Yesterday I showed you my new testcycle:
And no sooner had I done so than I clipped in and scampered off to that most formidable of proving grounds, the forbidding Trails Behind The Mall:
[The beguiling mall behind which the forbidding Trails Behind The Mall are behind. Photo not by me. The REI is long gone.]
I was looking forward to receiving this bike as sort of a guilty pleasure, for I’d enjoyed the last testcycle quite a bit, even though I’m a staunch advocate of rigidity in bicycles:
And now that we were in that ideal trail-riding season when the snow is long gone but the mosquitos have not yet taken over I was eager to zip around in the woods on a fully-suspendered fin de siècle mountain bicycle with aggressive geometry and tiny wheels once again.
The heart of this particular bicycle is of course the so-called “i-Drive,” which sounds like a great name for a self-driving taxi service:
While I was certainly familiar with the i-Drive as a thing that existed, I also didn’t really know how it worked, since for the past 30 years I’ve gone out of my way to to not own a fully-suspendered bicycle or learn anything about them. But now that I was the custodian of one I looked it up, and here’s an explanation from an old review:
The i-Drive concept is a way of creating a very active suspension system with minimum pedal feedback by using a bottom bracket subframe that ‘floats’ underneath the mainframe. Theoretically, suspension feedback and chain growth on the i-Drive system counteract one another, leaving you to point, pedal and let the suspension do the donkey work. It works well, and each new i-Drive generation has worked better than the last.
Great, got it, donkey work, no problem.
Leaving my home, I darted into the park and onto the first stretch of dirt:
The bike felt fast and nimble like the AMP had, but also more plush and refined thanks having more suspension and newer drivetrain components, plus it’s a little bigger than the AMP was and has wider bars wider, so overall it was more comfortable.
So far so good.
One can, if one is so inclined, make it almost all the way to the forbidding Trails Behind The Mall on that dirt trail, but in the interest of time I soon merged onto the paved trail instead. This is the one on which I’d had my recent wino encounter, though fortunately the route I take to the forbidding Trails Behind The Mall involves scurrying up the embankment on the right of the trail in the picture below in order to head over to the beguiling mall behind which the forbidding Trails Behind The Mall are behind, so I don’t pass the spot on the trail where, for all I know, the angry winos are still lying in wait for me:
Before long, I was behind the mall behind which the forbidding Trails Behind The Mall are…well you know the rest:
Everything about this bicycle is now obsolete, but don’t tell me or the bike that, because we don’t care:
Now that’s what I call a brake!
Handling-wise the bike felt great. However, I was having one persistent issue, this being frontal shifting problems–rubbing, not dropping into the smaller chainrings, etc.:
Nothing I did seemed to solve it, and I thought to myself, “Yes, I know the world has moved on from triples, and they can be a pain to set up with an indexed front shifter, but they certainly weren’t this bad.” I also noticed that the front derailleur was moving along with the rear suspension travel, which didn’t seem like something that should happen, but because it did happen it meant any adjustments I made to the limit screws or cable tension were futile. So I fired up my portable telephone and did a little more i-Drive research:
See how it moves?
Well, because of this, apparently you have to make the front derailleur cable housing long enough so that the movement of the rear suspension doesn’t pull it taught, causing the derailleur to move. So while there is extra length here, either it’s not enough, or else I don’t have enough air in the rear shock (Paul had given me suggestions as far as air pressure but could easily have way underestimated my heft), or probably both, since it seems like there should be enough cable slack so that the shock can go through its entire travel without tugging on the derauilleur, right?
So I’ve got stuff to figure out, but that’s just part of being the Old Crap Test Pilot–maybe even the most important part. Was I tempted to instantly write the bike off as irredeemable and tout it as yet another example of why all forms of suspension are bunk? Was I equally tempted to run out and buy a brand-new single-ring drivetrain for it? Of course. But taking the time to get to know, understand–and yes, even love–these star-crossed time capsules is my special purpose in life.
When it was new I would have found this bike menacing, but now it’s just saying, “Help me:”
Aww, poor little i-Drive…