As a result, the mis-mitered tubes could be used to build a fun bike to be given to friends, and after some happy accident, I ended up with one—a steel, single-pivot, long-travel trail bike or, perhaps, a slightly sketchy enduro bike. While I’m not going to pretend to have ridden enough trail bikes or enduro bikes to be able to make nuanced observations about suspension kinematics, I have ridden enough bikes over the past two decades to have a good idea about what worked for me and how the bike felt to ride. It’s a bold move to build a deliciously dynamic and forgivingly flexy steel trail bike in Germany, the heartland of stiffness being touted as the grail of bicycle manufacture in cycling media. I stripped the bike down to the carbon frame (2 pounds 13 ounces) and rebuilt it from the ground up.
The SRD came with the classic Acto5 mountain cranks, nice and short in 165—because this bike has all the gears—and long cranks are for flat-earthers. Looking at a component in isolation, I really prefer the performance of SRAM electronic shifting, especially in wet, grimy conditions, but some people prefer mechanical shifting, and those people prefer Shimano. Looking at buying a $600 mech, I love the idea that individual parts of the mech can be replaced if they get damaged, that it will run with almost any shifter, and that I can swap the cage out to run short or long so it can be used on more or less any bike. The frame is made from custom butted and bent 4130 tubes and cast parts manufactured in Taiwan.
I’m normally a fan of flex everywhere but in this instance, the super stiff BEAST parts kept the bike feeling positive and surprisingly efficient on climbs. And surprisingly, he often finds a diamond in the rough — or at least a salvageable build he can later modify. (In fairness, he finds total lemons too.) So I caught up with him to find out why he loves box-store bikes, whether it’s ever a good buy, and what you can do to make a 200-plus-dollar Walmart bike a respectable ride.
The RD-1 rear mech is by far the best-looking out there, but more critically, it’s unfussy about what other parts it works with, meshing equally well with 11—or 12-speed SRAM, Shimano, or even Campagnolo shifters. In practice, that translated to the bars feeling significantly stiff. Regrettably ill-equipped for the scientific process, I’d estimate deflection over their ample span to be within the acceptable deflection tolerance over the same span for a rolled steel joist designated for constructing a skyscraper. The 35-mm clamp diameter carbon risers that the bike came with have an anti-crush zone where they be clamped, as well as a soft, high-friction coefficient lamination on the outside in clamping areas because over-tightening of stem bolts is often a reason for handlebar failure. In this way, the bars don’t move, even with less-than-the-ideal torque, and won’t get crushed with more, so the risk of crush-based failure is mitigated. My SRD’s life began as a pile of mitered tubes destined to be an iteration of the forthcoming enduro-focused Sour Double Choc during the middle stage of Sour’s onshoring process when tubes were still mitered in Taiwan and welded in Germany.
Consisting of the Elevate 22, Daybreak 17, Summit 30, and Stuff Pack 30, features range from complete simplicity to those needed to accomplish creative, technical missions. I find intact collarbones to be both beneficial and desirable in my line of work and as a self-employed person, so I was overly cautious to start with, riding an alien-feeling bike on things that I can’t ride. It’s a good-looking bike with a concise and consistent design language used throughout the frame, with all the castings for the pivot points matching the dropouts and gusset shapes. It looks pretty minimal for a long travel mountain bike. Bike Yoke is a brand with which I was not previously familiar, as they are best known for their droppers, mountain bike specific saddles with integrated suspension, and alternative yokes for rear shocks.
All the while being simple and, in my experience, maintenance-free with four sealed bearings between the swing arm and the frame. It weighs in at 356 g and is machined in two parts, a heat-treated hyper bicycles steel part for the first nine smaller cogs, and a hard anodized aluminum part for the three largest cogs to save weight. It offers amazing and consistent performance throughout its 520% range.