-
I always found demo bikes never quite fit right, stem to long, wrong seat, gears etc Also try and get an XL on demo! For me its only when I have got a bike set up how I like that I can assess if its a keeper. Hence the principle of trying every frame until I randomly find one that works.
velosaurus-
I just buy whatever is on sale and then make it work with my vast array of previously experimented-with components.
-
I always found demo bikes never quite fit right, stem to long, wrong seat, gears etc Also try and get an XL on demo! For me its only when I have got a bike set up how I like that I can assess if its a keeper. Hence the principle of trying every frame until I randomly find one that works.
I rented an XL Megatower in Morzine, then rented an XL Hightower back in the UK.
Following this, I bought a Pace, and then spent some time specifying it so that the kit matched the XTR Hightower - which had a degree of cargo-cult in it I admit.
Crucial to my decision making process was waiting until there were two decent reviews of the bike that said it was good - given that I took delivery of the very first XL 295 frame to arrive in the UK there was zero possibility of demo'ing it.
One mistake I made was that the first bike I bought (Scalpel SE) was too small for me, based on the size of bike I'd have ridden in the 90's rather than the style of bike that we ride today.
Does seem to be that the answer to "is this long enough?" is "No", which has resulted in trail bikes that are longer than DH bikes, which I find entertaining when putting mine on the back of the chairlift.
hippy
Dammit
Good point. I do typically do a bit of sizing chat with Scherrit and kinda know what I want/need with road/TT stuff though. Because MTB is so far removed from my normal riding I just don't know what certain geos feel like. I don't know if I'll like a bike's handling or it will do what I want it to do. So, dropping £3k on something that turns out to annoy the piss out of me is the last thing I want to do. This is probably why I've been umming and arring about MTBs for a year now.
Gotcha. I'm waiting on some parts to turn the Inbred back into an actual MTB.