Teased with an overly gushing video earlier this summer, the Pinarello Dogma XC full suspension mountain bike’s looks certainly lived up to the hype. Whether it rides as well is something we’ll have to check out separately. For now, we’ve got a lot of detail photos and a bit more info on it and the new Dogma K Hydro disc brake road bike.
The XM shares a lot of front end features with their hardtail, including the internal cable routing, fork crown bumper and split top tube seat clamp device. The rear end is what’s really unique, featuring asymmetric shock placement with a lower link routed around the bottom bracket, flex stays and more…
Rather than bend the downtube to create clearance, they simply integrated a rubber bumper to catch the fork’s crown in the event things get sideways.
The rear triangle is one piece with no rear pivot near the axle, the goal being to reduce a weak point on the frame. A bolt-on brace connects the seatstays from left to right to prevent torsional or uneven flex. The system drives an alloy rocker arm that pushes the shock straight down. The front derailleur floats on the chainstay.
The seatstays are flattened to allow for flex, which is necessary since there’s no rear pivot. The system provides 90mm of rear wheel travel.
The other particularly different part about the bike is the lower shock mount. Rather than unnecessarily reinforce the carbon tube to handle the stresses of the shock pushing into it, they built an alloy mount that connects to the frame around the bottom bracket. Whether this saves any weight (or adds it) is questionable, but it does remove the forces from the downtube and puts them at a part of the bike that needs to be super stiff and strong anyway.
Pinarello’s trademark use of asymmetry is all over this bike – note the downtube’s differing profiles from left to right.
A 12×142 rear axle finishes things off at the back.
We covered the new road bikes briefly here, too, with more models and info. The Dogma K Hydro shown here is one of two disc brake models for 2014, but it’s the more exciting one for us because it uses more traditional standards rather than a glut of Pinarello specific bearing sizes and Italian threading.
If you’ve followed Pinarello for any amount of time, you’ll know they’ve used some pretty random bearing sizes in their headsets, which can make replacing them a real challenge. Thankfully, the Dogma K gets standard drop in 1-1/8″ to 1-1/2″ bearings. And note the clearance for those nice, big Conti tires! Go ahead, do a little dance.
The asymmetry carries down to the fork here, along with a super clean brake hose routing. Click to enlarge the image and you’ll notice that the disc brake fork leg is thicker than the driveside, and the shaping of its ridges are different, too.
Very clean rear brake hose routing, too. While not everyone likes PFBB30, it’s certainly easier getting parts for it than the Italian threaded bottom brackets still found on some of their other models.
Plenty of tire clearance in the rear, too.
