Minus Ten Review- 51

Another bike! Sheesh!

This week ten years ago on the blog here I was talking about yet another new bike for me. Crazy! I started 2006 with two 29"ers and ended the year with six! Of those six bicycles I have three in my possession. One is complete and rideable, the other two are frames only, and far from being ready to go.

Anyway, this one came to me because the then marketing wonk at Raleigh, Reed Pike, decided I had brought Raleigh a lot of positive attention, made several good suggestions for changes, and had overall helped Raleigh make the introduction of their 29"ers more successful than it otherwise might have been. I guess. Since, ya know, he called me over when I was at Interbike and commanded that his underlings send me one. 

 The XXIX+G, (what a weird name!), was an odd handling rig. At the time we had 38mm offset forks only, and as it turned out, the frame was the same geometry as the non-suspension corrected XXIX single speed. Raleigh's designer kind of fudged the geometry to work either way, suspended or not, and dialed in an enormous amount of trail which made the XXIX+G handle like a wheelbarrow.

Oddly enough, what those Raleigh guys were after- great downhill stability and decent trail manners- were only achieved within the last five years for 29"ers. My Singular Buzzard is really what Raleigh wanted to do. Short rear end, slack front end, and a big, burly fork. None of that existed in 2006.

Things sometimes do change for the better.