Let's offroad / mountain bike / mtb / ride dirt

I have this hardtail frame laying around that no one want to buy.
Its designed for 27.5x2.6 tyres with a 150mm fork.
I'm playing with the idea to build it up as a mullet, so a 29" front wheel and a 130mm fork and probably 2.40" tyres front and rear, just to make it bit faster.
Is this a bad idea, does anyone have experience with this?

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Other than changing the geometry slightly, it'll be fine.

Thanks! In my head it will look like this

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Surly Krampus!

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Nice!

I changed my Cube Stereo140 to a a mullet. Dropped the fork travel from 150 to 140 to adjust back to the original geo. Love riding the bike. Dutch trails and blue and easy red bikepark lines in Winterberg

Thanks for the info, I only have this mountainbike which is very fun in bike parks but rubbish on the Dutch trails.

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This is gonna sound funny, but does anyone know a good fitter for MTB? I've never used one for road or gravel/CX and never had any problems, but I've got wrist/forearm problems caused by my XC bike that no amount of tinkering with stack and sweep seem to fix. Usually I can get to a comfortable fit without one but, much as a resent it, I think the time has come to do it.

wrist/forearm problems

I solved mine by running my levers much flatter than before. Meant I was supporting my weight with my palm rather than thumb, and put the wrist at a more natural angle.
The pain on the outside of my wrist went away immediately.

I think bike fitting for MTB is a tricky one, because your body position is much more dynamic than on road. You simply don't stay in the same position for as long.

I'll give this a bash. I assume from your user name you're also a man that has to run a lot of post on an MTB? I don't think the saddle to bars drop is helping but any lower and it'd be uncomfortable for pedalling, plus my dropper is on the seatpost collar.

I tried a 20 degree rise stem and but it did nothing for comfort and made the front end very squirrely.

Tbh, I'm most concerned about getting the seated position right. My rides on it are usually 40-50k with a fair bit of riding on gravel/roads to get to singletrack.

It's a weird situation. It's not slammed (got about 30mm spacers) and the drop isn't hugely different from my CX bike maybe 10-20mm more. But my wrists and forearms really don't like something.

Have you tried out different variations of bar roll as well? Also some silicone grips like ESI ones?

plus my dropper is on the seatpost collar.

Unless by some weird coincidence this works perfectly for you, I'd imagine this isn't helping things fit-wise

I was going to suggest bar roll too. That and lever angle have done far more for comfort (for me, anyway) than stem height or length. If you want to be really comfy, you need a bike with a massive stack height.

Another call for bar-roll. I can comfortably ride bikes with varying stack and reach numbers, but the bar roll has to be spot on or my hands aren't happy

I concur, and those SQ Labs grips that give a bit more back sweep angle.

Sitting in your riding position and rolling the bars until you feel the entire grip evenly across your palm should alleviate a lot of wrist problem. When the bars are rolled so the very ends are pushing on the outside of your palm, your wrist turns and puts pressure on the outside of it, which is frankly fucking painful.

This is all been useful for me. I’ve been having issues since swapping bars for purely aesthetic/weirdo reasons and it’s given my wrists some issues. Will try some different bar roll and flatten off the levers a tad.

Cheers everyone. That does sound like the root of the problem. It's basically pain in the outside of my wrist and up into my forearm. I don't think it's ulner related as I've got no tingling or numbness.

Running big chunky ESI grips and SQ labs bars so it's already set up for comfort. It's been pretty confusing as the stack isn't wildly aggressive compared to what I'd use on the road or my cross bike. Going for a bimble around Stratford trails this evening so will play around with bar roll and see if that helps.

Tbh, it's because I have a long travel dropper and that's as far down as it goes. It's a Fox transfer from I think 2023, so non adjustable. But it is about the right height, got about a 5 degree bend in my knee and no hip rocking.

Can confirm this (and taping the offending wrist) seemed to help a bit. My wrists were achy afterwards but not sore. Achy is possibly just down to my bimble turning into hot laps and being on the brakes more than usual to get around all the 90 degree bends at Stratford.

Good stuff! Another thing I found helped when I was getting back into MTB was I was simply gripping on too hard. Took a while to retrain myself to do "heavy feet, light hands"

Some good advice in here, particularly about hand position

https://m.pinkbike.com/news/are-we-misapplying-light-hands-heavy-feet-to-mountain-biking-2015.html

This sounds like what I have at the moment.

I've just started trying to wipe my arse right-handed again after crashing and it's actually the outside of my wrist that's more painful than my shoulder or anything.

One of the exercises they gave me after surgery was to simply sit and rotate the wrists, palm up to palm down and the right wrist has pain along the outside when it gets to either extreme of the rotation. The pain is right behind the "wrist knuckle".

Spam alert - selling my xl Honzo ESD frame here