Size Matters

There may not be an overwhelmingly good reason for this post's content, given the volumes others have already said, and there's likely a slightly shamefully bad reason for that title, but I'm not letting such considerations stop me. In business, there is the concept of planned obsolescence, whereby products are intentionally design for a limited lifespan to force new purchases. The bicycle industry version of this is to continually create new technology and convince buyers that their old equipment, which once had given them many smiles, is no longer rideable.

I first was aware of 29" wheels from Carl of Vicious Cycles at the Pedro's mountain bike festival, probably sometime just after the turn of the millennium. I'd just been introduced to Carl by a friend, and while we were chatting, one if his bikes caught my eye.

"There's something odd about that bike."

"Yes," he replied, "can you figure out what it is?"

I stared at the bike for a long thirty seconds then it clicked.

"The wheels are bigger!"

Carl was impressed that the kid known for riding a bike was also perceptive about them as well, and he congratulated me, sharing that he'd been asking people all weekend if they could figure out what was unique. Not only had I recognized without the prompt that something was different, the only other person to get it was another industry icon who'd been playing with the new wheel size. Carl and I became friends and he even supplied my race bikes with forks when I went rigid a few years latter.

I'd tried Carl's 29er in the open field and my immediate response was that it rolled over the lumpy grass as well as my cross bike, but in the years to come, I remained a fan of 26" wheels because the early examples of big wheel bikes never felt right to me with their steep head angles. The industry eventually figured out to address that, but the big wheel bikes still felt  well, big to me when I tried them. Then, ten years ago, I rode my friend Sarah's Kona Honzo around the parking lot before a ride.

It didn't feel big! It just felt right, even to a cranky old rider cranking around on 26" wheels. I still remembered the email address for Kona's product manager Pat and sent off congratulations for building the first 29er that didn't feel like one. Years later in 2022 (no, I'm not quick), knowing that I'd need the rolling resistance advantage of big wheels to offer any competition in a race, I wound up with a Kona Taro, which was a Honzo AL before they called it that, with the bonus of older quick release rear dropouts that work with my trailer and, of course, the depreciation inherent in buying used in a world of planned obsolescence.

One aspect of most 29ers I don't like is the difficulty I have lofting the front wheel. I was happily surprised by my new bike, which, by the expense of a curved seat tube, measured chainstays that were 5mm SHORTER than my default 26" wheel woods bike. At the bottom of one of my favorite local decents, on the exit of a corner and with a rooty approach, there is a table top jump that I could just clear on my nimble, small wheels if I nailed the corner and roots just right. I expected the big wheels, and my usual inability to rock my weight back behind them, would prevent me from clearing the jump to the downslope landing. I was wrong. Short chainstays, I cleared the top more easily than I ever had, and while my curmudgeonly love of 26" wheels was still alive, I'd just lost another reason to not conform with the move to big wheels.

Of course, I had additional questionable reasons, not just that one. I'm a fan of both old-school rigid forks and the extra slack head angles of modern bikes, but riders, even people on hardtails, have switched to suspension forks with more travel than what I used racing downhill in 1999. These forks are LONG. So long, it can be a challenge to find a long enough rigid fork to replace them, but I'd figured out a trick to create a modern, slack bike with a rigid fork: start with a 27.5" bike and regain some of the lost length up front by clamping a 29" wheel in that rigid fork, gaining 19 millimeters!

Yes, I know I'm not the first to ride a mullet, although I do think that nomenclatire is backwards, because the hairstyle is big in back. But see, I can conform and ride what other people do, sorta. It works, and happily, with 26" wheels more truly measuring 26.5", it means the back end feel is not that far away from the old bikes I loved for years. Yay!

Then two weeks ago, I rode my tellum and found I was aware of the rear wheel just not rolling over roots as well as the front. Sure, with my nerve injury still recovering, I can't unweight the rear wheel as well, and that end of the bike starts statically with a bigger percentage of the weight distribution, but darn it, drat, the bike was just feeling a wee bit imbalanced. So, end of  last week, my mountain bike ride was on my race bike from 2022. Hmmm, yup, I did kinda like it, so maybe my wheels and I will eventually grow up.