Mountain Cog
Mountain bike podcast that will make you laugh and learn. Featuring a wide range of passionate guests.
Mountain Cog
098 - A technical look at Norco's mountain bike design approach. (Guests: Norco R&D Engineers - Colin Ryan & Kirk McDowall)
In this episode of The MCP, hosts Josh and Dane dive deep into the science of mountain bike suspension with Norco development engineers Colin Ryan and Kirk McDowall. The conversation explores Norco's different suspension platforms with detailed explanations of axle path, anti-squat, and anti-rise properties. The engineers reveal how these technical elements directly impact riding performance, particularly in technical terrain with square-edge hits and rock gardens.
The discussion also highlights Norco's innovative RideAlign bike setup system, which uses rider metrics to provide personalized suspension, cockpit, and tire pressure recommendations. Kirk and Colin share insights from their development process, including how they balance data acquisition with rider perception, World Cup racing feedback, and mule testing.
The episode concludes with teasers about upcoming Norco releases, including continued development of their downhill race bike (note that Kirk is a 2 time Downhill Canadian National Champion and accomplished Downhill World Cup racer) and hints about a new shorter travel bike that will complement their expanding acoustic and pedal assist mountain bike lineup.
Norco Bikes: https://www.norco.com/
Norco's Ride Align Bike Setup Tool: https://www.ridealigned.com/
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so you know that, uh, last week I was riding, uh, you know, out here kind of, yeah, I could kind of head into three bridges or whatever, and I went over the bars.
Dane:Yeah.
Josh:And I kind of landed in a giant cactus bush, okay, and it got me thinking like you know, like what type of plants should you avoid when you are riding Any?
Dane:idea. I mean spiky ones. It's an ambush, that's what you should try to avoid.
Josh:It's an ambush. That's the plan, that's really bad.
Dane:These don't ever get better. It isn't, no, they don't. I mean the dad joke. What's. What do you think a dad joke's definition is? I don't know, is it supposed to be good?
Josh:That's what I want to know. Or is it supposed to be bad? It's supposed to be bad. It's supposed to be bad design. We kill it. So we're killing it then. So so, uh, it's monday night here on the mcp. We're fresh off of the sedona bicycle festival. Yeah, got to talk to a lot of companies. I don't think you guys were there, norco wasn't up there, were they?
Dane:uh, I don't remember seeing you.
Josh:Usually I would go by were you guys, were you guys at the Sedona Bike Festival, do you know?
Colin Ryan - Norco :I'm not sure if we were at Sedona this year. We were last year.
Dane:Yeah, I remember last year because I actually saw the new optic there and the new Fluid VLT and I bought one of each.
Josh:But we're here with some of the outstanding talent from Norco Bikes, and they were just telling me they're both out of Vancouver. Oh nice yeah not too far from their headquarters. Would you guys care to introduce yourselves? Maybe we can start with you, Colin.
Colin Ryan - Norco :Yeah, sure, yeah. So my name's Colin. I'm one of the development engineers at Norco and we kind of split our engineering department into production design R&D. Split our engineering department into production design R and D. Uh. So I work on more of the R and D side of things, mostly focusing on suspension development. Uh. So that includes uh, developing kinematics for our full suspension bikes, doing some mule test work on new projects, uh, working with our suspension suppliers on custom shock tuning and then kind of final components, working on our ride line set of guides nice yeah right on over to you kirk yeah, so um, I, as colin explained, also worked on the development side of our engineering team.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Um, I've been with arco for for three years now and um before that. Um was kind of full-time into downhill racing um for a number of years, you know, through um, through while I was in school and stuff like that. So, um, a bit of a different sort of background, but um, yeah, it's tied well into working with narco um where I can kind of do my engineering stuff but, you know, also do test riding as well.
Dane:So I do so. Do you guys think, that are you both? Are you both downhillers? I?
Colin Ryan - Norco :don't really get on the downhill bike because definitely not as much as kirk does.
Dane:What's your weapon? What's your weapon of choice?
Colin Ryan - Norco :uh, I've been a weapon of choice. Right now, I don't know if we can talk about it just yet.
Dane:Oh well, no, you don't like disclosing like in the short travel stuff these days.
Dane:Oh, I think I may know what you're talking about. Uh, so okay, and then, um, yeah, cause I'm I'm an old downheller and uh, I don't know if that got me into suspension, uh, you know, or if it was the other way around getting into suspension got me in a downhill. I couldn't tell you which one came first, but uh, but I was listening to another podcast, with kirk I believe, and uh, they were talking about the, uh, the downhill bike, uh, production. I can't remember.
Dane:I think it was blister or something, so and that was that was really interesting to to hear how many times you guys go through mules. You know, build something up, just run through it, and I think from what I heard on that bike, you guys are still developing it it's you don't even know if it'll ever go into production the way it is, but you're just trying to make it a pure race bike. Is that about right?
Kirk McDowall - Norco:yeah, that was probably a little over a year ago, I guess, when we did that podcast, and I think even then we're still tweaking away at things on the on the download bike for the race team side, but finally are also starting to steer that ship towards the production bike as well. So that's going to be cool.
Dane:What do you think is the hardest thing to nail down when you're dealing with that? I mean, are you fighting rider feedback with what maybe computer models do, or is it just trying to get speed? And I mean I can't imagine that's easy to get all of those different riders opinions and try and figure out which ones make the biggest difference from my end.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:It does feel like, you know, going through this process, it does find, or it does seem, that a lot of the riders kind of find themselves in a similar area and we do sort of tend to steer in the same direction yeah, yeah, I think that's pretty true.
Colin Ryan - Norco :I don't know if that's just a case of the riders that we work with over the course of this project or how adaptable this bike is. It lets us test, um, different elements of the suspension and geo and isolation and really kind of zero in on the ideal numbers. But we do, yeah, kind of see most of our riders converging on really similar settings. And we've been working on this bike for, yeah, I guess this will be coming into our fourth season if we include the season we did testing the mule with kirk. So over that time we've we've worked with quite a few different riders, probably close, close to 10 between development and race team and the fact that everyone seems to sort of converge on very similar settings within a little bit of adjustment kind of suggests that we're getting close to zeroing in on some of the ideal characteristics.
Dane:That's awesome. I mentioned before we started recording, I just set up my optic, so this is the new optic with the high pivot. I'm excited about it. We have you know, pay-to-play is what we call it. You have to climb everywhere in order to go down. The terrain, though, can be really rocky, square-edge, volcanic, really sharp rocks, and so the optic coming in at 120 in the rear. I believe that's correct. Is that right, uh?
Dane:so 125, 125, thank you. And then uh, it's uh, but it's a high pivot and so when you look at it it looks like you know what you see on the world cup downhill races. You know, you've got this big idler sitting up high and the chains routed over the the idler and comes down onto the chain ring, and so it has this look of this long travel kind of trend you know, but it's only 125 millimeters and we've we've had actually difficulty getting our customers to kind of wrap their head around that.
Dane:Yeah, totally, and so so.
Josh:so maybe it'd be good to orient our listeners. I think you guys have four suspension platforms, if I have that right the, the VPS, vps, hb, hvp and HVP six. Do I have that right?
Colin Ryan - Norco :Yeah, yeah, for the 25 lineup, I guess it'll be kind of two main production layouts and then the HVP six that we're using on the downhill bike, the, the range was that high virtual pivot or hbp layout and that's kind of spawned the, the downhill bike layout. But uh, but yeah, on the production side of things for 25 it's mostly going to be our bps or like our horse link layout, and then our bps hp, which is a variation of a horse link layout with a higher colin kirk, could you take us through like explain a variation of a horse length way up at the higher Colin?
Colin Ryan - Norco :Kirk, could you take us through like explain each one of those, like how they work, what the differences are between them, and then like what bikes they're on in your in your lineup?
Colin Ryan - Norco :I think at the heart of kind of our approach to suspension platforms is is Axlepath really. And so Axlepath is just how your rear axle moves relative to the front triangle as your suspensions compress, and really our approach to different suspension platforms is trying to tailor AxlePath to the terrain and the intended use of the bike so you can tune in different amounts of what we call rearward AxlePath, of what we call rearward axle path, which allows the back wheel to move out of the way of kind of square edge hits as terrain gets rougher and allows you to maintain speed and control on more demanding descending trails. And so that's kind of as you move from our short travel bikes that use the BPS layout without an idler, with a more conventional axle path, into kind of the more demanding applications, things like the sight and the optic, all the way up to downhill. We're introducing progressively more rearward axle path to try and manage those rougher, higher speed, chunkier kind of descending trails so.
Josh:So, as I understand it, more rearward axle path is better in things like rock gardens. Would that be a fair assessment?
Colin Ryan - Norco :yeah I mean that that's the idea behind it is um when your rear wheel hits something in the trail, uh, your suspension is. The force that's acting on your rear wheel is not just trying to compress your suspension vertically, it's also um kind of tugging on the rear wheel trying to slow the rider down. And so if you can allow the rear wheel to move backward to some degree, um, you can help the rear suspension manage those uh kind of square edge hits that aren't just trying to move the wheel up but also backward, um, and that just allows you to carry momentum, uh gives you a greater sense of control and confidence, as, as you're riding kind of rougher uh and higher speed trails.
Josh:So, dane, for you know, so we have a. You know we're, we're a rocky mess here in Southern Arizona.
Dane:We live in rock gardens.
Josh:And so, um, you know, that kind of tells me that this might actually be a perfect bike for our terrain here in that you know, it's going to handle those rock gardens more effectively than a bike that doesn't have that. That same suspension Can it?
Dane:can it first ride on it? So far? That's what I'm experiencing this bike. Just my first ride on it.
Josh:It was amazing how pedaling efficient it was, so yeah so is that something you guys have dealt with like customer perception based on the look, and, and how are you helping to educate the customers that maybe that, maybe the look isn't what they should focus on?
Colin Ryan - Norco :yeah, I mean that that's definitely a challenge that we anticipated. Going going to this hype that lay out with an idler on both the optic and the sight. We do get that question quite a bit, which is why we try and bring it back to high. Pivot bikes aren't necessarily all. They don't all perform the same. Much the same as we think of having varying amounts of vertical suspension travel, you can have varying amounts of vertical suspension travel. You can have varying amounts of rearward axle travel or rearward axle path as well. So in the case of something like the Sight or the Optic, they do have more rearward axle path than a conventional horse-linked design wouldn't run on either. But it's not so extreme. It's definitely not taken to the extreme that you would see on a demo bike. So we're trying to kind of strike that balance between a bike that still feels really intuitive when you're cornering it off, jumps, um, still handles like a conventional trail bike but at the same time we're able to just take the edge off of all those square edge hits as you are riding through kind of rougher trails and just enhance the sense of confidence when you're descending.
Colin Ryan - Norco :And then, yeah, one of the things that we've tried to talk about with these bikes, to sort of dispel some of the myths around idler bikes being less efficient to pedal, is what we've done with idler location.
Colin Ryan - Norco :So it's quite well hidden because our industrial designers have done a good job of kind of hiding the idler inside the chainstay. But the idler is actually located separate from the main pivot and we did a lot of work in the fuel phase for both these bikes, moving the idler around to tune what we would call the anti-squat or kind of how chain force interacts with the suspension, all with the goal of trying to make these bikes pedal really well, um, and in line with what you would expect from a trail or so. Um, that's one of the things we like to talk about. When people you know think of idler bikes as being inefficient is, actually you have this kind of unique tuning feature by being able to locate the idler um separate from all your other kinematic points. That lets you fine-tune how the bikes pedal to a greater degree than you would even get with a bike that doesn't run. So it's actually in some ways an advantage rather than a disadvantage can.
Dane:Can we touch on a couple things? Uh, so I, I, um, our listeners amazing. They're all over the world, 66 countries, yeah. So, but one of the things that I struggle with as a suspension guy, a bike guy who's been doing this a long time is there's a lot of new terms that have come out in the last few years and I'm hoping cause you guys are probably the ones coming up with these terms, so I'm hoping you can help me throw some definitions out to kind of help people kind of understand them, including myself. So some of these things. You know, I was joking on a different podcast about kinematics, so we found out kinematics is just the relationship of the suspension against itself, and it's kind of an easy word to say a suspension system, if that makes sense. And so the other one is that I'm struggling with because I've got old terms and these are new ones are anti-squat and anti-raise anti-squat and anti-rise are similar terms but kind of deal with two different scenarios on the bike.
Colin Ryan - Norco :They both relate to what happens with your rear suspension when you're either accelerating or decelerating. So when we're accelerating on our bike, it's when you're pedaling, and what happens when you're accelerating is you create what's called your body in the massive. Your bike creates what's called an inertial load, so it creates a load that wants to oppose the acceleration or try and keep your body stationary. And the result of that is you'll increase the amount of load or weight over the rear wheel and decrease the amount of load or weight over the rear wheel, um, and decrease the amount of load or weight over the front wheel. Uh, and so if you weren't doing anything with the rear suspension to try and counter that, you would feel that as what you talked about in pedal bob. So, uh, you put some power down through the cranks, you start to accelerate, your body wants to stay stationary, creates that inertial force that transfers some load to the rear wheel.
Dane:Your suspension has to counter that increased load over the rear wheel and so it compresses okay so, and so hold on, I'm going to do a little bit of translation while we're talking so yeah, um, so what you're saying is, as you push the pedal down, your body and your force is almost trying to make the bike do a wheelie which pushes the back end down, or or your cranks down more and squats the bike. Is that, is that a fair? Yeah, I think that's not a bad summary of it. And then when you stop loading it, it wants to come back up, and then when your next leg comes down and does the same thing, it squats it. And that's why we get this kind of in the old school way we used to call this pedal bob, because you would get this kind of up and down feel as you pedaled, as your body kind of get loaded the bike and unloaded the bike.
Colin Ryan - Norco :Uh, yeah, through the pedal? Yeah, is that. And that that's kind of the unique thing about bicycles, that's a little bit different from some other vehicles is, um, the way that you accelerate, you, you generate um power. You don't generate um power or torque, uh, constant, at a constant rate at the cranks, yeah, um, as we all know, you know, we generate, or the most torque, um, at a certain point, our pedal stroke, and so you get this really like cyclic kind of nature to it. And that's where the bobbing comes from, is it's not just the bike squats while you're accelerating and then it stops when you're no longer accelerating. You're constantly going like accelerate, decelerate, um, and it just creates this kind of cyclical, like pedal bob sensation which a lot of people will perceive as being inefficient.
Dane:It'll feel like it's kind of just sapping all your energy with yeah, we'll get feedback from customers that way, like, oh it's, you know it's bobbing up and down, and then, as a suspension guy, I've got to go and figure out if I can do something with the suspension to counteract that. Whether it's, you know, like when they produced a pro pedal back in the day to kind of calm down, uh, shocks, or now you have a trail, a trail switch on some of the shocks and and so they try to overcome it, and then you so you guys are are using I'm assuming you're using the design of the suspension to get rid of that, rather than relying on the shock to do it how you locate your suspension pivots.
Colin Ryan - Norco :You can tune in a certain amount of what we would call anti-squat to counter the suspension compressing when you're accelerating, and that's purely just done by. Forget about the shock for a second. It's just how you've located the pivots relative to one another and relative to the chain. There's a balance because your shock can also do some of the work. That's where things like climb switches come in. When you close your climb switch, it increases your Typically it's your low-speed compression damping. Sometimes it'll do some things to rebound as well.
Colin Ryan - Norco :You can lean on the shock a little bit for some pedaling support. So generally it's trying to find the right balance, because there are some drawbacks to going too far with anti-squat or relying on it too heavily to create an efficient pedaling feel, and so that's kind of that's where the mule process comes in. For us it's trying to feel out what that balance should be on on a bike to make it pedal the way we want it to but at the same time make it descend the way we want okay so, colin, I've heard you talk previously about your attempts to try to like measure pedaling efficiency and how difficult it is to like do that in a quantitative way, and so you had said rider perception previously.
Josh:So even if the pedaling is very efficient, if the rider feels like it's inefficient, that's a problem for you guys. And I'm interested in Kirk's perspective, like from a pedaling efficiency perspective, like, are you helping to give perspective to Colin and team and yourself on the perception of efficiency?
Kirk McDowall - Norco:The mule- phase for this bike actually predates my time at Norco, but one of our other test riders, riders and colin worked really closely together to run through all this stuff and he's really good with the the feedback as well. So at the stage that I joined, this bike was kind of like that more suspension tuning stage. So we're kind of um, you know, tuning what lockouts or climb switch modes look like on the shocks. At the same time we were also doing some like idler and idler efficiency work, so trying out different idler tooth profiles to try and make the bike pedal. It's most efficient.
Josh:I mean, is it? Is it really a problem where the suspension design is actually providing an efficient pedaling platform, but the rider says this doesn't feel efficient? I mean, do you guys deal with that? Is that something like legitimately that you're dealing with?
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Yeah, we were just talking about this earlier today that I think you know we'll not a data acquisition on the bike and we've done some testing where we're just like climbing a road and looking at the data and, um, you know, trying to see that pedal bob in the plot of, like, the rear shocks, uh, action, we're always going to combine sort of the rider's feedback and the data and not just look at one or the other okay, so you're.
Dane:So you guys have are using data acquisition to kind of take out the feel and get more of just the numbers. That helps you kind of identify what's actually going on where the feel doesn't dominate what you're doing. Is that fair?
Josh:It's actually a really hard problem to solve. Yeah, you can't actually test for pedal efficiency. I don't think. Correct me if I'm wrong, guys.
Colin Ryan - Norco :At least in our experience, it's pretty tough to do outside of a lab setting. I mean it depends how you define efficiency. But with the site mules what we tried to do is do testing where we had different idler configurations that would vary anti-squat across a fairly wide range, and then run a power meter and measure for a consistent average power over a certain segment, the time to complete that segment, thinking the setup that does it in a shorter amount of time for the same applied power is going to be the more efficient setup, it's going to be the one that gets you up the hill quicker. But then ultimately we realized that if you're applying the same amount of power at the cranks, you're going to, you're going to get there in the same amount of time, but all other things like rolling resistance and stuff being equal. So really what you need to measure is how much energy the rider is outputting to generate that power at the cranks, and that's where the that's where it becomes tricky to to measure outside of a lab setting. It's, um, yeah, the the energy output from the rider.
Colin Ryan - Norco :I think when we really brought it back after that testing we thought well, ultimately you know our customers aren't doing this and trying to to measure whether a bike is or isn't efficient.
Colin Ryan - Norco :It's it's how they perceive it. And I think, to bring it back to the point you were talking about, dan, like relating rider feedback to what we measure in data acquisition. I think in that scenario, as well as you know, any other time we're testing with data acquisition, we're not just driving our direction entirely off of data, just the same as we're not driving it entirely off of rider feedback. A lot of times it's trying to take what the rider's feeling and we work with development riders that have great ride feel and good feedback and look at why they're feeling that by digging into the data. So it's really not a one or the other approach. It's trying to learn why the rider is feeling something so that we can either get rid of that feeling if it's something that they're, if it's a negative, or we can more quickly get to that feeling in the future if it's a positive so.
Dane:So one of the things I felt on my first ride that I I was paying attention, I was trying to to feel things. You know I wasn't just riding yeah and um. So the terrain I was on was really lots of square edge, real rough, um, lots of climbing, but not super steep, you know and then a little bit of descending. It's not an area where I could get real real long descents on. That's the next thing that I want to do with this is take it down some gnarly stuff. But I noticed a little bit of.
Dane:I feel like I could feel the rear end move backwards a little bit and the bike actually, when it hit a square edge, almost the end move backwards a little bit and, and the bike actually, when it hit a square edge, almost the bottom bracket drop a little bit. I don't know if that's a fair thing to say, but it but it didn't slow me down and I don't know. It's a weird feeling. It was different feeling, for sure, than the bikes that I'm used to riding, which are usually horse links or DW links and usually those you hit an obstacle and then it's over. You know you hit it and you over. This one kind of went backwards but didn't slow me down, and it was kind of. I don't know if that feedback is at all useful to you or if it's something that you're used to hearing, but is there a little, a little bit of a like a dip down in the frame as you hit obstacles Does it drop the bottom bracket a tiny, tiny bit?
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Not something that I've necessarily noticed, but yeah, we'd have to. We'd have to back to back test.
Dane:Yeah, do you think my brain is thinking that that axle is going backwards and so it's just making that up, which is very possible?
Colin Ryan - Norco :I wasn't going to gonna say anything, but yeah, yeah, that's okay, that's okay, because that's what I'm.
Dane:I'm out there literally trying to feel a difference, and so is my. My brain may be coming up with it. What I did notice is who gives a shit.
Josh:You didn't slow down well.
Dane:So, yeah, that's what I. That's. What I did notice is I didn't slow down and I didn't have any pedal issues. The other thing that's what I, that's what I did notice is I didn't slow down and I didn't have any pedal issues. The other thing that I noticed is that one of the hills that I ride is called lost arrow, and it is super technical as far as like repeated uh rocks and they're not. They're pretty rhythmic, so you can get in front and wheels dropping into like little holes at the same time, and it's really difficult to climb this hill without dabbing, and I made it up no dabs, so I was pretty, pretty proud of that. So the traction was really good. It didn't. None of those square edges stopped my momentum. That was what I did notice. So, in fact, if anything, the front fork was more likely to stop than the rear.
Colin Ryan - Norco :So, yeah, yeah, that's cool, I, I, that's one of the things I really like about. I ride the site a bit more often than the optic, but you know, pretty similar layout, just a little bit more travel. But yeah, one of the things I really like about that bike is, uh, how it climbs on. Uh, kind of more techy stuff, like the scenarios and, like you said, if you're coming off of another bike, um, I've found that when we first started riding the sites and I would climb up a trail, I knew pretty well and go like, okay, this is normally the spot where I gotta jump off here on this climb and it, you know, yeah, just a totally different feeling and the amount of traction that had the climbs I was able to clean that would normally make it up. Um is, yeah, maybe not something people think of, or it's not the first thing people think of when they see a high pivot bike like that but no, I think that's what we're in the shop.
Dane:I think that's probably our biggest barrier and one of the reasons that I got this bike is to help help people.
Dane:You, you can tell people they can read a magazine, they can read a lot of stuff, but when you're relating that product to the trails they ride, it really helps them understand if what that bike's going to do. You know, and one of the things we do on the sales floor is we ask people what their favorite trail is. You know what's your best trail, what's your, what's the trail that you want to ride the most? And that gives us a lot of insight as salespeople on what bike is going to kind of fit their needs the best, and this one has been one of those, that's. You know.
Dane:You want to say Bug Springs, which is a big hit, descending shuttle run, but I got to tell you I think this is going to be the number one star pass or sweetwater ride bike, which is, you know, uh, tons of square hits, not necessarily a ton of downhilling, but lots of technical climbs and, and a lot of people, I think, abandon those trails because they get to where they just can't get up, those techie climbs, and this bike, I think, would help them do that. So at least that's the first ride impression.
Josh:So you asked two questions before and we covered the anti-squat right.
Dane:Yeah, anti-rise, anti-rise.
Josh:Yeah, maybe you could help us explain that, how braking impacts that, and so on.
Dane:Yeah. So what's a layman's term for what's going on with the bike when you talk anti-rise? Brake, dive, brake, dive in the front? What's a layman's term for what's going on with the bike when you talk anti-rise? Brake dive, brake, dive in the front? Or is it brake, like you put the brakes and then your seat comes up, kind of like the old Klein mantras, where it launches you?
Colin Ryan - Norco :So I mean, I guess when I'm talking about it I'm thinking your weight shifts forward and so your fork compresses and you take some weight off the rear. Okay, your weight shifts forward and so your fork compresses and you take some weight off the rear, which can be, you know, pretty disconcerting feeling if you're jamming on the brakes on something steep and you're getting pitched out the front door. So, yeah, um, anti rise uh is, I guess, uh, very similar to anti squat, but kind of working in the opposite direction. So, um, just the same as when you accelerate, your mass wants to stay stationary. As a result creates a force that increases the load over the rear wheel. When you hit the brakes, you're transferring load to the front wheel, which is why your your fork will compress. Sometimes it feels like you're getting pitched over the bars a little bit.
Colin Ryan - Norco :So anti-rise is what we can do with the rear suspension to uh to try and counter that.
Colin Ryan - Norco :So a high level of anti-rise would imply that the rear suspensions, um, it's resisting the rear suspension, um, moving to a more extended position in its travel, so it's trying to hold the suspension down.
Colin Ryan - Norco :And if you have quite high levels of anti-rise bikes, like our old downhill bike, the Oram HSP. It's a good example of this. It would actually kind of squat into its travel when you hit the brakes, and there's some pros to that in terms of how they preserve geometry. When you're hard on the brakes they don't get rid of that sensation of being pitched over the bars, but there are some drawbacks. So when you're holding the suspension down into its travel with high levels of anti-rise, you're not allowing it to recover after uh kind of successive hits, um from things that you're hitting in the trail, um, so it can kind of pack down and uh, that's where, uh, you sometimes hear the term brake jack, which is really just your suspension isn't able to independently move to track the trail surface while your brakes are applied, and so it's not doing, as an effect, as effective a job at isolating the rider from all the kind of rough impacts.
Dane:Wow, that's. You know the way you explain. It is amazing because it makes total sense. You know, when you're going downhill your weight shifts forward. It would unweight the rear suspension, and so you guys are actually trying to counteract that, but then you've got to balance that with not going too much, so no wonder you know, these suspension designs are so complicated as far as, like moving, one little thing can really change a ton on the bike.
Dane:So is the brake position. So I've heard with some people where if you put the brake on the chainstay versus the seat stay, that can affect um brake jack, like in the olden days we had floating disc brakes, you know, and I think that was to get rid of that right to try and allow the wheel to float and the rear suspension not be a you know how. So you guys are trying to figure out how to do that without having a floating disc brake, I'm guessing definitely talk a little bit about floating brakes, because they might be making a comeback, but uh, I've seen some stuff.
Colin Ryan - Norco :I saw a couple patents the floating brakes I think originally came about when a lot of suspension designs, uh, were still single pivots or like a linkage driven single pivot and really that means that the rear axles mounted generally to the chainstay and that chainstay is directly connected to the front triangle and so the rear axle is just rotating around.
Colin Ryan - Norco :The main pivot layouts like horse layout came about and really one of the goals with that was decoupling your brake force and your suspension by mounting the rear axle to the seat stay in this case, and the seat stay is not directly connected to the front triangle in those designs. Instead of being a single pivot layout, it's what we would call a virtual pivot layout where the point the rear axle is rotating about is kind of defined by the chainstay and the upper link and how they attach to the front triangle. That gives you some freedom to define different levels of anti-rise and run. I think originally with the horse link layouts it was to lower anti-rise relative to some of the single pivot layouts that were used at the time, so kind of make braking and suspension more independent.
Dane:Okay, and then one of the things, Kirk, is, you've got a lot of history in downhill racing, in downhill racing, and so is there a way that you can help us understand what some of these terms would do on the on the bike, what you may feel on a track or or something like you know? Um, I think, with my job is always to take some of this technical stuff and then to change the wording so that I can kind of relate it to my customers. Uh, if that makes sense, and so a rider who's um, feeling something may not know how to put it into words Like you guys have world cup athletes that are giving you good feedback. What is the?
Kirk McDowall - Norco:you know, what is something an average writer going to feel when they, when they want to see something like this, either go away or yeah, it's an interesting one and I'm happy to let Colin field the suspension because he's pretty much like a walking, he's the wizard, he's amazing.
Dane:But man, I you know, like he's so good at telling us I mean we could design a bike after talking to him, but like there's a lot of people that are riding and have no idea what's going on, you know, and so how are they figuring out this stuff? So like, what are you feeling on the bike as it pertains?
Kirk McDowall - Norco:to downhill anti-rise is the most interesting one because, kind of like colin said, there's advantages and disadvantages.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Um, when you're down the racing, like the feedback that we can get on the on the high pivot bike is, I guess, having only ridden a high pivot bike for the first time when I joined norco three years ago, my impression was kind of that it worked quite well when I was descending because it's not loading the front wheel and you can like drag rear brake.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:I'd drag rear brake quite a lot when I'm riding down and, um, as you can sometimes see by my blue pads and rotors, but you can actually use that brake track to sort of kind of like, you know, keep your bike on the plane you want it to be and not load the front wheel. So that's, that's a really cool one. Yeah, something we're gonna dig into more here as, uh, yeah, as we do a little more enterprise testing. But as well, feedback that your average rider might feel is just that it feels like a bike could feel stiff under braking and it's sometimes hard to discern. I think for me as well, like, is that stiffness because the shock is too soft? Or and it's actually like squatting too far down in the travel and, like Colin said, you're getting kind of packed down.
Dane:Right, Almost almost a bottom out, but it's steady.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Yeah, yeah, or or like if it's because there's actually too much weight on the front of the bike and there's not enough weight on the back. So I'm sure as a tuner Dane you kind of get some of that feedback as well. And sometimes I think, like a lot of things you know, feedback can sort of doesn't always give you the exact direction. There can be like almost two opposite ends.
Dane:The lens of every rider is different. Right question is as how? How do the average people, you know um, take what they want out of a bike and then kind of figure out what bikes fit their needs? So like, for instance, one of the things that I'm hearing from you is like uh, if it's, if you're starting to lean on the brakes on a descent and you're going pretty fast, if the rear end is starting to lift up, you may get some skipping over the tops of stuff and maybe not stay planted I guess planted is a good word that I hear a lot and um and so like having that suspension, feel like it's stuck to the ground, like those are terms that we use all the time like that's something that I like when I race.
Dane:I like a very different suspension than when I go to the bike park and so like my race bike has got much slower suspension, much slower rebound. I want to be stuck to the ground. I actually don't mind if I pack into a corner a little bit and keep, keep low, cause it helps me, you know. Basically berm around that corner better. But when I'm at the bike park everything's gotta be pretty springy low amount of rebound, damping and bouncy so that I can get more air, so um, so those little terms and stuff. So so if I've got a bike that's got, um, you know, anti-rise properties, is it going to have a more planted feel? Is that something that I'm going to probably see more?
Colin Ryan - Norco :it's going to depend a lot yeah I'm just going to say it's like I think one of the things that keeps us going with the suspension development stuff is it.
Colin Ryan - Norco :It's so hard to attribute like a feeling to any one particular thing, like there's so many different variables, kind of knobs to turn when you're developing a suspension layout, that, um to like, attribute that feeling solely to something like anti-rise is kind of tough to to do.
Colin Ryan - Norco :That's definitely where the data acquisition can come in to help us when we're developing a bike. Anyway, if the rider is feeling something, then being able to go in and look at things like suspension position, velocity or any number of other things that we might bring in, depending on what we're interested in, and go oh okay, I think you're probably feeling this because the suspension's reacting in this way. That's usually how we approach things, at least at the development level. When it comes to the consumer side of things, that's really where our setup guides come in to try and guide people. Uh, once they've bought our bike and they're trying to set it up for themselves and the trails that they're riding to guide them towards a setup that's going to work well for them and the way that they want to use our bike can.
Dane:Can we talk a little bit about that, because I, I don't want to get too dwelly on the suspension stuff and I got to tell you that ride line is pretty cool tool on norco's website and, uh, I was. I was really impressed. I was kind of pessimistic guys when I went to do this, because I've seen apps and stuff come up with each bike and stuff and the amount of data they give you just to set up.
Josh:It even told me what bar width so maybe, uh, either colin or kirk, you can take us through ride a line for our listeners. Explain, explain what it is, how do you get there and what's it used for?
Colin Ryan - Norco :I can tell you how it came about, maybe, and then, uh, kirk can maybe talk about, like, how it looks in its current form, because he's, uh, he's been doing all the educational stuff for it ride. A line came about actually just a bit before I started at norco, but it was kind of born out of us seeing that we would send bikes out for review with media or out with, you know, customers and we get kind of mixed feedback on a bike that we thought was really good, kind of tried to dig into why that was and realized that a lot of times people are setting the bikes up quite differently from how we rode them and talking things like suspension setup, but also just things like cockpit so there's a selfish reason why you guys developed this.
Josh:You're like you guys are setting our bikes up wrong and we're getting bad reviews because of it, so we're going to show you how to do it Right.
Colin Ryan - Norco :I think it's. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know if I'd necessarily word it that way but I think it was like trying to make sure that people, uh, people, uh, experienced our bikes the way that we intended them to.
Colin Ryan - Norco :That's how I like to think about it. So that that's kind of the goal with ride aligned is, regardless of your height, your weight, body positioning on the bike, we want you to experience the bike in the way that we've experienced it when we've developed it. And I think bike setup is something that a lot of times gets overlooked. And I think it gets overlooked sometimes because it's kind of mystifying to a lot of people, especially as you buy a higher end bike. It has more adjustments and more things to turn, but if you don't know what each of those knobs does, you can take a bike that's supposed to perform really well and make it perform kind of shitty. So that's where RideAlign was kind of born out of.
Colin Ryan - Norco :It started in kind of the version one of the setup guide, so we did that for 2020, I think was the first model year with sights and optics that we did. That, got really good reception to that and then also collected some really good feedback on how we could improve it. And so a couple years later, uh, we came out with a second version of ride align, which is the one that we're running. Now that's has some additional features. It's kind of changed the way that we do things like how soft or firm your bike is, made it less about asking the rider, uh, what their skill level was, and more about getting them to ride the bike and give us feedback on how it felt and giving them the right tools to kind of tune it based on what they were feeling.
Dane:Yeah, that when I set it up initially it asked me it actually asked me where I'm centered on the bike. So it had was it, is it called, recommended set a center, like it had it a little bit farther behind on my optic than center, you know yeah.
Josh:So you're talking about rider position?
Dane:Yeah, rider position, and I actually stuck it more forward. I don't know why.
Josh:Because you ride more forward.
Dane:Well, I do, I do it more forward, I don't know why. Because you ride more forward. Well, I do, I do. Like you've even commented that I sit on the bike more and I actually corner, you know, from the seat more. I don't stand as much. But I also knew the ride that I was going to do, particularly that day, was going to be climbing and and tiny descents, very short ones, so I wasn't going to be like doing a long descent, so I didn't. I wanted to get kind of bias it towards the middle. But then, uh, some of the other sliders that I didn't play with were um, what's, at the beginning you do your weight first. The first sliders are. I didn't mess with those at all, I just put my weight in and skip to the next one. But, uh is, can you change your? Is it aggressiveness that you're changing, or is it terrain type, a suspension feel, trail, grip, trail type? Okay, see, I'm gonna go play with that you're changing. Or is it terrain type, a suspension feel, trail, grip, trail type?
Dane:okay, see, I'm gonna go play with that, you know because, because I want to see you know um what they do and if my settings will change or be recommended versus what norco says.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Just that's what I recommend to people is to just leave. Leave the sliders probably in their default position, unless you have a really strong preference for your first ride, and then if you come back and you find that like your shock feels way too soft, then you know you might adjust the rider position to be further forward and ride. A line will split out some sets that give you a more balanced position. Or, yeah, if you find it way too soft then you can change the feel slider as well.
Dane:How does the ride line figure out your bar width? Because it didn't ask me my shoulder width or anything like that.
Colin Ryan - Norco :They're meant to be starting points rather than like really rigid values, and definitely in the case of bar width, we're making an estimation, I guess, of your body geometry based on height and weight, of your body geometry based on height and weight. It's one of the challenges of you don't want to overwhelm the customer by asking for too much information but at the same time you want the setup to be accurate. So it's trying to find how can we do as much as possible with as little information as possible, and so we've got some kind of test rigs that we've developed in our lab to look at things like rider weight distribution and body position on the bike, to try and learn how we can take things like height and weight and make some assumptions around how that person's weight is going to be distributed on the bike or, in the case of bar width, what their kind of average shoulder width would be and what a good starting point in terms of bar width would be.
Josh:It's pretty amazing. I mean, you guys are only collecting six data points, if I'm seeing this right Suspension, feel, trail, grip, trail type, weight, height and your rider position. Do I have that right? Are those the six? And then obviously, the bike that you're on.
Dane:Well, yeah, how dependent is the bike?
Colin Ryan - Norco :It's all done specific to the bike. Okay, kirk does to the bike. Okay, kirk does a lot of baseline testing, so he can. He can talk about how we arrive this baseline. But as far as taking it from kind of the ride test and then transferring that into a setup chart, that kind of feeds this setup guide goes, yeah, it's all specific to the bike. We generally will have a baseline that's developed from one of our test riders and then we put it into an algorithm that we kind of developed behind the scenes that will calculate settings for a range of different rider weights and different heights on different frame sizes and then we'll go out and check to make sure that that's accurate by getting riders that are either at the light or short end of the size range or vice versa, the kind of heavier, taller end of the size range, we'll get them to ride those settings, give us feedback and make sure that we're in a good place.
Dane:Have you thought about making this interactive for data collection? Where a rider can do the ride align. A rider can do the ride align. I, I maybe you already do and I just didn't notice it.
Josh:Um, but where they do the ride align and maybe then you share their results, or maybe share feedback, or are you collecting the, the, the input from the riders, and using that to help in your data analytics?
Colin Ryan - Norco :We. We do some stuff, I guess, with the like high level things, like the majority of people setting one of these sliders towards one end. That tells us, okay, maybe we didn't quite get our baseline right, maybe our recommended settings are a bit firm because everybody seems to be setting the slider towards the soft end, and then we can adjust from there. So we'll look at things like that, or the sizes that people are purchasing based on their height. We'll give us some information on where we should potentially go with sizing future. So we'll use the data for things like that.
Dane:I put my height in and it kind of spit out a size, and then it made me want to click on the button, and so I could have gone and changed that to some degree, like with the new bikes, and so I could have gone and changed that to some degree.
Colin Ryan - Norco :Like with the new bikes, we've got five sizes and the intention there is to have more overlap so that more people have the option to size up or size down. Okay, so, uh, we won't recommend you know, if I'm six, two, I'm not going to get recommended that size one because, no matter what we do, we can't set the bike up for you. But but yeah, if you're somebody that kind of falls in the middle of two sizes, we'll allow them to pick one of those two sizes, and we do actually tweak the settings just a little bit based on which size they've purchased. Okay, how interesting.
Dane:Why is reach? Because it doesn't take into that account. Why has that become the dominant number that people are talking about?
Colin Ryan - Norco :Bike fit's complicated. Yeah, people are the dominant number that people are talking about like it's complicated. Yeah, people are, although you know you can be the same height but, like you said, you could have somebody that's all torso, no legs, short legs or you know other way around, all legs, short torso, and they're probably going to be comfortable on bikes that are sized different. And I think reach is just, it's a number that people have grabbed onto as coming as close as possible to kind of being one number that summarizes how they're going to fit on a bike. But bike fit can't really be summed up into just one number.
Colin Ryan - Norco :What you're talking about we look at seated and standing fit fit. So we have. Although our geo chart may not list these numbers because they're not really commonly used, they're not going to necessarily mean anything to people. Yeah, we'll look at things like, uh, the distance between the bottom bracket and the handlebar, um, so that sort of spread between your feet and your hands, similarly, from kind of the center of the seat and the handlebars seat in your hands, and we'll look at things like that to give us a better idea of how all of these geo numbers are going to result in a um, a fit both seated and standing, okay.
Josh:Well, I got to tell you, man, I think the ride line system is amazing. I do, I'm not aware of anyone else that's got anything that's it's anywhere near as as good as this. So kudos to you guys for for pulling this together and yeah, it even came up with tire pressure.
Dane:That's amazing, and I set my tires at that pressure and didn't change them.
Josh:So which is which is great yeah I do have a question on the, on the extremes. So I was playing around with it today and you guys can probably see I'm I'm not a small guy and I broke your tool with my weight. It said, hey, you can't set this bike up that heavy.
Dane:You're not allowed to ride a Norco, you're not allowed to ride this particular model.
Josh:Okay, what are the extremes that you have?
Colin Ryan - Norco :in the tool. It's not necessarily the same for every spec and we shouldn't make the distinction to that. The ride-align tool if you're outside of the weight range, we're not saying necessarily that you can't ride our bike, of course. What we're saying is we want to stand by the setup that we give you and if you're outside of a certain weight range we don't feel like we can confidently recommend settings that are going to work well for you. So that that's just subtle kind of distinction. A lot of times it's driven off of uh suspension spec we can do things to, and generally it's pressure in your fork, in your shock or or spring rate if you're a coil shock. Um, that's usually where you're going to max out and we can do things with the kinematics and the rear suspension to control, uh, what pressure rider needs to run relative to their weight. But in terms of the forks we're we're more tied to what our suspension partners will top out at on pressure.
Josh:So I need to go talk, we need to go talk to Fox, dvo, rockshox and be like listen, there's heavier riders out there, guys, let's, let's, uh. But to give you an example, let's get up the 260.
Dane:So I I pulled up my settings, I took a picture of them. So it said for my shock setup to put in 252 air pressure yeah, what's the max on that?
Dane:350 usually. I haven't checked the vivid, but most the time it's 350 on most rear shocks, and so I have plenty of room to go. And there are some brands. We sold a couple brands where we ran into the problem where you couldn't put enough air pressure in them. In fact I think Intense was one of them, one of the first generations X2s. They only went to 250 and they had to do a recall on the air slave and I think that was 2014, 15, somewhere in there.
Dane:So the leverage ratio will have a lot to do with that. So what, what do you think your leverage ratio? I want to say it's a little on the high side, is that?
Colin Ryan - Norco :fair. I guess high and low is maybe all kind of relative. I guess I I think on the site in the optic, but you're seeing a lot of brands, I think, converge on pretty similar shock strokes relative to rear wheel travel. Yeah, so I think we're not the only ones that have learned that the high leverage stuff does make it really difficult to set bikes up for heavier riders. We definitely had that struggle with the previous generation site. We ran a shorter stroke shock for the same amount of wheel travel, so as a result, we had higher leverage. Yeah, that means that you need to run higher shock pressures for the same amount of field travel. So as a result, we had higher leverage. Yeah, that means that you need to run higher shock pressures for the same rider weight. So we had trouble supporting heavier riders on that bike, and that was one of the things that we wanted to improve on with the new site especially, but also with the new optic. We thought there was room to improve.
Dane:Yeah, this is a. Is this a 185 by 55? It's a 50.
Josh:50? Is a? Is this a 185 by 55? It's a 50, 50, okay. And then, uh, am I going to run into problems when I turn it just for our listeners, when it yeah, yeah, yeah, this guy loves to overstroke every bike. He has what would you say about dane overstroking his? Yeah?
Dane:I, I haven't done anything, I just got it today.
Josh:So I played with it.
Dane:Usually I think that's a bad thing I'll usually cycle the suspension and see if I have any interference. So, uh, I don't know if you guys have done that yet. So because usually 185 I've got 185 by 55 is lying all over the place.
Josh:So, uh, that would, that would be I can already tell the answer by looking at colin's face right now.
Dane:So he's like listen man if we wanted it to be 55, we would have made it if we go away from that and to what colin was talking about, a, the leverage ratio. So like a lot of bikes at 120, I'm seeing it like 40, uh, stroke length like a 190 by 40, you know, uh, so and so this is a long, this, this shock I see on other brands on much longer travel bikes.
Colin Ryan - Norco :So we're somewhere, um, between three and 3.1 kind of starting leverage, which is, yeah, I would say it's pretty middle of the road. We definitely played around at 3.2, like on that site that I was talking about. That starts to give you troubles in terms of shock setup. But low leverage can also be challenging, uh, especially around compression tunes, yeah, and getting something that's light enough, uh, for those lower leverage breaks to not feel too firm. So that's kind of how we ended up, in sort of that middle ground yeah, yeah.
Dane:And so if it's low leverage and you have a really light rider, you may just it. It may always feel harsh and it's hard.
Josh:You have to retune I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you guys to change subjects a little bit. You guys had Greg Menard join you last year. How has he influenced or impacted, or is you know, messing with, your design process?
Kirk McDowall - Norco:The Optic is his favorite bike. Really Speaking of Optics, that's cool.
Josh:That's it. That's all we get. The Optic is his favorite bike. That's it. That's all we get.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Yeah, but no, I do. I do think he he challenges us to achieve really high standard. That's, that's kind of his. He's the goat, he's demands the best of himself and his equipment and everything. So it's been pretty cool. Like you know, obviously, just joining within the past year. He's kind of just seeing some of our new bikes coming out and hasn't been super involved early in the development of any new bikes that are coming out yet. But he's been pretty stoked on everything that we've we're kind of rolling out here, so that's always feels good.
Dane:I felt the same thing when I when he first got on the downhill bike and didn't instantly hate it and it's like I always wonder if some athletes are a little more too picky than others, you know, and some are easier to deal with and some aren't, you know.
Josh:Yeah, calum, what's Kirk like? Is he too picky or is he a little easier?
Colin Ryan - Norco :to deal with. Yeah, kirk's, uh, no, kirk's exactly what you want A development writer, I think. He's like always open to to testing, like always open to to testing some new theory doesn't really come in with any, you know kind of biases, pretty open to doing blind testing which some riders are super keen on. But, um, you know, I think maybe sometimes for kirk it's uh, it's hard to separate the engineer from the test rider part of it which, uh, you know, I find challenging myself, but I'm not usually the one that's having to give all the really nitty-gritty details on the ride feedback.
Josh:so yeah, kirk, do you have like numbers running through your head while you're riding? Like, oh man, if we just increase that by two millimeters, I wouldn't have felt that right there I think, yes, I don't know.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Sometimes it's been almost bad for my riding because I'll just be, I'll just go for a ride on a weekend, and I'll realize that I'm just not even thinking about riding, I'm just totally analyzing, I'm thinking about the bike or whatever I'm like, dang it, I, I missed that whole ride, yeah, yeah yeah, but yeah, I do think that's kind of important.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:That's why it's important for me to do some of the testing. Blind is because sometimes I just um, like we were saying earlier, dan, confirmation bias or you, if you know, if you know too much and you go riding and you know what it's supposed to do, then it's pretty hard to convince your brain to be open minded. So I think that's that's why I do like doing stuff blind, just to remove that.
Josh:Well, hey guys, we really appreciate you guys taking some time to talk with us today. I got one final question what are you guys excited about? About the future in Norco?
Kirk McDowall - Norco:Like what's getting you jazzed? I'm always excited about the downhill team but I'm also very excited about e-bikes.
Dane:Oh, yeah, yeah we haven't talked about them at all. No, and they have one of the best, in my opinion which one's the best. Well, keep in mind I'm biased, confirmation bias. I like light bikes, but their new fluid vlt is one of my favorite bikes ever. Like it's. It's a killer bike, you know, I I want to ride the new one that's coming out, um, but uh, I like lightness in a bike. If it's lighter and that thing is stock around 40 pounds, it's awesome uh, so we interrupted you though.
Josh:Yeah, yeah, so, so you guys are you guys are excited about the e-bikes. Tell us more.
Kirk McDowall - Norco:I'm on the same page. I love the fluid vlt and, yeah, ourgen Sight VLT coming out is going to be just really rad. Just a big e-bike fan in general.
Dane:Yeah, it's weird how many people say that.
Colin Ryan - Norco :Now, it's crazy In terms of things to get excited about at Narco. Yeah, definitely downhill bike. It's exciting every time a new season starts, especially with the rider roster that we've got for this season. Um, we just wrapped up a test with some of the riders last week and, um, yeah, it's just cool to see how the team's kind of coming together already and, with all these kind of new faces and stuff, it feels like we're setting up for a really good season. So that that's definitely exciting.
Josh:But uh, everybody, everybody's healthy right now.
Colin Ryan - Norco :Everyone except except for eris unfortunately had that crash at hardline, so she's oh, that's right, yeah, recovering from that one, but we're hoping that she, you know, recovers quickly and can get back on the bike soon and um, but otherwise, yeah, everyone's in good shape and training for for the start of the season, which is not too too far off. So that's exciting. But maybe, instead of saying I'm excited about e-bikes although they're tons of fun to ride I kind of think that you're going to see people compliment their e-bike with a light, short travel pedal bike. To me, that's kind of what I want. I don't want to fully switch over to an e-bike, um, but I want those two different experiences. Like, if I'm going to go for a pedal, I want it to feel like light, snappy, efficient and uh. So we got something coming later this year that kind of fits the bill for that.
Colin Ryan - Norco :I've been spending a lot of time on that bike and that's that one's definitely got me excited. So tell us a lot about that. He can't. I know, I know, I think. I mean, I think, if you look at our, our model lineup, it's, uh, there's, there's definitely a couple bikes that are pretty long in the tooth, so I think it's probably pretty obvious which one's getting an update. Um, there's a couple spy shots and stuff out there, so it's gonna be good.
Josh:Does it have an idler?
Dane:no, I mean maybe I don't know, I don't, I don't. I mean maybe I don't know, I don't know. What do I know? I don't know anything?
Josh:All right guys. Do you have any final thoughts for our listeners?
Colin Ryan - Norco :I think it's been cool to chat with you guys, being based in Arizona, where I personally haven't got a chance to go down and ride there.
Dane:You sent Arthur down here. We did.
Colin Ryan - Norco :I got to meet him.
Dane:He's a he's a great guy I get to. I got to meet his dog check out his last week yeah, his his custom um camper that he built on his truck that was pretty cool, so very cool guy he. Uh, I told him that we were going to have a podcast with you, so he was nice to me, so but you guys need to do more testing down here.
Colin Ryan - Norco :Uh, I kept telling, telling him we can show him some really good trails, so yeah, yeah, we should definitely do that, yeah, but, uh, it's cool to to chat with, you know, people that are in a different market and kind of riding quite different trails from from what we're riding and get your feedback on our bikes because, um, you know, we obviously do test trips, like arthur's been doing for the last week or two, to try and branch out and test the bikes in different environments and make sure they still work well there, but we do do most of our ride testing in bc. So it's always interesting to us to to talk with um people that are riding them in different areas and just see how they're working. Yeah, so it's been really good to to get a chance to talk with you guys and kind of put the word out about norco, I guess to a different audience than they have heard of us in the past yeah, I, I love this format to let people know about products.
Dane:I feel like norco's been around forever which they have, you know but I still struggle sometimes letting people know about the brand. I'm always curious why that happens.
Dane:Well, I'd say don't be afraid of the idler. No, no, and I'm getting firsthand. I mean, this bike is going to be in the shop ready for customers to be able to take out too. It's not just my bike, I'll let people to ride it, but I'm also going to be talking about it from a firsthand standpoint so we can overcome some of those bias you know, that people have when they look at it, yeah exactly Right so well, guys, thank you so much.
Josh:Really appreciate the time this evening. Um, yeah, man, I'm, I'm stoked to try one.
Dane:Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Josh:So maybe those guys to drop off an extra large for you to try.
Colin Ryan - Norco :That'd be good. Just got to get that weight. You just got to lose weight.
Dane:I just got to stop eating cheeseburgers right, I'm sure we can find something that'll work for you, right? Thanks guys. We really appreciate it, thank you.
