Never one to shy away from a challenge, Misfit Psycles’ owner Peter Keiler just sent over these pics of his first-ever belt drive mountain bike. Which he’ll be racing at the Breck Epic. Which starts tomorrow.
Per usual, his emails to us have consisted of two and three word grunts, half or more of which are among the 13, so details are short other than what is obvious from the photos.
It looks to me that chainstay and seatstay have channels that mate to raised channels on the dropout, so the forces wouldn’t be on the blot alone. Besides if every bike with sliding dropouts uses the same size bolts but only two almost perpendicular to the seatstay. If vertical forces don’t break every Kona, Redline, Salsa, etc. then I think the Misfit will be fine.
I’m just saying, I own one belt drive mountain bike and have ridden many different kinds of belt drive bikes… and personally, this one doesn’t look all that sturdy. I did notice the slot in which the seatstay and dropout mate together, which will strengthen the system to a degree, but overall it’s not really that sound of a design. Imagine the force on that stay when hammering up a climb and throwing the bike back and forth. Imagine the force when you go off a small drop or bomb a more technical downhill section of a trail… That’s a very little amount of metal to keep all that force from shearing off that bolt.
And, yes, those aren’t ACTUALLY bottle cage bolts. They’re 1mm bigger. Bottle bolts are 5mm. These are 6mm. One of my bikes used those exact bolts in its dropout, though, and placed far less stress on them… they still couldn’t hold up. The manufacturer replaced all of their customer’s bolts with larger, heavier ones and changed their dropout design.
jeronimo: agreed, my Kona has a very similar dropout and it’s been rocking in singlespeed mode for 4 years strong now without any slippage at all. Mine is slightly different in that it doesn’t have a cutout for the belt, but that means it also only uses 2 bolts, not 3. It’s totally bomb-proof!
@ all the haters: instead of wasting energy and time writing about how you would do this or that to the dropout to make your dropout 834792387194 time more superior to this dropout. why don’t you start your own company and MAKE IT!!!!
@ Tyler (Editor): am i missing something??? how is this bike, by any stretch of the imagination, the first belt drive mountain bike??? since Spot has have many belt drive bikes available for years and Norco had a complete belt drive bike available last year!!! this bike isn’t even running the new centertrack belt!!!!!
