Spot has updated and renamed its all-mountain bike, giving the Rollik 150 a proper number in the name to indicate it’s actually travel. So, the Rollik 607 is now the Rollik 150, and to celebrate, they tweaked the suspension a bit, too. While we were visiting their booth, we also spotted something interesting on their new XC model, too…
The Rollik 150 gets a revised suspension tune and updated kinematics. They say it’s now a little more progressive, so it’s softer off the top for better traction but with more support at bottom out.
But the bigger change is the ability to change the geometry with this flip chip. OK, so where’s that flip chip?
It’s underneath the shock mount, and here’s how it works:
The shock’s rear bolt threaded into a separate hole that’s hidden, so turning the lower part of the mount under the yoke moves that position forward or backward. It’s a clean design that does away with the typical 2-part flip chip found on chainstays. Meaning, there’s only one small part to change, not two, and it’s not at a pivot location that sees a lot of twisting and lateral stresses.
In the normal position, the Rollik 150 has a 66.4º head angle and 343mm bottom bracket height. Switch to low and things change to a 65.8º head angle and 336mm BB height.
The Ryve gets spooled up
The short-travel Ryve (pronounced like “hive”) XC race bike was announced just before Sea Otter, but we found a little feature that they didn’t talk about.
Called a Spooler, it’s that comb-looking part that sits under the rear of the Living Link leaf spring. This is the fixed part of the spring, where it wants to bend more. So, the Spooler controls the arch of the carbon leaf spring, helping it stay laterally stiffer. They say it’s already laterally stiff, this just makes it more so.
From the top, you can see how short the Living Link leaf spring is, so twisting forces are already going to be minimal, but on the Rollik and other bikes, that part gets longer. So, the Spooler is now being used on all of their full suspension mountain bikes. It’s a running change, so new bikes shipping from April (at least) will already have it installed. For prior generation Rolliks, they way there will be a way to upgrade and add a Spooler, but details of that process are TBA soon.
