I forwarded a few of the questions you had about the Section 29 to my contact at Ibex bikes. Chiefly the questions on fork clearance and potential frame cracking. Here was his response:

We have no problem with fork clearance. The Section-29 frame has been purpose built for this application. It is designed for use with the Rock Shox Reba 29 forks in 85mm travel and has been extensively field tested.

That field testing has shown no indication of issues with cracking at the S/T & T/T junction. If any such problem were to develop down the road, IBEX frames do carry a lifetime warranty (to the original owner). I do not think we have any problem here, but if something like that were to become apparent later on we’d certainly address the issue with revised designs. Again, I’m not expecting any such issue, but our solution would be based on how widespread the problem were. For example, in 2003 we had an endemic problem with the ‘03 Apogee frame. That one was because our tubing supplier sent us mismarked tubes resulting in triple-butted tubing being used for the top-tube instead of the plain gauge tubes called for in the blueprints. Due to seat-mast weld at mid-tube, the butted tubes were not acceptable. Once we discovered that a problem existed and identified the root of it, we issued a recall and replaced the front triangle on every Apogee sold that year. On the other hand, if a frame has an isolated problem we would replace the individual frame, not necessarily initiate a full recall.

Also, I’m pretty sure they will offer this as frame only since they do the same for all their other bikes.

Personally, I’m looking forward to this bike… it will be a well priced alternative for people willing to handle the downsides that come from buying direct online.