Santa Cruz Tall Boy: The Interview

Editor’s Note: While Grannygear has been out testing the Santa Cruz Tall Boy, and posting reviews on it, we had a few questions sent out to Santa Cruz’s marketing wonk, Mike Ferrentino. Here we present the “e-interview” for you to check out.

Twenty Nine Inches• Santa Cruz was a bit late to the dance as far as 29ers go. What was the wait all about? Timing? Skeptics? Abject fear?

Mike Ferrentino: How about all three? Okay, seriously? We are a relatively lean company, without a huge reserve of spare manpower or money, and as such, can only work on so many new projects at one time. About when 29ers were really taking off a few years ago, our sales manager was lobbying hard for us to get our feet wet there, but that coincided with the revision of the Blur LT, which was the bike we launched our latest generation VPP suspension with. The new LT was the culmination of two solid years work by the engineers here, and aside from some pretty major revisions to shock rate and suspension characteristics, it also incorporated a massive change in the pivot system – links, hardware, everything. None of that was off the shelf stuff. We had to make it all in house, then break it, then make it again, until it was right. Immediately following the new LT, we revamped the Nomad, and were concurrently developing the new carbon Blur XC. And right after the Nomad, timed about the same as the carbon XC, we came out with the Driver 8. Then we followed that immediately with the carbon LT.

As a point of reference, we have three engineers here, one machinist, and one frame fabrication specialist. And we have our own test lab, where we test everything in-house. So this small core of guys who do ALL the development, prototyping, testing, and pre-production honing of concept into product, they have all been completely pinned with these projects for the past few years. Basically, the Tallboy had to wait it’s turn. As a marketing stooge, I would have loved to see it sooner, but in the real world, there is only so much that a few people can do in X amount of time, given Y amount of resources.

And yes, there were (and still are) some skeptics in the room. Kind of like in real life. Some people fall immediately in love with big wheels, others never do.

Photo: Jeff J.
TNI• So when you guys did decide to get your feet wet, you headed right to the deep end of the pool and jumped in riding the Tall Boy. Carbon fiber, 4” of VPP travel…wow. How did that come about? There had to be some long meetings over that kind of commitment. Why not begin with aluminum?

Mike: Well, we had been on a really steep learning curve with carbon fiber, and we were being blown away by some of the strength and stiffness characteristics we were able to get out of the material. The more we learned, the better it got. To say nothing of the fact that we were getting these through the roof numbers while losing weight over aluminum. During our early testing, which involves a lot of competitive analysis – buy some bikes, ride them, test them, break them – one thing we all agreed on was that the status quo for many big wheel bikes was more flexy than we were happy riding. Many of the frames we rode, well regarded frames at that, were whippy or noodly, or however you want to describe them. So were a lot of the wheels.

Carbon fiber, in terms of addressing an undesirable trait (in this case flex), was a no-brainer. Yes, it meant the price would be on the high end, but it allowed us to make a bike that we wanted to ride.

VPP as a choice for suspension was also a given (at least in our eyes). There were already plenty of single pivot and hardtail 29ers out there. If we were going to come late to the party, we had better have something to differentiate our bike from the others. VPP is our flagship suspension, and it incorporates some ride characteristics that we are very happy with, AND those short, stiff links with big fat axles running through them also do a lot to enhance chassis stiffness, which as already mentioned was one of our main priorities.

TNI• I have found short link bikes to be a mixed bag of good and not so good and all of them are tweaked to conform to the vision of the designer/builder. What does Santa Cruz see as the best features of a VPP design? Is there something that differentiates this from a DW or CVA bike?

Mike:Okay, VPP. There are a lot of ways that multi-link designs can be configured, and there are plenty of good and bad examples of them out there. For us, the key talking point on VPP is shock rate. We can’t stress that enough. Shock rate, shock rate, shock rate. the design and placement of the links in our current VPP suspension allows for a slight falling rate at the beginning of travel, which flattens then changes to a slight rising rate toward bottom out. If you were to look at our shock rate curve on a graph from top- to bottom- out, it would resemble a smiley face. Unlike a linear shock rate that would look like a horizontal line, or a slightly upward tilted line.

What’s so good about this shock rate? It looks like a smiley face, everyone loves smiley faces!

Right, straight answer: A falling to rising rate allows for a plush early travel, allowing the suspension to respond easily to light bump forces, and creates a sort of “feels like it has more travel than it says” sensation through the mid-stroke. Then, as the bumps turn into drops and g-outs, the rising rate helps the shock resist bottoming out. That shock rate curve, combined with link placement that creates a stable pedaling platform through most of the gear range, is responsible for some very sweet bump absorption.

Shock rate is one part of the VPP deal, but link design and hardware are the other. Short links resist flex better than long links. We use large diameter aluminum axles that bolt into the frame on one side of the bike and have these expanding collet heads to lock in place on the other, they pivot on angular contact bearings, and there are a whole mess of lip seals as well as grease ports in the lower link to keep things clean. End result is a very solid connection between front and rear triangles, and very low maintenance suspension.

Photo: Reader’s submission

TNI• The Tall Boy comes off as being a pretty versatile bike. I can see this working as a racy bike for endurance stuff or getting dressed out with a 120mm fork and a stouter build for pretty burly trail use. What did Santa Cruz have in mind as a target audience for this bike?

Mike:The bulk of our bikes are “trail bikes,” by and large. Not to sound like a cop-out or anything, but we try to resist pigeonholing most of our bikes with a single purpose (note: “most.” Jackals, Stigmatas, V-10s are all pretty single focus). Even with the Blur XC, much as we wanted to make a bike that would be a race weapon, we really wanted it to be a bike that anyone could have fun riding, and that could live a happy life as a lightweight, daily use trailbike. I see the Tallboy as a big wheel alternative to that, but with a little bit of LT style bomber flair thrown in for good measure. The Tallboy is silly light enough that it would make a sound platform for a racebike, but the 29″ convert who is intent on banging out big rides and maybe getting a little bit of hang time is also going to hopefully feel right at home on it.

TNI• We have talked about this before off the record; that being the challenges and reasoning behind building a big travel 29er. But is there room for a Tall Boy LT or a Taller Boy, maybe with 6” of travel and a burlier frame?

Mike: When we went into this project, there were some hairy eyeball reservations from some corners here about the limitations that the bike might have – most of those were based on two things: wheel strength/wheel flex, and how the hell do you package big wheels and long travel together in a bike that isn’t so freakishly tall it defies physics? Bear in mind it took us a year and a half of building and riding prototypes to get the suspension and ride characteristics that we wanted out of the current Tallboy, and we learned a whole lot along the way. What we know now is not what we knew then. The wheel strength and packaging of long travel into a rideable bike are still concerns, but the eyeball is less hairy now.

As a company, we have the same number of engineers and we are every bit as slammed with new projects as we were a couple years ago, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a Tallboy LT or a Nomad 29. But the odds of it happening are better than they used to be.

TNI- What- if anything- was designed into the TallBoy to help make carbon fiber “trail rated”? (To borrow the Jeep terminology)

Mike: We use a proprietary one piece molding process with all our carbon frames, meaning that each triangle is the result of a carefully laid up piece that is molded in one process. Everything gets done in that same process – it’s not preformed tubes that are then laid into a mold then wrapped together with other preformed tubes. Our carbon bikes are laid up in one single process that includes the cable guides and shock mounts and brake tabs, while creating a nice, strong, single unit that we have very tight control over where and how the materials are placed. If you were to cut up one of our frames (I have some LT cutaways around here somewhere…) you can see where we wrap extra layers of weave around the head and downtube junctions, as well as notice that the underside of the downtube is thicker than the topside of the downtube. There’s an extra layer of 3k weave running down the entire length of the downtube’s underside that has nothing to do with frame stiffness or how it rides, and everything to do with protecting the structural carbon fiber below from piercing rock impacts. We lay extra fiber onto the frames at a few key points like this. The carbon bike that’s been around longest is the Blur XC, and we’re happy to note that they are holding up extremely well out in the real world. And that’s a frame that is a solid pound lighter than the Tallboy.

TNI- We get a lot of questions regarding the Tall Boy and 120mm forks. Grannygear got his tester with the 100mm fork, so what- if anything- can you tell us about running this bike with a 120mm fork? Good? Not Good? Don’t do it or Mike Ferrentino will hunt you down?

Mike: Depends who you talk to and what your riding style is when it comes to fork length. Most of our engineers prefer the 120, since it turns the bike into a wonderful straight-line downhill bomber. The engineers do a lot of their handling evaluation in steep and gnarly terrain so this works for them. Personally, I think the bike pushes the front a bit with the 120 on there, and I like the way it carves and climbs better with a 100mm fork. I also don’t really feel the need for much more travel up front yet – having ridden plenty of baby-head high speed rocks up in Downieville and the Lakes Basin, as well as a ton of the smoother local trails here. I prefer the balance of the shorter fork. But that said, plenty of riders better than me prefer the longer fork.

Editor’s Note: In the course of this review, Grannygear mentions the following: “I weigh around 190 dressed to ride so I ran between 170psi and 190psi to see how it felt. That put me at either end of the recommended sag settings. The lower pressure felt plusher…no surprise…but the higher setting was closer to what I would ride in my fairly smooth neck of the woods. In any case I had to run ProPedal on the number 2 setting or I was getting too much pedal induced movement in the suspension.”

The highlighted part of the statement caught the eye of Mike Ferrentino. He wanted to address this issue with us and ultimately, for you the readers. Here is an excerpt from his response to us:

Mike:First, time to get to grips with terminology. “bob” is not the same thing as “squat” or “anti-squat.” at least, not in our books. ” Squat” is a chain torque derived characteristic, wherein the bike tends to sink into its travel as a result of pedal force. “Anti-squat” is also chain torque derived, and is the exact opposite – The bike tries to top out when the pedals are stomped. Almost all suspension designs have some degree of one, usually both, of these characteristics, depending what gearing combination the bike is in. The chain torque effects on a bike suspension vary greatly between the granny/big cog and the big ring/little cog. Most suspension designers try to find a range of gears where their suspension designs work exactly as they want them to and then basically limit the damages in the gears outside of that range. Doesn’t matter what the marketing spiel says, but all bikes have some degree of compromise in their suspension performance in gears outside of the range that the suspension was optimized around.

” Bob“, meanwhile, is a pretty simple thing – It is the weight of a rider lumping up and down on the pedals and activating the suspension as a result of that mass rising and falling in an irregular fashion. There is no suspension in the world that is immune to bob if you really want to pedal in squares, but some designs cope with it better than others. Truthfully, the most effective way of limiting bob, aside from pedaling with turbine efficiency, is by increasing compression damping, or using chain torque to counter the effects of bob by introducing a degree of anti-squat, which will work perfectly for riders within a given weight range and pedaling force in the right combination of gear ratios.

Long rant short – Everyone has some degree of compression damping built into the shocks they are using. but that amount varies. with us, we specify a very light compression damping tune from Fox. This in turn makes for a nicely supple suspension, with the potential associated drawback that some riders will notice more feedback in certain situations than others. At least we offer shocks where you can turn it on or off. We have also noticed that the bigger the rider, the more of a concern this becomes.

(Editor’s Note: Santa Cruz has sent out a Rock Shox Monarch damper unit, which Grannygear is trying out which features a higher level of compression damping from the factory. Initial impressions are favorable, but Grannygear will chime in with a more detailed report soon. Bottom line here is that all suspension devices will exhibit movement underneath a rider to some degree. There is no free lunch in terms of supple suspension and no rider induced movement of a suspension system. Fortunately we have tuning options to suit our desires, and different suspension bikes to choose from. Choose your compromise to suit your tastes.)

Thanks to Santa Cruz and Mike Ferrentino for the opportunity to do this “e-interview”. Look for more updates from Grannygear to come soon.