Maverick Long Term Update

So I've had the Maverick DUC 32 front shock on my RIP for quite a while now, I've had a chance to ride it on just about all of our trails. This is what I've found.

Installation
I won't lie, I was not a fan of installing a fork with a rubber mallet and hacksaw on the list of necessary tools. A fork that costs this much should mount up easily and without the need to go caveman on it. I was more than a little frustrated getting the upper crown on correctly.

Set up
The initial set up with my fork was somewhat of a learning exercise. I had the legs out of the fork on numerous occasions trying to get the right oil heights and viscosity, the right negative air spring rate etc, but I was able to find a setting that did what I needed eventually. It seemed like every time I changed one setting, I had to rethink the others. It took up until last week to finally get it all figured out.

The Ride
On my very first ride, I hit a large root which produced a very large clunk from the headset. I figured that the upper crown must have finished seating itself, because you can only hit the thing so hard with a hammer in the stand and feel good about it. After I checked every bolt, and tightened them back up accordingly, the noise was gone, and has yet to return.

The quality of travel is actually quite amazing. It feels very well damped and controlled while seated, but get out of the saddle and it has a tendency to dive. But add pitch to the equation, and there goes most of your usable travel.

From these photos, you can see that I'm pretty much bottomed out. While the fork will extend into depressions keeping the front wheel firmly planted on the trail, situations like this demand raw positive travel.





It seems adjusting this out of the fork is not possible at this time. Maybe a platform valve of some kind would help immensely. Or maybe I need my own personal Maverick tech to play with it every time I want to ride.

They have been extremely helpful too, I would add. I'm not even going to talk about what I had to do to one of these forks to get it to work on one particular set up, but they were there every step of the way.

It certainly goes where pointed with no drama. The direct mount stem is the first I've used since my days on my Boxxer equipped DH bike.
It's always good to know where you're going.

I did manage a few large drops (3-4 feet) this Sunday, and it soaked them up with aplomb.

One of the problems I have with certain bar/stem/shock combos, is that my hands get beaten up. I use carbon bars to help with this, but my Reba always used to pound my palms numb. Not so with the Maverick. That is a big plus for me.

I have read on some of the mountain biking forums that some folks have had issues with the fork on off camber sections of trail. The complaint is of the bars wrenching out of your hands while going over rocky sidehills. This could be caused by not having the axle secured properly, one leg could rotate while the other stayed put. I never experienced this, as I paid extra special attention to the clamping force on the quick release. I found Maverick's quick release to work pretty well, but the one thing I would improve is to give the tension bolts a coat of threadlocker or something to stop them from coming out of adjustment. It seemed like every time I had them open, I had to fiddle with them to get them back to the correct tension. On more than one occasion, the QRs were too tight, and I lost the skin the knuckle of my thumb more than once on the brake rotor trying to re open the damn thing. That was super annoying, as I have a small car and I have to use a roof rack to get where I'm going to ride. Time spent fiddling with one's gear gets big BOOs from me.

The Verdict
For what it is, the Maverick is a pretty good fork if you are an "in the saddle" rider. I can see that on long epic rides, the fork's lack of weight and buttery softness would be a big benefit. It is an amazing climbing fork, the inverted design allows it to react to even the smallest of bumps, and the direct mount stem kept it pointed the way you wanted it in technical rocky ledgy climbs. You can tune it 100 ways to Sunday, allowing you to get the ride you want in for most applications.
The down side, is that there isn't much you can do about the dive on the fork if you are riding steep, technical descents. "Out of the saddle" riding effectively turns the fork into a really expensive rigid fork on descents, or a giant pogo stick in short sharp thrusts up.
The clatter of the stanchion guards was a little unnerving at times too. It made a racket on almost every bump hit.

What initially had me pretty excited about the fork was the possibility of more travel for my RIP, ended up to be something I don't think it was ever intended to be. It is not the 4.5" travel all mountain fork the RIP so badly needs to reach its full potential, but it is a good fork for the cross country minded trail rider.

Stay tuned for the next installment on the RIP. That's kind of a funny joke...

Maverick Ride Report

This winter, I upgraded the front end of my Niner RIP9 from a Rock Shox Reba, to a Maverick DUC 32.
I was looking for something with a little more travel than my Reba, and something that was a little more tuneable. Over the last few days, I've been riding the RIP and trying to get a feel for the new hardware. So far, I've been extremely happy. The first few rides were my usual shake down trip out to the Stowe Town Loops.

Today, we visited Snake Mountain in Addison VT. Anyone that has ever ridden there knows that any equipment will show it's soft underbelly under the duress of the trails up there.

So far the only thing I want to change about the fork, is the high speed compression setting. It tends to dive hard under braking, but holy cow does this thing go where you point it! I used the travel reducer for the brutal climb up to the top of the mountain (it's a little over 1.7 miles with an elevation gain of about 900ft).


Everywhere else, the fork performed flawlessly. Not once did I feel it bind up or twist. There were lots of loose pointy rocks, steep roll downs and tight switchbacks on this ride. There were even a few spots where I chose to walk, and spots where I should have walked. There were even a few spots where I got lucky.

Treachery aside, the mountain itself is beautiful. You get to ride through hardwood stands, deer yards, giant exposed stretches of granite, cliff bands, pine stands, beaver ponds, streams and mud holes. I'm looking forward to riding down there a lot more this summer.


The most notable thing, was the post ride feeling. Or should I say lack of feeling. It's been a few years since we rode there, but normally a trip to Snake leaves you feeling like you've been through a meat grinder. Not so today. It was also the first time we had ridden there on 29ers.

Coincidence?

RIP9 Redux

So finally I have a few moments to recant the major overhaul on my RIP 9.
To recap, the bike weighed 29.25 set up with a Reba, an older version of the Bike 29 Royale wheelset and pedals. While the nuts and bolts of the build didn't really change that much, the two changes made were pretty significant.

Fork
I replaced the front end with a Maverick DUC 32 fork. Truly a thing to behold. Despite it's stout look, it is almost the same weight as a Reba, but it's packing another 22mm of travel in those legs. I felt like I was running out of travel with the Reba on this particular bike, so maybe this will be the ticket.
The Maverick is an inverted fork, the axle is mounted to the sliding portion of the fork, which telescopes into the uppers. The Reba has two lower legs connected by a crown, that slides up on the sliders. Because there is now lower casting and crown, the Maverick has less unsprung weight. Only the axle and sliders move, allowing it to soak up small bumps with ease. On top of that, the fork is very tunable. Things like the oil weight and oil height can be changed, along with the damping circuit shim stack. It can be pretty confusing, but one can really dial this fork in to suit their needs.
And it better, it costs $795! And then you need to buy the stem, and upper crown, and requires a proprietary 24mm axle front wheel.
Is it worth it? Well, for the ultimate in tunability, I think it very well could be. It will be a while before I can actually put it to use. The snow still lies thick up here.

Wheels
With the aforementioned need for a proprietary 24mm front hub, I needed to rebuild the front wheel.
And while I was at it, I decided that I may as well try out one of the new Stan's rims, the ZTR Flow. I made the jump to tubeless. I built a lot of the Stan's ZTR 355 rims over the last year, but they were not suitable for my weight (don't ask, let's just say I'm a clydesdale). In January, they released the ZTR Arch, which is a beefed up 355, and the wider ZTR Flow rim, suitable for heavier riders, or getting aggro on full suspension bikes.
Because tire changing will now be more complicated, I also decided to try a Kenda Nevegal tire, in anticipation of the impending soggy trail conditions. These tires, while not light, have high marks in grip and cornering ability in sloppy riding conditions.

I also ran a tiny cockpit mod, the Avid Matchmaker. It's a cool little clamp that replaces the rear clamp of one's Avid Juicy hydraulic brakes, and allows you to directly mount a SRAM X0 or X9 trigger shifter. The only real benefit of this clamp, is that it frees up a bit more space on the handlebars by removing the shifter clamp. The actual weight of everything it replaces is 18g, which is how much the Matchmaker actually weight. You can adjust the trajectory of the shifters too, which is a nice feature for those that have to have it "just so".

The final build weight now is 29.07lbs, I suspect that had I kept the Rampage (679g), the bike would be about a 1/2 lb lighter. The Nevegal weighs in at 786g.


This was not an exercise in weight reduction, rather a significant performance upgrade. I still need to crack open the Maverick and set everything up the way I want it, but all in all, I'd say I have great confidence in the new set up.

We're talking about making a road trip down south in the next few weeks. Southern New Hampshire has some trails that might be rideable within the next few weeks.