Guests at this weekend’s Philly Bike Expo feasted their eyes on Digit’s rethought suspension idea — now tailored to a 29-inch bike for the primary time.
It doesn’t matter what suspension design bike builders go for, all of them face one evident downside: it’s heavy.
Componentry provides up quick within the weight column on any full-suspension bike’s spec checklist. On prime of that, sustaining and repairing essentially the most advanced setups will be painstaking and extremely technical.
Digit Bikes seeks to unravel each with one idea by no means earlier than carried out within the bike world: strut suspension.
The fledgling firm hit us in February with the Datum, its first providing. The model gave its all-mountain mullet body its proprietary Analog suspension methodology to chop weight, keep the same pedaling really feel to conventional four-bar suspensions, add chassis stiffness, and improve reliability and repairability.
Out With the Shock, In With the Strut: Digit Bikes Rethinks MTB Suspension
And at this weekend’s Philly Bike Expo, it unveiled a 29-inch prototype body that seeks the identical objectives.
The Ring will provide 125mm of rear journey (±5mm pending finalized design) to go along with a 140mm entrance fork.
Digit’s Integer strut makes use of an elongated air spring tuned to match the body’s leverage profile. Which means the damper holds considerably extra oil, which performs two important capabilities: it resists overheating (decreases fading) and helps increased circulation charges all through the journey, which improves management).
Talking of management, Digit’s design additionally delivers extra as a result of there’s simply much less that may go mistaken than in a standard four-bar setup. Any machine with fewer shifting elements is inherently extra simple. With fewer elements to rattle unfastened over time, jimmy round, put on out, or outright fail, the Analog suspension ought to give riders a dependable, constant really feel.
The one draw back, if there may be one — you continue to can’t get a Digit bike in carbon fiber. For now, at the least, the corporate rolled out the Ring’s prototype in aluminum.
Digit stated it expects to launch the Ring in early 2023. MSRP info was not accessible as of this writing.
