Giant Link

Spent the day today at the Giant Link where they give their dealers training on their latest products. After meetings in the morning the rest of the day was spent riding the new bikes. As you can see in this picture there are a lot of bikes available to test ride. 

 I got there a few minutes after they opened up the demos which means the nice full suspension cross country carbon 27.5 bikes were all ready out. So I told them I would ride the trail 27.5 bike. I ended up with the gravity version of the bike. Awesome bike, but I wanted to start out climbing. The cool thing is, even thought this is a plush bike designed to going hard on the downhills, it is a good climber. Flip the rear shock into climb mode and all pedal bob disappears. The fork also has the ability to go from 160 to 140mm of travel giving the bike a better climbing geometry. However the 34 tooth single chainring made it hard to pedal up the steeper hills. So amazing climber for a bike that is designed to go downhill.

I then traded for the aluminum cross country 27.5 bike. Much more what I am use to. The 27.5 inch wheels make for a quicker acceleration giving the snap needed to get over technical rocky sections. Yet the wheels rolled fast and provided a lot of traction like you expect from a 29er. Giant is making a huge investment into the 27.5 wheel size, and I think it will make a lot of customers happy.

Some of the 27.5 bikes. Giant asked that we not post closeup shots of the bikes, or give out bike names so I figure this slightly out of focus picture works.