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2015 Specialized Demo and Enduro Evo

csermonet

Monkey
Mar 5, 2010
942
127
the asymmetrical frame thing just isn't jiving with me. is their reasoning that it makes it moar easy to access the shock for maintenance and shiz? Cause for the life of me, I can't think of anything you would need to access on a shock while its mounted, other than the knobs and mounting hardware. It looks ****ing ugly. The side with the bracing is too beefed up to compensate for the lack of support on the other side, and the side without it just looks ****ing stupid. No need to reinvent the ****ing wheel, put support on both sides and slim down the structure, would have looked much better IMO. Owell, maybe the spring will castrate a few Specialized customers and keep them from producing offspring.
 

Verskis

Monkey
May 14, 2010
458
8
Tampere, Finland
And I agree with csermonet. While otherwise the bike looks really fine, the asymmetrical seat tube brace just looks silly and does not make any structural sense. Maybe suspension tuners rejoice now that they have access to the shimz a couple of seconds faster, but for average joe this has no relevance.
 

S.K.C.

Turbo Monkey
Feb 28, 2005
4,096
25
Pa. / North Jersey
(*stumbles through front door / lands on floor*)

Whoa - where am... oh - right, I'm back here. :D

So, in lieu (French term -pinkies out-) of the latest evolution of the Demo 8, I went through my archives and found what at the time was my second DH bike ever and race bike for at least two seasons... and Holy Sh!t, just look at this thing:

05Demo8 -the Destroyer-.jpg

...everything aft of the seat mast is like something out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome... and the gi-normous mongo link between the seat stay and the frame...?! Don't get me wrong I loved this bike, but it seems like yesterday I was riding it and now it looks like something Ash would have built in Army of Darkness.

Compared to the latest iteration: (and of course the S-Works edition above)

View attachment 115745
 
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Vrock

Linkage Design Blog
Aug 13, 2005
276
59
Spain
The asymetric seat tube makes a lot of sense, think about how carbon fiber is built. Building a tunnel it's a lot harder than doing it asymetric. Now you can use a pretty much standard mold. And Kinematics are pretty much the same as the old model, the frame looks very different but it works the same.
 

juanpkumicho

Chimp
Oct 13, 2011
14
1
That "Metric vs SAE" world map is so false. Venezuela is a great example where both worlds live together, as it must be. I prefer the metric system myself, but the reality is that a huge part of things in life have been invented by americans.
Here in Spain, it is very, very difficult to find a 1/4 inch bolt (for instance), but then you have some hydraulic connections and other stuff like that in imperial system, lame. Contrary to that, in USA you can easily find and buy metric stuff. American univeristy students (as in Venezuela also) are used to working and calculating in both systems (at least the ones I have come to know), here in Europe they have no clue what lbf.ft are. So maybe the close minded are not actually the americans.
It is a shame that there is not one single system, but that is reality, and that map is false.

Oh and the assymetric Demo is not cool to me, as the shock vs downtube angle is not either.

JP
 

slimshady

¡Mira, una ardilla!
That "Metric vs SAE" world map is so false. Venezuela is a great example where both worlds live together, as it must be. I prefer the metric system myself, but the reality is that a huge part of things in life have been invented by americans.
Here in Spain, it is very, very difficult to find a 1/4 inch bolt (for instance), but then you have some hydraulic connections and other stuff like that in imperial system, lame. Contrary to that, in USA you can easily find and buy metric stuff. American univeristy students (as in Venezuela also) are used to working and calculating in both systems (at least the ones I have come to know), here in Europe they have no clue what lbf.ft are. So maybe the close minded are not actually the americans.
It is a shame that there is not one single system, but that is reality, and that map is false.

Oh and the assymetric Demo is not cool to me, as the shock vs downtube angle is not either.

JP
I was taught to jump between both systems too at high school and did some unit conversions as part of the practical part of my Physics 101 course in college here in Argentina. Two years later, I helped a friend to do a paper from the sociological point of view, comparing both systems. Turns out the Imperial system had much more Imperial than its name. The plethora of units (many of them overlapping or not being universally defined, such as Ounces, Miles and so on) had the covert mission of facilitating scams for the educated members of the US and UK populace over their uneducated counterparts (both in those countries and in their occupied territories all over the world). Since unit conversion takes some basic math to be carried on successfully, it was easy for the landlord to do skewed calculations when converting the labor of his workforce to dollars. As the Justice system, both features were planned to divert the lower part of the population from going up in the social scale.
 

jonKranked

Detective Dookie
Nov 10, 2005
85,562
24,182
media blackout
While that might be true, and while designing in metric might be arguably easier, two facts remain:

1) The majority of their target market, the US, uses SAE.
2) It takes NO effort for them to provide the info in BOTH formats, but all of their US customer base (see fact 1) have to get annoyed spending time converting because Specialized is too lazy or ignorant to just do it once.
i want my head angle measurements in units of Pi
 

jonKranked

Detective Dookie
Nov 10, 2005
85,562
24,182
media blackout
the asymmetrical frame thing just isn't jiving with me. is their reasoning that it makes it moar easy to access the shock for maintenance and shiz? Cause for the life of me, I can't think of anything you would need to access on a shock while its mounted, other than the knobs and mounting hardware. It looks ****ing ugly. The side with the bracing is too beefed up to compensate for the lack of support on the other side, and the side without it just looks ****ing stupid. No need to reinvent the ****ing wheel, put support on both sides and slim down the structure, would have looked much better IMO. Owell, maybe the spring will castrate a few Specialized customers and keep them from producing offspring.
The asymetric seat tube makes a lot of sense, think about how carbon fiber is built. Building a tunnel it's a lot harder than doing it asymetric. Now you can use a pretty much standard mold. And Kinematics are pretty much the same as the old model, the frame looks very different but it works the same.
my first thoughts were - ease of shock changes, mainly for the WC mechanics.

but hadn't even considered the production aspects of it. MUCH easier with only one side. yet somehow i bet they will charge more for it.
 

Kanye West

220# bag of hacktastic
Aug 31, 2006
3,740
470
Up next: Single sided swingarms, with, you guessed it........a new hub standard!!

Measured in inches too btw. Because, fvck you.


Oh, but not before a new proprietary Ohlins/Specialized fork with it's own proprietary taper measurements, thus necessitating....a new headset and headtube standard!! The possibilities are endless folks!

Oh and don't count on this fork having knobs. It's for "workd cup mechanics", which make up most of the target market, so it's going to only take JIS adjuster screws, which look like Phillips heads, but will strip out if you use a Phillips driver.

Because.....fvck you.
 
Up next: Single sided swingarms, with, you guessed it........a new hub standard!!

Measured in inches too btw. Because, fvck you.


Oh, but not before a new proprietary Ohlins/Specialized fork with it's own proprietary taper measurements, thus necessitating....a new headset and headtube standard!! The possibilities are endless folks!

Oh and don't count on this fork having knobs. It's for "workd cup mechanics", which make up most of the target market, so it's going to only take JIS adjuster screws, which look like Phillips heads, but will strip out if you use a Phillips driver.

Because.....fvck you.
You are one bitter old man...
 

JustMtnB44

Monkey
Sep 13, 2006
840
113
Pittsburgh, PA
Ah specialized, using metric, when everyone else uses SAE for bike measurements.
SAE is horrible and should be stamped out for good.
SAE is not a system of measurement, it is a system of standards. Nothing on bikes has to do with SAE, since they have no standards for bikes, and bikes do not use inch sized hardware.

"US customary units" is the system of measurement being discussed, vs metric.

That "Metric vs SAE" world map is so false. Venezuela is a great example where both worlds live together, as it must be. I prefer the metric system myself, but the reality is that a huge part of things in life have been invented by americans.
Here in Spain, it is very, very difficult to find a 1/4 inch bolt (for instance), but then you have some hydraulic connections and other stuff like that in imperial system, lame. Contrary to that, in USA you can easily find and buy metric stuff. American univeristy students (as in Venezuela also) are used to working and calculating in both systems (at least the ones I have come to know), here in Europe they have no clue what lbf.ft are. So maybe the close minded are not actually the americans.
It is a shame that there is not one single system, but that is reality, and that map is false.
I agree that the metric system is generally superior and it would be nice if the entire world standardized to it. But you make a good point that many American based products (fluid fittings especially) don't always have metric equivalents (yet), so switching would be a painful process for a while. That said, it will only get worse as time goes on.

On topic, I am glad the Demo finally lost its extra chainstays, but the asymmetric seat tube definitely looks odd. This must have been a marketing decision, because everyone knows all engineers hate asymmetry.
 
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gemini2k

Turbo Monkey
Jul 31, 2005
3,526
117
San Francisco
SAE is not a system of measurement, it is a system of standards. Nothing on bikes has to do with SAE, since they have no standards for bikes, and bikes do not use inch sized hardware.

"US customary units" is the system of measurement being discussed, vs metric.
Fancy college boy!
 

S.K.C.

Turbo Monkey
Feb 28, 2005
4,096
25
Pa. / North Jersey
those first gen demo 9's were absolute battle-ass tanks. i think they were right around 50lbs? :rofl:
Actually, what I posted was a pic of a first gen Demo 8, but back then the 9 and 8 looked so similar... That's right - the Demo 9's were probably around the 48lbs. mark. I know that in race trim, my Demo 8 was STILL 42 lbs. and that was with XT cranks and Welter Weight tubes.

What's amazing is that Straight used to throw these things around like they were pit-bikes, but then again when he was 18, he was built like a running back. =) Trying to clean and service the bearings was a total nightmare...
 

S.K.C.

Turbo Monkey
Feb 28, 2005
4,096
25
Pa. / North Jersey
Haha - I was WONDERING where you were!

I remember there was a guy with 24's on his rig in the lift line at the 04' U.S. Open... he said something about the smaller wheel diameter giving him an advantage... I was speechless.
 

ianjenn

Turbo Monkey
Sep 12, 2006
2,998
702
SLO
So the single sided Demo without the extra Rear Stays is only gonna be the S-Works version? Seems sort of weird if so though they charge more for S-Works so.....
 

William42

fork ways
Jul 31, 2007
3,908
634
ridemonky logic "I don't really know how they went about the cf layup, or really any of the technical aspects of this bike, so all I have to complain about is that they're going to charge more for a one sided seatmast then 2?? but were only getting one side, shouldn't it cost half the price?"
 
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Bikael Molton

goofy for life
Jun 9, 2003
4,010
1,146
El Lay
SAE is not a system of measurement, it is a system of standards. Nothing on bikes has to do with SAE, since they have no standards for bikes, and bikes do not use inch sized hardware.
If we are being all accurate now, some BMX bicycles as well as Harley motorbikes use fasteners sized in those oddball fractions of 25.4mm
 
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ianjenn

Turbo Monkey
Sep 12, 2006
2,998
702
SLO
ridemonky logic "I don't really know how they went about the cf layup, or really any of the technical aspects of this bike, so all I have to complain about is that they're going to charge more for a one sided seatmast then 2?? but were only getting one side, shouldn't it cost half the price?"
No because the other "S-work" demo was basically the same as other CF frame. But now if they had 2 variants that are very different it would be unusual. I would be shocked if they made many of the SWork variety. Judging by the Enduro S-Work price jump I would assume the same will happen to the S-Work Demo frames.
 

marshalolson

Turbo Monkey
May 25, 2006
1,770
519
Going not too far out a limb with an $11k full // $5k frame guess

edit- and $7k with the obviously eventually coming ohlins fork
 
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Udi

RM Chief Ornithologist
Mar 14, 2005
4,915
1,200
and pi technically is not a quantity. it is a ratio, and is irrational.
Actually, pi is not a ratio, and this is in fact the definition of an irrational number (unable to be represented as a ratio of two integers). Fun fact: 22/7 deviates from pi by the third decimal place.

but he was like 13 at the time, and taking internet mountain biking WAY too seriously.......:D
Some things never change. Forever 13!