I love to just sit and look up at the sky and draw things in the clouds. It’s maybe something that I’ve always done, but I became especially aware of it years ago while reading an interview with John Castellano where he talked about inventing all sorts of things in the sky.
I couldn’t find a copy of the interview to link to but I remember quite a bit about it such was the imprint it left on me. Castellano talked about riding in jeans, maybe synching a lava lamp to music at MIT, a motorized skateboard, finding ways to bring mountain biking to more affordable price points, and a prototype linkage fork – never to be seen. All that put aside, the key takeaway is just how much we can accomplish by actively doing nothing and letting our brains wonder and ponder.
Anyway, I have a little food for thought for you. A question. And all I ask is that you take it away and actually roll it around in your head for a while before you answer. To make things more complex, I think the answer is going to be largely bike-specific. You could say ‘yes’ for some bikes and ‘no’ for others.
Do you really want a rear-thru-axle on your bicycle?
Down below I’ve shared my brief musings on the subject. Read them now, or, if you’re interested, have your own internal cloud-time and then come back to it.
This is not a new thought for me, but it came up notably on Monday when I was riding with the Squidulous Toucan and the Clairebarian. The three of us were finishing up our ride with a sweeping adaptive mountain bike (AMTB) friendly trail called Empress Bypass when I had, what we’re going to refer to here as, a ‘moment.’
During this ‘moment’ my rear tire, a 27×2.6″ Specialized Laughter* broke loose and took my 29×3.0″ Bontrager XR4 along with it. We were moving at a healthy pace… a healthy pace that would have made putting the bike down unhealthy… and it was a conscious fight to pull it out of the two-wheel loose-over-hard drift I was in. Somehow, to the soundtrack of Toucan’s cackling, I managed to find the Laughter’s side knobs, dig in, and stand the bike up.
As it turns out, what Toucan was laughing at was not (just) my impending meeting with the hard ground but how much ‘suspension’ I managed to visibly coax out of my beefed-to-the-nines Waltworks V2 in the process. My frame is properly stiff in such a way that I’ve ridden multiple aluminum hardtails that are more compliant. But, the eyewitness report is that it’s also a hyper-flexy soft-tail in particular situations.
Do I want a rear-thru-axle on this frame? Decidedly, YES. In addition to adding stiffness to the frame, it takes serious loads out of the rear hub that comes from flex in the 10mm nubs, small steel-shafted quick release (QR) and open dropout tabs held in place by a combination of friction and tension.
*I maintain they would have sold piles of these if they’d sold them for shits-and-giggles (Laughter) instead of as a certain-conditions DH race tire (Slaughter).
Regardless of the frame material – titanium, steel, aluminum – even with bikes like the Banshee Enigma or Santa Cruz Chameleon that have a less-stiffness consideration in mind as part of their design all hardtail bikes are stiff compared to the days when terms like “steel is real” derive from.
There are some old steel and titanium, and even aluminum, hardtails that a rider my size could/can ghost-shift riding out of the saddle. It’s no wonder that proper Clydesdale riders were always chasing more frame stiffness for their personal bikes.
It’s also little wonder that thru-axle adoption covers 100% of performance mountain bikes. Especially full-suspension mountain bikes where tying the rear end together has made a significant difference to bearing life and ride quality in a machine that’s designed to compress smoothly in one plane (vertically when perfectly upright).
But what about road bikes, commuter bikes, gravel bikes, kids bikes, and any number of other rigs where maximum stiffness in janky terrain is not a priority? Think of the treasure and time that brands have poured into increasing the rear-end compliance of carbon road bikes in the years since rear-thru-axles became the norm for those bikes as well.
I know that on Claire’s hardtail more compliance would be preferential to less compliance and I could say the same for my commuter bike, at least when it’s not in single-speed mode. I know that my Kona Unit bikes were very different swapping between the 10x135mm QR dropouts and 12×142 thru-axle dropouts.
I certainly want a rear thru-axle on my Waltworks V2 (thanks Toucan) and on any full-suspension bike that I’m riding. But having a little swagger in the backend on a commuter or road bike would be a desirable outcome for myself and Nina, and on any bike would be a win for Claire.
So, in my household, for a slight minority of bikes, the answer is NO, I don’t want a rear-thru-axle.
Cheers for reading! If you enjoyed this piece please consider buying me a coffee. Any questions, concerns, or comments please feel encouraged to drop me an e-mail, or join us at r/MEATengines.