of potentially low sales bikes. Probably not so appealing if everything has to be modified because the industry has 'moved' somewhere else, unless, of course it's for a particular reason, like the 25th anniversary Zaskar re-issue.