Ebullition/Doubt 27: Silly Simple Sweet Hardtails

I’m fascinated with simple things. A plain coffee cup, a pictogram design, monochromatic pictures, songs with few chords, color fields (yeah, I like Rothko), and basic shapes. I do enjoy perks of modern technology but hate clutter in design be it with redundancies or things I just don’t have any use for. We all have our lines we will not cross when defining what is too much or rather how little we can manage with. Regarding bikes the arguments continue rage on about what technological advances are beneficial to the sport. From there each rider makes that call as to what they desire for their experience. There is no great leap in claiming the mountain bike offerings in the 80s were simpler than today. No shit, Sherlock. That by no means places them on a higher pedestal as being better. This is despite a plethora of retro MTB fans. In a similar sense, as an armchair automotive enthusiast, I often view the late 80s shitboxes I favored with more reverence than they deserve. So, the argument continues; is less more and where is the line? Are there some modern updates that are non-negotiable?

First though, get with some Bovidae energy.

Bison: You Are Not The Ocean You Are The Patient Vancouver BC’s Bison land squarely doom metal/sludge punk (cess?) pool with similar acts like Red Fang, Mother Iron Horse, Telekinetic Yeti, and Cancer Bats. These guys do mix it up putting some tasty bits into their song craft including great use of melodic open ringing chords and creepy horn/string sections reminiscent of one of my favorites. However, don’t think for a second that will temper the raging stampede that Bison brings. The album chosen above from 2017 is the last thing they released, but they do still seem to be active. I would recommend checking out their entire catalog via whatever platform you dig as it is all killer. I am surprised they are not more spoken of by the metal cognoscenti. Embrace the hairy crush of Bison. 

There is no denying of my delight with full suspension mountain bikes. I have carried on about them ad nauseum in many/most of the pieces I’ve written for this column. However, it was my old hardtail’s geometry that informed my current riding choice with great prejudice. So now that I had reached Xanadu with my riding choices now what? Certainly, riding TF out of them would be on the menu and I do continue to do just that, but I began to be consumed with fleeting flights of fancy.  Or I was just thinking about other fun possibilities with my hardtail. 

Going single. I had first encountered single speeds in the late 90s in Minneapolis. There is no need to rehash that stuff but suffice it to say that single speeds are a truly fun and ridiculous thing you can do with hardtail. Yet, some frames are less conducive to this sort of tomfoolery. The Banshee Paradox despite my best efforts did not wish to go this route. I tried a few different tensioners with no luck. I will give props to the Wheels Manufacturing for their Solo XD hub conversion kit which allows you to run a single cog on a XD driver-equipped hub. It’s simple and it works. I still had no way good way to tension the chain on the Paradox though. Then it hit me. 

If you love something, give it away. My youngest son borrowed my Banshee last Christmas when visiting and loved it. While he doesn’t ride a ton, he does goof around his environs, and we turn it out on the surprisingly great trails near him when I visit. It had been a while since I last updated his bike, and I had been considering getting him something new.  I will be the first to say that hardtails are ideal for most people and this is particularly true in the Midwest where the trails are not so punishing nor high consequence. I hatched an idea to give him the Banshee and build something else for myself. I wanted something with sliding dropouts to suit my deranged thoughts of single speed tap dancing and of course something with at least similar geometry to the Banshee. Then again why not play around and get silly? 

In the early 00s, freeride hardtails occupied a strange and silly niche of on an already niche mountain biking category. Offerings from Evil, Sinister, Spooky, Banshee and many others made for some unique and mostly WTF photo fodder. These were hardtails with generally short chain stays and long travel forks including even double crown models.  These bikes looked insane, and they were. Tough full suspension bikes already existed at this point, but these were a rejection of that. You had to be one tough mofo and/or deranged to ride one of these. They were not great climbers and, in all honesty, challenging at best for descending. I personally owned a slightly tamer version of this concept embodied in the Surly Instigator 1.0. It too was over-forked and a beast of a bike, but it was hella fun. I still have the frame, and it awaits some potential hairbrained resurrection. 

Fast foul-weird to the modern geometry as I have raved on about. The long/low/slack (LLS) geometry deal that landed in the early 10s has permeated every mountain bike genre and some more so than others. The original Honzo * was mine and many others gateway drug into the possibilities that this new geometry could unlock especially 29ers which were far from being universally adored at the time. Kona came out swinging again when they introduced the Honzo ESD, a version of that already aggressive bike that turned the volume up beyond any reasonable level. The ESD and others like it take the LLS geometry to the territory only previously occupied by the most aggressive enduro bikes or DH sleds but drop in a steep seat angle to make them climb surprisingly well. 

*Holy cow! Those Kona Entourage bikes looked amazing (see the first two pics in that release article) and I considered getting one at the time. 

Still, no matter what anyone says your first thought with looking at these bikes is that A. they look ridiculous, B. they’ll climb horribly and C. they’ll handle like a shopping cart. Everything single word I just said is wrong. As noted above I went the silly route and found a gently used ESD. I pulled all the kit off it to rebuild the Banshee for my son and used my old stuff for the Honzo ESD. In a word, it is silly in the best of ways, and we’ll get into it forthcoming. Go out and be ridiculous because silly is sweet.