Geometron arguably did more than any other bike brand to kick off the geometry revolution of the late 2010s, but they weren’t content to leave their longstanding G1 alone — even though its geometry still looks pretty up to date five years after it first launched. So we sat down with Sam Robson and Marcel Lauxtermann from Geometron to talk about the…

In this month's episode of Reviewing the News on our Bikes & Big Ideas Podcast, Mike Ferrentino and Simon Stewart debate the polarizing topic of bikes in Wilderness areas. There's plenty of bike racing to talk about — including the biggest one in the world, the Tour de France. And they’re excited to talk about Red Bull Rampage including a women’s c…

We’ve been testing a big spectrum of bikes from the XC-race-derived Specialized Epic Evo to big Enduro sleds including the RAAW Madonna V3 and Marin Alpine Trail, so David Golay and Zack Henderson sat down to chat about a whole bunch of them, and along the way we take a deep dive into tire design & a variety of options we’ve been testing; discuss t…

Bryan Hance is a bike enthusiast and web developer who combined those two interests in co-founding Bike Index, a database that tracks ownership to help recover bikes that end up stolen. Through that work, Bryan uncovered a sprawling bike theft and trafficking operation, which he traced back to one man, operating out of Jalisco, Mexico — and the sto…

Bike companies file a lot of wild patents, spanning from “nearly released product” to “outrageous pie-in-the-sky idea.” Dan Bacon of Wheelbased chronicles many of the more interesting ones, and we brought him back on the show to talk about some recent highlights, from Bilstein’s proposed fork damper to Shimano’s multiple electronic brake concepts, …

Mike Ferrentino is back again as co-host for this month’s iteration of Reviewing the News, and Simon is delighted to have him in the studio to help try and make sense of the Red Bull Hardline drama. There were two exciting DH World Cup races to talk about, as well as an XC World Cup in Nova Mesto to cover. And in a fun change of pace, they get into…

We’ve been very impressed with the EXT Storia V3 on a whole bunch of different bikes over the years, but EXT is launching a new V4 iteration soon, and they’ve found a lot to tweak. So we brought EXT founder, Franco Fratton, back to Bikes & Big Ideas to give us a rundown on the new Storia and Arma V4; talk about the potential for truly “active” susp…

When it comes to rear shocks for mountain bikes, there are tons of options for both air- and coil-sprung versions, but the Cane Creek Tigon is both — an “air-charged coil shock,” as Cane Creek describes it. So we sat down with Cane Creek’s Will Hart to get the rundown on the Tigon, including why Cane Creek decided to make it; what its pros and cons…

We’ve been testing a huge variety of bikes, from the E-Gravel Scott Solace to a bunch of high-pivot Trail bikes (including the Deviate Highlander II), plus several new forks, some new tires, and a whole bunch more. So we sat down to chat about all of it; recap the World Cup DH season opener; recount being repeatedly heckled on the local trails; and…

Carbon fiber bike frames have become ubiquitous in the high-end world, but metal bikes are making a comeback — and the number of steel full-suspension bikes we’ve reviewed in the last few years is a testament to that. So we sat down with Daniel Yang and Nick Neuhaus of Neuhaus Metalworks to chat about the case for metal bikes; hear the story of the…

Simon welcomes guest co-host Mike Ferrentino to go over a busy, weird month in the bike world. Of course, they have to talk about what happened to Kona, which leads to a discussion about the negative effect Venture capital and investment companies seem to have on the bike industry. But there’s also fun stuff going on with companies like Gates, and …

The Norco Factory Team has a new DH race bike, and the story of its development is an interesting one. So we sat down with engineers Adrian Ward and Kirk McDowall to hear their take on the goals and design intent of the bike; what they learned from the development of the existing Enduro bike, the Range (and its modified DH version); the original te…

We’ve been testing a massive assortment of new bikes and other gear, and David Golay and Zack Henderson sat down to chat about a whole bunch of them, including the high-pivot Norco Optic and Sight, the new Specialized Epic Evo, the newly-mulleted Yeti SB165, and more. RELATED LINKS: BLISTER+ Membership BLISTER+ Real World Testimonials Blister Labs …

March was an interesting month for bike news. There was a dispute at Crankworx Rotorua which resulted in the men not competing in the finals, Scott is having crazy management drama, there are a bunch of interesting new lightweight eMTBs, and Simon had a recent trip to ride in Tuscany. In our third installment of Reviewing The News, Ryan and Simon g…

Racing World Cup DH isn’t easy under any circumstances, but doing so after a spinal cord injury — and needing to relearn how to walk, much less ride — is something else entirely. Brook Macdonald pulled it off, but he’s also struggled with bike setup, burnout, and more over the last couple of seasons. For 2024, though, he’s got a new team, a new bik…

Georgia Astle is one of the many ultra-talented riders to come out of Whistler, BC — but she actually grew up kitesurfing and doing a whole bunch of other sports, rather than mountain biking. Once she fell in love with mountain biking in high school, though, her rise through the ranks was astonishingly rapid — first as a racer and later as a freeri…

Dakotah Norton finished the 2023 DH season strong, with two podiums and a 6th place finish over the final four races, but as he put it, the season started with “near failure.” We sat down with Dakotah to talk about the struggle of finding consistency at the limit; his move to Mondraker Factory Racing and the dissolution of his former team at Intens…

Gravel racing has exploded in recent years and Sarah Sturm — who only started racing bikes in college, after burning out on competitive soccer — quickly vaulted to stardom in the sport. So we sat down with Sarah to hear the surprising and hilarious story of her path into gravel racing; chat about the struggle of not excelling at something you’ve de…

On our second episode of Reviewing The News with hosts Simon Stewart and Ryan Palmer; Ryan may have uncovered what Kyle and Rachael Strait are keeping secret before their big announcement on Friday (March 8th); Simon considers adopting Ronan Dunne’s pre-race hydration program after watching his incredible Red Bull Hardline winning run; there’s a br…

High-pivot bikes are becoming increasingly common but they’re still mostly reserved for longer-travel Enduro and DH models. Given that, Norco’s decision to move their 150mm-travel Sight and especially the 125mm-travel Optic to that layout was arguably a bit of a surprise — and it wasn’t one Norco made lightly. So we sat down with Norco engineer, Co…

The first Tasmanian edition of Red Bull Hardline is coming up, so we sat down with Ed Masters to talk about the event, building and testing the course, and getting prepared to ride it. Along the way, we talk about Pivot’s wild prototype DH bike, the state of Enduro and DH racing in general, Ed’s outlook on the future, and a whole lot more. RELATED …

Continental’s overhauled gravity tire lineup has had a lot of success, both on the World Cup Downhill circuit and with everyday riders (we’ve personally been huge fans of the Kryptotals). It’s a big departure from their prior offerings, with 5 new tread patterns to go with overhauled casings and rubber compounds, and we sat down with Alexander Hänk…

Blister reviewer Zack Henderson makes his Bikes & Big Ideas debut to talk with David Golay about a bunch of the bikes they’ve been testing, including the Nicolai Nucleon 16 Supre Drive, Ibis HD6, and Chromag Lowdown (and they tease some other upcoming reviews that they can’t yet talk about in detail). RELATED LINKS: BLISTER+ Membership BLISTER+ Rea…

Simon Stewart is joined by bike industry veteran, Ryan Palmer, to kick off the inaugural bike-focused edition of Reviewing the News. Ryan and Simon tuck into what happened to Greg Minaar and Santa Cruz; Mondraker’s new focus on the U.S market and their stacked World Cup DH Team; the state of the industry in both manufacturing and retail going into …

Moving up to Elite Downhill racing from Juniors is hard, but Rónán Dunne made that leap in 2021, and promptly started getting great results — despite only racing a handful of World Cups as a Junior and never even making it out of qualifying. After three strong years racing for Nukeproof, Rónán has moved to the new Mondraker Factory Racing team for …

There are a lot of good reasons to try mountain biking at night, from simple necessity during the colder, darker months to seeking a new challenge and experience. We sat down with Outbound Lighting’s Tom Place to make the case for (safe) night riding, talk about light design, how to think about putting together a light setup for your needs, and muc…

When Ruben Torenbeek founded RAAW back in 2016, he had a clear vision for the sort of dependable, no-nonsense bikes he wanted to build. He clearly wasn’t alone in wanting a bike in that vein, because RAAW is going strong with an expanding model lineup, a bigger team, and so on. So Ruben and David Golay sat down to chat about all of it, including wh…

Vorsprung Suspension has been making a wide range of suspension upgrade products for quite some time now — and we’ve been very impressed with a number of them — but they’ve yet to offer a full standalone fork or shock. That’s about to change. So we sat down with founder and engineer Steve Mathews to hear all about the new coil shock that they’re de…

We got the gang back together to recap a whole bunch of the bikes and other gear we tested in 2023, and Simon Stewart, Dylan Wood, and David Golay picked a bunch of our favorites, including bikes across the travel spectrum and a variety of softgoods. Along the way, we get into bike design and geometry tradeoffs, headset cable routing, and much more…

Forbidden might be *the* company most closely associated with high-pivot bikes, but Owen Pemberton didn’t set out with that goal in mind when he founded the company. We sat down with Owen to hear all about his journey through the bike industry, including a long tenure as an engineer at Norco; founding Forbidden; his philosophy on bike design and ge…

EXT founder Franco Fratton has more experience working on suspension than just about anyone, and today, we’re revisiting our first conversation with him that kicked off our “Very Deep Dive on Suspension” series, where we discuss all the details when it comes to suspension design and tech. RELATED LINKS: A Very Deep Dive on Suspension with EXT’s Fra…

William Boisvert made his first bike frame — a machined front triangle for a Devinci Troy — in just seven weeks for a college project, and despite the challenges that arose (and the fact that that first frame didn’t survive very long), he’s continued the development of a CNC-machined high-pivot Enduro frame, and founded Tool to bring it to market. …

A lot of companies have offered bikes with a degree of adaptability in their geometry and travel configurations, but the Albatross Apogee Module is a very novel design that opens up a much wider spectrum of options than most. We sat down with founder and engineer, Will Hilgenberg, to chat about the concept; what he sees as being the advantages of t…

Two races into the 2022 EWS season, Katy Winton hit a breaking point and pulled out of the rest of the series to give herself the time and space she needed to get her mental health back on track. Having made a successful return to racing in 2023, Katy is now ready to open up about the experience. We sat down with her to talk about burnout and what …

Founding Intend (2:18) Fork design & the first Intend offering (5:24) Why inverted? (7:09) Selling inverted forks & market acceptance of things that look different (8:52) Designing a full fork (17:16) Damper design (20:16) The Infinity EN (24:42) The Bandit (38:32) The Hover shock (43:12) Brake design (48:17) Deciding which projects to tackle (57:0…

Neko Mulally’s Frameworks project has drawn a lot of well-deserved attention, and now he’s opening pre-orders for the production version of his World Cup DH race bike. So we sat down with Neko to hear all about everything that’s gone into the development of the bike this season; his experimentation with different frame materials; the wildly talente…

The stats of the Tour Divide route — 2,670 miles and 192,000 feet of climbing, mostly on dirt — are imposing, and Lachlan Morton just covered it in a record-setting 12 days, 12 hours, and 21 minutes. So we sat down with him to hear about what it takes to plan, prepare for, and execute such a wild undertaking, how it went, why Lachlan already wants …

The Contra MC — a US-made, steel, high-pivot Enduro bike — is an ambitious project by any measure, and designing and prototyping the bike is just half the battle. So we brought Evan Turpen, the driving force behind Contra, back on the show to talk about refining a prototype design and knowing when to stop tinkering; what goes into bringing a design…

Privateer has been working on the second-generation versions of their 141 and 161 bikes for three years now, and Dan Hicks, the engineer behind the project, has a ton to share about the thought process behind the updates and bike design in general — and does a great job of explaining all of it. So we sat down with Dan for a very deep dive into the …

When it was announced that Red Bull Formation wasn’t happening in 2023, there was a lot of hopeful speculation that, in its place, there would be women competing at Rampage for the first time. But that didn’t happen either, so we sat down with three of the top freeriders in the world — Casey Brown, Vaea Verbeeck, and Hannah Bergemann — to get their…

Simon Stewart, Dylan Wood, and David Golay sat down to talk about a bunch of the bikes they’ve been testing lately, from the short-travel Cannondale Habit to the very not short-travel Canfield One.2 Super Enduro; some eMTBs including the new Santa Cruz Heckler SL; a head-to-head comparison of high-pivot Enduro bikes from companies very large and ve…

High-pivot bikes are having a moment. Mullet bikes and steel full-suspension frames are too. And while gearbox mountain bikes haven’t achieved widespread popularity (yet?) they’ve got their ardent supporters. The Archibald Cycles AC1 brings all those elements together in a Canadian-made Trail / Enduro / Park bike, and the end result looks pretty in…

It’s rare for a small but well-established custom bike builder to make the leap to overseas-built production bikes, but Adam Sklar has done just that. While it might be easy to romanticize the idea of a custom hand-built bike made by a single builder, Adam speaks very openly about the ways running that version of Sklar had ceased to feel like the w…

We recently launched Gear Therapy over on our GEAR:30 podcast and now we’re bringing it over to Bikes & Big Ideas, too. For our first session, we chatted with Blister Member Andy Majewski about his bike quiver and the ways it’s evolved; how he might better dial in his current bikes to suit his needs; what bike would make the most sense to add to hi…

Trek’s new sixth-generation Slash has changed a lot from the prior-generation bike — including a high-pivot suspension layout, some big updates to the geometry and suspension kinematics, and a default mixed-wheel size setup — and we sat down with Matt Yerke, the lead engineer on the new Slash, to learn all about it. Matt walked us through the desig…

D3O’s non-Newtonian materials are used extensively in mountain bike protective equipment from a lot of different brands, and David Golay recently sat down with their Senior Vice President of Marketing, Kevin Franks, and their Head of Product, Kevin Fleer, to talk about the state of the mountain bike armor market; the ways it’s changed in recent yea…

Chromag has been doing things very differently from most bike companies for decades now, helping to pioneer modern hardcore hardtails — and doing so in Whistler, BC, in the shadow of the legendary bike park — not exactly classic hardtail terrain. So when Chromag launched their first production adult full-suspension bikes late last year, it wasn’t a…

David Golay, Dylan Wood, and Simon Stewart sat down to chat about a whole bunch of the bikes we’re reviewing currently, from the Chromag Darco to the Commencal Supreme, with a ton of other ones in between, including the Pivot Shuttle AM and the Trek Fuel EXe AL. Along the way, we discuss bike design more broadly; eMTB drive systems and their tradeo…

Aptos, CA is a small beach town that has produced an incredible number of world-class mountain bikers, and Ryan “R-Dog” Howard has a lot of great stories to share about the scene that gave rise to him, Cam and Tyler McCaul, and too many more to list — not to mention serving as the winter riding escape for the likes of Brandon Semenuk, Martin Soders…

When Jacob Rheuban founded Prevelo in 2017, he had no engineering background and no experience in the bike industry, but identified a need for better kids' bikes, and set out to fill it. And now, more than six years later, he’s got a lot of great stories to tell and insights to share about both what it takes to start a bike company from scratch, bu…