Ok, so it’s not officially a 29+ BroadAxe, but it’s pretty close. Foundry was able to stuff the full Surly Knard 29×3 tire on a 50mm Rabbit Hole rim on the front, but they had to resort to a 29×2.4 Maxxis Ardent on a Rabbit hole rim on the rear. Considering the monster tires there was still a surprising amount of clearance and this didn’t seem to be one of those “don’t try this at home things.” Will 29+ become more than just a thing, or the next fatbike? We’re not sure but it looks like fun.
In addition to the fat BroadAxe, Foundry also had quite the interesting stripped down version of the bike, you can see it next.
Somehow, Foundry got it in their heads that they wanted to do a stripped down version of their BroadAxe mountain bike. Stripped down as in, down to the bare carbon, with no finish. Keep in mind that if you did this to a lot of mountain bikes you could see all kinds of colored epoxy, fillers, etc. – it’s easy to cover that up even on “nude” frames with a bit of carbon colored paint. Instead, when Foundry had their bike stripped by a well known carbon builder and repair company, they were quite impressed by the build quality of the bike – they even went to say it was one of the cleanest carbon bikes they had stripped. After the frame was stripped a UV coating was added which make painting and even applying decals extremely difficult – yet they were able to apply the sweet decals pictured on the bike. Foundry mentioned they were even considering it as a stock option since it dropped around a 1/4 pound from the bike.
I forget the final weight, but I believe it was somewhere around 17 or 18 pounds even with the big Ardent 29×2.4 tires with an XX1 drivetrain.
