Carver Bikes fork review

 

I'll start with some plain spoken honesty: Carver Bikes gave me this fork.  Plain spoken honesty is actually a great place to start a review of any product from Davis Carver or Bikeman.com because he and his business absolutely embody this quality.  Davis and I first met in 1997 at the Grillz Memorial race he promoted on the rugged Maine coast.  The man and the race course (which included the gnarliest, rock-strewn singletrack I'd ever seen in a cross country event) were the real deal, and I was happy to make both their acquaintances.  Through the years, whenever the Carver name came up, I'd point people to Bikeman's Ebay user profile.  A good power seller will usually have a positive feedback rating in the 99.X% range, which is near perfect when you've had more than a thousand transactions, but NEAR perfect isn't the way of the Bikeman business, and it has the only 100% positive rating I've ever seen for a  volume seller.  Davis is that kind of guy, and now that his son Forrest is largely running the business, it seems the family character has successfully been handed down.

At first glance, many are tricked into thinking this is a suspension fork, but oh no.  As some of you may know, I have a penchant for fully rigid bikes (it's not a hardtail; it's a hard-nosed hard-ass!), and over the course of my last three years of racing, I rode more than half the events without suspension assist.  On many occasions, spectators would ask if I really thought a rigid fork was faster, to which I'd flat out reply, "No," but then opine that there was more to mountain biking, and possibly even racing, than just "fast".  Mountain biking offers challenges like rocks, wet roots, and logs, that just aren't likely found road riding, and presumably, it is these very challenges that draw mountain bikers to the sport.  Well, I love the challenge of mountain biking very much and prefer as few squishy bits as possible muting that experience.  Yes, yes, I have procured a suspension fork to have on hand for this year's racing efforts, but I'm quietly hoping I still have the ability to get away without it.  So, if you're still reading what has become an ode to the rigid fork, check this one out:

This is the fork I wanted, straight up honest truth.  In fact, I bought a second one for an adventure bike build when Bikeman gave me this one for my race bike.  For about ten years, I've been riding an unbranded but very similar design all aluminum fork in a shorter length on one of my bikes, and I trust the design of using metal for dropouts, crown, and steerer to hold up to the loads and scratches a mountain bikes sees in the woods, but I was not always happy with the amount of independent movement between the two fork legs, translating to twist at the axle and less precision in corners.  Those are 35mm pipes, so you'd think it would be super stiff, but a rigid tube can't dissipate impact forces like the oil in a suspension fork, so that energy has to go somewhere, and that means flex.  Enter the Carver fork with carbon tubes inserted into the same aluminum contact points, and now I have a 1cm longer fork that eschews that twist I experienced cornering my older fork.  I like this fork. A lot.

What would I change?  Not much, but with Davis as my inspiration for plain talk, I thought hard and came up with two things.  1. There are no cable guides on this fork, unlike some others of this design, although, I'm actually going to say I prefer the Carver option here.  The guides I've seen are installed by drilling the carbon tube and attaching with rivets.  Me, I'd rather leave that carbon fully intact and use a stick-on guide if I want to be fancy, although for now, I'm just wrapping a zip tie around the leg over a piece of electrical tape for abrasion protection.  More importantly, this fork doesn't use the hell that is the bike industry's obsession with internal cable routing!  2. My fork uses a through axle, although Bikeman has some traditional quick release options.  I'm sure that axle is contributing to the reduced twist I'm enjoying, but one nit to pick: the through axle is designed like a quick release skewer, with a threaded cap instead of internal threads on the fork dropout.  For function while riding, I see no weakness here, but it does make for one extra loose piece when changing a flat.

You'll notice that there is no gripe about weight.  With the axle, this fork weights right around two pounds.  That puts it in the middle of the range between slightly shorter steel forks and full carbon monocoque options I found.  The steel forks were downright heavy, often nearing the heft of the lightest suspension forks, while some carbon options were so scary light I was wondering if I'd save even more weight by knocking out my teeth if the fork failed.  Eep!  See, I have a habit of not backing off much with a rigid fork, partaking of drops, jumps, and bumps in all their forms, so a design that relies on the basic structure of rowdy all-mountain forks while maintaining the pure essence of a rigid ride checks all the boxes for me.  Did I mention I like this fork a lot?  Yeah.

One note on axle to crown length: this is the distance from the bottom of the headset to the center of the hub axle.  This length is getting really long with the fork travel seen even on hardtails these days.  Still, you needn't match the full uncompressed suspension fork length, or possibly not even the sagged length, as unlike that suspension fork, you new rigid goodness will never get any shorter when you hit a bump.  In my case, I was replacing a 541mm fork with Carver's longest offering of 490mm (although they mentioned custom offerings if you can wait), so I added an extended crown race to gain a little more length, and the end result feels spot on.  There's a handy online tool for checking varied fork lengths here.

If you're curious to try the rigid revolution (don't I wish!), check out all the options at Carver Bikes.

Ride rigid and keep your teeth!