Date Posted:6 July 2018
The Behind the Bikes series will highlight the challenges and triumphs that go into the making of our bikes. These videos are a chance for us to pull the curtain back, and let you into our world to see what makes things tick here at Transition.
For our first episode, we go back to Lars' home garage, where he delved into a 2 year long exploration of bike geometry. Taking standards that have long been outdated and pushing manufacturers to support our vision. It was a long road, but it eventually led to a new wave of bike design we call Speed Balanced Geometry.
-Words by Skye Schillhammer | Transition's media wizard-
Speed Balanced Geometry. SBG. It may sound like a bunch of marketing speak, since it is our first acronym that actually means something. But that couldn’t be farther from what lies beneath those three letters. When I joined the crew at Transition Bikes, I walked into one of Transition’s biggest projects to date. At the time, it was a tangled mash up of technical geometry terms that would quickly turn away even the biggest bike nerds. Fork offset, front center, trail, and wheel flop, just to name a few. As things ramped up, it became confusing enough to where we internally needed a way to talk about what we were doing, and thus, Speed Balanced Geometry was coined. So you can call it SBG, or just “how Transition bikes ride”, either way it boils down to providing a means of simplifying the technical terms that make our bikes ride the way they do. Our SBG bikes have been out for a a year now, and we thought it was time to show the world how they came to light.
Starting from Lars’s home work bench, moving up through the minds at Transition, working with the two major suspension companies, and eventually getting into the hands of riders across the globe. SBG is live and on the trails. Some will brush this off as marketing, but it was a developed for the pursuit of better bikes, and not just Some Bulls*#t Gimmick, as they say.
These four humans were some of the key components in getting SBG off the ground
A bike informally named "the Super Smuggler" was Lars's testing machine while developing SBG. Tucked deep in the PNW woods, he rode this trail over and over to unlock the magic.
Not a bad place to be stuck doing laps, eh?
Sam and his production Sentinel. Clearly pumped on the finished package.
Sam is a backdoor kinda guy. The trail that is.
Fittsie laying it over on his local trail in Santa Cruz. He and JC have been testing short offset forks on a range of frames, going through many of the processes as Lars did.
Chris Mandell and John Cancellier shaking some shocks on a lunch ride from the SRAM HQ in Colorado Springs.
Stay tuned for the next episode of Behind the Bikes, where we will dive into the details of SBG, and what it took to make the whole package.
Words: Skye Schillhammer
Video: Skye Schillhammer
Photos: Oliver Parish and Skye Schilhammer
Leave a comment
