I was very fortunate yesterday to spend some quality time on the upcoming Niner R.I.P.9. Often a company's "redesign" involves a model year change to the rear shock and a new color, but it was pretty clear, from the first time I saw a new R.I.P., that Niner had done something special here.
Even at a glance, the new R.I.P. is obviously a more serious fellow. With the introduction of the incredibly fast Jet, and the release of the monster W.F.O. looming, any fears that the flagship R.I.P. was going to go Jan Brady on us can be safely put to rest. This is still the Niner full-suspension bike.
Niner took every ounce of success they found listening to dedicated 29er fanatics, and invested it right back into all the right places here. Fit and finish on the new bike is absolutely top-drawer. Niner's CVA suspension system works extremely well, but is clearly more complicated to manufacture. With this new R.I.P., though, Niner has made it look easy. Forget the big guys; from a design standpoint, this frame is cleaner than 90% of the bikes on the market. Niner not only stiffened the absolute hell out of this bike, they did it in incredibly well thought-out and elegant ways. Look at the lower shock mount here, that's doubling as a unifying gusset, tying the shaped down tube to the seat tube. And even that piece is sculpted. The new rocker is equally well made. Given the ability to forge frame pieces, Niner stepped up and used that power for the forces of structural good instead of just aesthetics. There's a tremendous amount of thought and quality in the design and construction of this bike, but it all comes together seamlessly. It's purty.

So I had this ridiculous idea to ride the fantastic trail that we worked on last weekend, never mind that it was going to take a lot longer to ride there, and that I'd never before known exactly where the official trail head was for this section of it. "The worst that could happen" ended up adding an extra climb I definitely hadn't planned on, on top of the one pretty heinous climb I had. The good news: CVA suspension to the rescue.


In the interest of science--or what passes for it here--I did one extra climbing test, based on something the guys at Niner had told us at Interbike. They'd claimed that the CVA suspension was ideal for the new SRAM-vativ Hammer Schmidt internally geared crankset because it wasn't affected by the diameter of the chainring.

Quick less for those of you geek enough to care, but not geek enough to know some of this: Now, I'm not a suspension engineer, but I play one on the interwebs, and instant centers are one of those pesky little things known as "constants." Draw a line across one set of pivots, and then the other, and keep on drawing it out toward the front of the bike. That place where the lines come together is called the instant-center. Sure, it moves around as the suspension compresses, but it stays put on that one little route its given. Meanwhile, the force most responsible for affecting it--the torque on the chain--tends to move around. One minute it's a point at the top of your big ring, then you shift down and it moves to a point at the top of your middle ring, and then you granny ring it for the climb and now that point is sitting on the top of your little ring. To a suspension system, this point is supposed to matter. A lot. So much so that some full-suspension bikes are going to ride like ass if you use a Hammer Schmidt. Anyway, my test was simply this: keep slogging up a climb on the R.I.P., shift into each front chainring for a ten count, and watch the rocker for bob. If the R.I.P. behaved like most suspension bikes, there should be a noticeable difference in any rocker movement and even the sensation of power transfer, from one gear to the next. Almost every full-suspension bike ever in the known universe would do this. But guess what? Same thing in every gear. Just like Chris at Niner said it would. Hello Hammer Schmidt, sure. But more importantly: hello excellent suspension system. Pick a gear, any gear, and this is one longer-travel trail bike that's going to move out with a minimum of wasted power. (continued on the next blog)