Mountain Cog
Mountain bike podcast that will make you laugh and learn. Featuring a wide range of passionate guests. Available everywhere (Apple, Spotify etc).
Mountain Cog
103 - Deep Dive: New XTR M9200 Di2 Wireless Groupset with Nick Murdick (Shimano’s MTB Product Manager).
In this comprehensive deep dive, Shimano's Mountain Bike Product Manager Nick Murdick reveals a copious amount of details about their new XTR M9200 Di2 wireless groupset. Learn how Shimano engineered their first fully wireless mountain bike drivetrain with on-board derailleur batteries, customizable shifter paddles, and rock-impact protection designed from "the rock's perspective." Murdick explains the technical innovations behind the wedge-shaped derailleur design, dual-click shifting mechanism, and why Shimano chose derailleur hangers over direct-mount systems for maximum trail durability.
Discover the complete XTR M9200 component lineup including new brake technology with updated hydraulic fluid, 160mm crank arm options, and both long-cage (10-51) and short-cage (9-45) cassette configurations. Nick shares insider development stories, addresses SRAM transmission comparisons, and explains backward compatibility with existing Shimano components. This episode covers everything from battery life expectations to trim mode functionality, making it essential listening for mountain bikers considering wireless drivetrain upgrades or mechanics working with the latest Shimano technology.
Video: https://youtu.be/Ilx6ilqq6TQ
Web: https://bike.shimano.com/stories/article/shimano-xtr-m9200-di2-mountain-bike-components.html
Update! Nick Murdick got back to us after the recording with the answer to a question he wasn’t sure of at the time.
Here’s the answer…
It is indeed possible to convert a derailleur between short cage and long cage at the shop. If you connect to e-tube project through the PC you will see an option to change between GS and SGS. The derailleur uses a different shift pattern for each cassette. In some gears you may notice that it breaks the shift into two steps in order to use the shift ramps on the cassette more effectively. It's more noticeable when double shifting.
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I still think it's funny that you feel the need to do that. I can't stop it. So I got a dad joke. Go for it. When does a joke become a dad joke? When does a joke become a dad?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:joke. When does a joke become a dad joke? I don't know. Nick, you got any idea. He knows the punchline.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:We all do, I'm sure you've heard this uh, when it's apparent, yeah, uh, yeah he's like I'm gonna be real disappointed if the answer is something to do with a parent. No, yeah it is. You're always going to be disappointed with our dad jokes.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Well, I'm giddy, I'm super excited. Our listeners know how much I love Shimano Yep and I love Shimano for their quality, their durability and their price Fishing.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:You said fishing.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Fishing yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I don't think Nick deals with the fishing size of no, but it's, you know, like you, you, you and you, uh, you love the brand, I love the brand.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I'm, I'm a, I'm a fan boy. Um, performance is consistent across the entire range from Dior up to XTR on the on the mountain bike side. Um, it just fucking works. Uh, and we've talked about this a lot- yeah. Um, but today we are uh up in the Sedona mountain bike festival. Um, didn't get to ride the day because it snowed like crazy.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, Snow Dona.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Snow Dona, again Snowopolis or whatever. Um, but we're here with. Nick Murdoch is the North American mountain bike product manager for Shimano. How'd I do?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, that's great. Product manager for Shimano.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:How'd I do? Yeah, that's great, and he's got some really cool things to tell us about. Um, before we get to that I have. I have one question for you before we get to what you're going to announce. Uh and I'm sure our listeners have heard a little bit about this already Um, you, in your role, are managing the North American products. How do you balance the desires from other parts of the world with the desires, the unique desires, of your North American customers?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah Well, so my role is to sit on the global product development team, and so, for whatever product that we're working on, typically there's three product managers in Japan, and then I'll have a counterpart in Europe. For whatever it is that we're working on, too, in North America, it's really just me and one other guy, so it's a mountain bike guy and a pavement guy. I cover everything from tourney up to XTR and all the bike stuff as well, so it's a lot of stuff. So I work with a bunch of different teams in Japan and Europe even, but my job basically is to represent the North American mountain bike rider, uh, in those discussions that we're having and kind of fight for what is important to riders in our market.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:What are some of the key differences between the desires that the North American riders have versus our international?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):That is a good question, cause I don't really think that it's all that different. Like we hear this all the time and we chalk it up when we're having disagreements in our meetings to like, well, riders are just different out here, um, but uh, basically I can say that, uh, the guys in Japan consider the North American office to be the leading office for mountain bike trends and so they'll always defer to us.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Oh, that's cool Stuff tends to happen here first and happen here first and uh. So if crank arms start getting shorter here we can see that it's lagging a little bit behind in europe, but we kind of feel like it's probably going to catch up and that really like we're talking about um, our discussions are really oem spec focused, so rider trends might be moving just as fast in europe as they are in north america, especially like when you're talking about at Enduro World Cups, like obviously that's where the trends are, are happening in a lot of cases at least, and so maybe it's just a bigger lag between those trends setting in and them showing up on OEM spec.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So I could see that on acoustic bikes, but on e-bikes, is Europe not moving faster than the United States on?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):acoustic bikes. But on e-bikes, is Europe not moving faster than the United States? Um, I think it is uh different, and actually a great example is how much spec Shimano got for e-bike drive units in kind of those early days of e-mountain bikes coming to North America. Uh, like pivot was our first company customer that jumped on board with our system and then a bunch of other of those core mountain bike brands followed suit. Uh, because we kind of our development team was our North American mountain bike team and we didn't. We didn't hire new e-mountain bike product testers or anything, we just made the drive unit that we thought that mountain bikers would like. So it was actually a little bit out of step with uh would like. So it was actually a little bit out of step with uh, uh like the European arms race, like it was uh, uh a bit weird that we weren't publishing a max wattage number for a long time. They're like how can you play in the arms race?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:You don't have the number Like. Well, I don't really care about the number man. Well, you guys have some exciting news. Yeah, you got some new information. What do you got going on, man?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Well, so it's. When is it? It's March, right? So this is going to come our way in the future.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So I'm presuming that listeners have heard the story of our new XTR component product launch and so yeah, greetings.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:future dwell dwellers I hope the world is treating as well, yeah, who knows what's right?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):and I know that there's going to be a bunch of other new product launches that come out between now and then. Like this is early enough that, if I'm not referencing some other new thing, that yeah, don't hold it, don't hold us against this, yeah or, and I mean I'll be polite and not mention the stuff that I know is coming, because I don't hold us against us, yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Or, and I mean I'll be polite and not mention the stuff that I know is coming, cause I don't have all the information on it, like from competitors, um, but uh, uh, yeah, so it's been a long time coming working on this new XTR group, and how long? Uh, I mean the last group, um, we launched it in 2018, and maybe it started shipping at the end of 2018. But we were already working on the next group at that point. That's kind of how it goes.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:What do you guys consider a new group? So you'll have versions and you'll do a revision on something. So when do you guys consider it a total relaunch?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):We'll work on revision on something. So when do you guys consider it a total relaunch? We'll work on like a generational project. So this is the M9200. Xtr group Okay, all right and yeah, if I can take a moment, I heard in the in the SRAM versus Shimano podcast calling us out for our numbers and I just used it there, yeah, kind of proudly, but then also cause you guys know them right, but you totally lost me on the like. Uh, on the 3.1 versus 3.0 or 2.1 damper, I'm like you guys are using numbers.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah, yeah, that's true. He threw it right back at you.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:No, no I agree, I agree, I would like them to use names like charlie this is the charlie group, or this is the bob group, or something like that. But yeah, it's tough with the numbers, then nine. So xtr has always been like a nine something, 900 or what it was. The first, the first one was m900, m900, so m is for mountain, 900 would be the, the quality, the quality level, yeah. And then then where I get confused as a retailer is the 9100, or or 90, 200, like where you know, cause sometimes they'll come out 90, uh, nine, 20 or nine. You know what I mean. So like I start to lose where eight speed and nine speed.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I bet you, nick, can explain it to us.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Well, manny, our rep is, is explained it and I still don't get it Like how's it?
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:how's it work, nick?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Well, there we have like guidelines on how you uh get to choose a model number for the new thing that you're working on, cause there is a, there's a product manager in Japan that has to choose the like. Okay, this, uh, uh, the break is going to be the 92, 20, right and the. So the cross country break, the two piston one is 9,200, the four piston one's 92, 20. It doesn't matter which one we sell more of. It's that the two piston technology came out first, so that's the base number and it always will be okay. Um and but the the little modifiers are going to come in the third digit position, so that's like a spec variance. So we've got uh, uh, yeah, actually. So there is no, uh.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):9200 rear derailleur because, the 00 would mean that it was mechanical and there is no mechanical XTR derailleur. So the kind of the base spec the one that everybody's imagining in their head is the new wireless XTR derailleur is RDM9250. It's the first Di2 derailleur that came out. It got that modifier to say that it's the Di2 version, so it's the 92.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:At the time so 50 meant Di2 uh, for rear derailleurs at the time?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):yeah, it did, and so then there's also an e-bike version that instead of having a battery pack on board, it's got a wired connection and plug into a drive unit.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So that's the 9260 I saw the leaked pictures of that and everybody was kind of coming to that conclusion. But they were trying to figure out why they were different. So does that make you? Let you change the pricing of the derailleur?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Not so much the pricing, but what is the goal in making it totally different and not adaptable? It's really being able to take advantage of the single power source on an e-bike, and it doesn't just hook up to our e-bike drive unit either. And not all of them are going to be announced at the time of XTR launch, but easy to imagine that it plugs into a Shimano drive unit and those other drive unit manufacturers will be making announcements about how it can work with our derailleur.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):That's awesome In the coming months, especially around Euro bike timing in July.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay, in july, okay, so tell us more about the grupo we got. We got lost in digits and numbers there. I'm still just so you know I'm still confused. I'll make a spec sheet for you, yeah I think when you live it it's easier to understand.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So for sure, yeah, I mean you uh well, and like I, I was that guy at the bike shop that would, uh that, learned the system. Uh, um, not that I was like a huge Shimano fan boy. It was just like something technical to get obsessed about, and that's part of why I ended up in this job right Like it was a career mechanic that thought about what details can I memorize?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Like okay, I'm in Um, but uh, uh, any topic like that, because of that nature, like I can go for an hour so yeah, yeah, like don't be shy that uh, right.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So, uh, hopefully people have, uh have gotten the news and kind of gotten the basics and we'll be able to kind of go into details on, um, any individual component that you guys want to Um, but uh, yeah, the highlights and, yeah, for sure, check out those articles and especially, like we've got a little 10 minute teaser video that, uh, we'll give you the highlights, uh, right away, like the quick version.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:It's a great video. Yeah, it helps put it all right out there. You know it's it's and it's easy to remember.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, and there will be a series of those too, so there'll be a couple more that go uh like as a deep dive and yeah, so cam mccall hosts the whole thing and he'll produce them all for us and they turned out great. But, uh. So the big question I think that uh, a lot of people have been asking, or the group that people have been asking for for the last several years is, uh, can we please have a full wireless di2 version of a shimano xtr group? And so that's exactly what it is. There's a battery on board on the derailleur. Uh, it lives, uh, safely tucked inside the parallelogram on the derailleur.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Um, the uh, the shifter is shaped like a shifter. It's got pawls and clicks inside of it. Um, it's a double click shifter in both directions, so you can keep pushing on the paddle and get a second click out of it. Um, so it really is intuitive. I think anybody can hop on it and like it feels like shifting a bike. It's not pressing buttons, um, and then that shifter is super customizable as well, still kind of given like the if we want to go, if you pick anything that you want to go down the rabbit hole on that.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I do, but I'm going to let you finish and then I'll come back and get the questions.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, Um, the uh, the derailleur is really focused, uh, around what causes a derailleur to fail on a bike, and so we didn't just go through and make everything stronger. We tried to look at things from a practical point of view and the way I like to say it is, we looked at things from the rocks point of view. Um, and actually riding in Tucson. It proved so many of those points for us and and a good amount of the filming that we did for the video was done in Tucson.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, Shout out to Tucson bug Springs. You can. You can tell the trail. It's really cool.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And we actually use that trail for our media camp as well. So we took all the journalists down bugs in Milagrosa and the 50 year trail they Rosa.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:And the 50 year trail, they live, I mean how many died.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Some of your media guys may not have been able to clear that I think we did have a separated shoulder.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I totally believe that.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I absolutely believe that I'd be surprised if that's all you had, basically All right, but so it's pretty rare that you can hear your derailleur kind of do its impact recovery mechanism but we had journalists saying that they heard it three or four times that they know of, and so to be able to come down the bottom of that, knowing that that derailleur contacted a rock hard yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, Multiple times, and it's still um, and it's still kicking and uh, um.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So part of that, uh, the highlight for the derailleur, the overall story, like this practical on trail use experience, Like what really is, makes a derailleur fail on a trail when it hits a rock, and how do we solve that?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It's, uh, um, about making the derailleur, uh, a big wedge so that it gets pushed out of the way, Okay, and then, um, it also is free to rotate back and uh, and then recover on its own. So that's one of the key things that you get with a hanger that you give up if you go to a frame mounted design. So we intentionally didn't do a frame mounted design because we didn't feel like it was practical to give up that free rotation of the derailleur when you hit a rock. So you hit a rock, the derailleur moves backward, it gets scooped in board and then it recovers all on its own and you keep riding. So, whether you're just going to hit the next rock in another 50 feet or just don't like the idea of getting off your bike and resetting something, or if you're doing an Enduro, uh, world cup race and you can't get off the bike until the end of the stage, like it just doing it on its own is.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Uh, we felt like did you hear all the little subtle jabs in there?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yes. Yeah no-transcript sense to have a bigger single power, and then you don't have two batteries. So yeah, yeah, it was. It was clear. It was very difficult to get around the patents around putting a battery in a derailleur. And that's why we're doing this in 2025 instead of two years ago.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So how does this derailleur take a hit, move and then get reset and you don't lose like any adjustment?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Uh, so, um, I mean, the truth of the matter is, is the derailleur hanger Wasn't really that fragile in the first place? That, uh, uh, derailleur hangers can bend and should be able to bend. They should be kind of our backup plan. But we can hit a rock over and over and over again and if the derailleur is able to get out of the way and not transmit that force into the derailleur hanger, then it's not going to bend the hanger.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So it's like MIPS for your derailleur, it's like slowing down the force and taking it away from the fragile stuff.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, it's giving things an opportunity to kind of, yeah, slip out of the way and slip past the obstacle.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I got so many questions but I want to let them finish the group.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So before we get to the deep dive, you know me, I'm a squirrel master.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So there, there's another very key reason to uh to still have a derailleur hanger, but I'll come back to and the Mila Grosser Trail was a great place to showcase it. I actually did it. I bent a hanger during the media camp and replaced it on the side of the trail, nice. The whole thing took 10 minutes, but I'll come back to that point later when we start talking about the derailleur more. So the brakes are new as well. No-transcript.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):The caliper is uh a lot uh stiffer and stouter, like you can tell looking at the thing um that uh that it's a big beefy caliperiper.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):But the brake levers have picked up a ton of efficiency too. We threw a bearing in the main pivot point for the brake lever, but we also looked a lot at ergonomics of how your hand is interacting with the lever and if we can move the brake lever blade more in the same direction that your finger is already moving, then we can be more efficient and transfer more of the power that you're putting into the brake lever, into the brake pads, and giving you more stopping power. Um, so that's why the brake feels more powerful and like we tuned the modulation of the brake just a little bit like kind of re, uh visited, uh Enduro racers and kind of asked, like what actually is your preferred brake modulation right now? So that basically comes to tune down to tuning the system, stiffness, that, like how on offer the brakes going to be. And of course I think, yeah, that's our reputation for being kind of an on off break and people who love Shimano brakes that's what they love about it. So we're certainly not going to go away from that.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, they. So I watched the pink bike break test, which was cool Cause they I think they just kept switching out brakes on their bikes and going through them and I was surprised that the Shimano didn't do as well, and I was really surprised it was, I think, they were doing at Whistler, so it was a lot of downhilling and I don't know if XTR is necessarily the right brake to put at Whistler, like Saint would usually be the brake you'd choose on a downhill bike. Was that the Vital one? Oh, maybe it was Vital.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, because they did it at Whistler and it was towards the end of summer last year. What was funny is we chatted about this with those guys but it was the brake that we sent them and somehow it had resin pads in it instead of metal pads, and every other brake that was on their test had metal pads. So in their little matrix on, like the web version that has a big breakdown they, they like. They did call out that it was resin pads, but they were saying that uh, like, uh, man, shimano brakes are famous for having like an on-off feel, but these ones don't have that and I don't't know why.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I'm like I didn't realize it until later. And that makes sense, Cause don't the non-series brakes run? Resin stock.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It is up to bike manufacturers to choose the pad compound that comes with the brake.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So they also tested those and they were really surprised on how well they did. They're like the four 20. Yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, and they were just really yeah. And we sell a ton of the 420 brakes, which is basically I don't know all of the technical, but for us it's a non-branded. So we see it on a lot of bikes. I don't think it's OE, only we get them.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):No, we sell it aftermarket. It does quite well.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Four piston, nice feeling, good brake. It just doesn't say SLX doesn't say XT or XCR.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Okay, so let's run down, so we got a new shifter, we got a new derailleur Yep. We got new brakes, fully wireless Yep. Can we take like one thing at a time?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So on the shifter, let's start there. Yeah, uh, is there? There's a battery in there. Yep, replaceable, it's a. It's on the roadside, it's on the tri side of the SRAM. They have these little blips that are need to replace it.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Um, we're longer than I've had prototypes.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I think, uh, I think two years is what we're expecting, based on what we know from uh, I think 105 uses the doubled up coin cells. The dura ace and maybe ultegra just use a single coin cell right inside of there, but you get a longer life and these are the simple.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:You can go down to ace hardware and pick up these, these coin cell batteries. Yeah, nothing special they're uh, uh.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So if we want to go down the rabbit hole about the coin cell, that's, the coin cell was originally chosen for the Dura Ace group, so they wanted something that was that could fit inside of a shifter hood. That has to like fit inside your hand, uh, and so you don't want to have that thing be too wide and affect the overall shape of the thing. So 1632 was kind of chosen for, um, I think, almost an ergonomic reason as much as anything else. So 1632 is not as common as a 2032 battery, um, but it's definitely not hard to find like you can. You can get them at the grocery store, drug store.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So for the layman uh, most of us know what the cr2032s are, or look like. They're like a little disc. Is this the smaller ones that you would like you? Know like a hearing aid style like not that small.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):No, I think that, uh, the first two numbers are the um are the diameter of the battery. So okay, so, and then 16 millimeter versus 20 millimeters and it's not.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:The little tiny looks like a, like a half of a triple a.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It's not one of those no, it's like a like a half of a triple a. It's not one of those.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:No, it's like a, it's like a coin man, yeah, but. But, but they're bigger than the ones that I'm picturing, which are like, like you said, they're like 10 millimeters, so this is 16.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Okay.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So what excited? They're tactile, tactile.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:And then the second thing was the adjustability. Can you talk to us a little bit about the adjustability and what you can actually do to customize those?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, for sure this is a great story because, um, I have, uh, I've written a lot of prototypes for electronic shifters and a lot of them were terrible. I, I, I hated almost all of them. Sometimes maybe you could see what the point was, but it really speaks to. There's this temptation that if you're an engineer that is making an electronic shifter, you will almost automatically are like the temptation is too strong to throw away a mechanical shifter and start from scratch.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):that like I'm not constrained by a mechanical shifter, like I get to make whatever I want Joystick like dream shifter and fast forward to the end of that story is that when we get to our skunk development camp and have the test riders try something out, um, the best that any of those radical designs could do was, uh, like a 50% approval rating and uh, and so the other half would be like I don't like it at all. Um, and what was unanimous at every single one of those test camps was can you please just make an electronic version of a mechanical shifter.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Like I just want to try it. I just want to have like a baseline.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:You've said that before on this podcast I've been saying this for years.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Why is that so hard?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):yeah. So, um there, uh, we got, I think, kind of closer and closer to it, and I'll say too that I think that a reason that a mechanical shifter shape ended up working in the long run is that we've gone through several generations of refinement with mechanical shifters already, and we had very clever engineers that were figuring out the ergonomic problems that related to this. Thing has to pull a cable and both levers have to interact with the same cable even though they're moving in different directions. Like they sorted all that stuff out. Um, and so the ergonomics of a mechanical shifter were already really good and, uh, so the what the idea turned into was let's start with a shifter that's got the paddles in the exact same place as a mechanical shifter. Um, so anybody who hops on the bike for a test ride, like it feels very intuitive, like anybody can get along with it. Like our acceptance rate of this shifter, somebody saying like no, yeah, it didn't get in the way, like I, basically like it is more like 99%.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Oh, thank.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):God, it's very rare that somebody is like I really need to make some big adjustments to this thing to get her to get uh, to get along with it. But so that's the key thing is that, uh, that temptation is still there that we can make it better because it's electronic, and so that just turned into let's make it super customizable so that after you bought the bike then it's the rider that gets to choose what would make this thing better if they could really do whatever they want with it because it's electronic. And so it's been a year and a half since we got our first like big batch of prototypes that we could start showing to OEM customers. And so when we went out in the road with all of those guys, we would stop in the middle and have like a little refreshment station and I would pull out an Allen wrench and I'd go up to all the product managers and say you have homework now you need to put that shifter paddle in a different position and just try something, like if it makes it worse or makes it better, like I want you to have some idea of what this thing can do and the I like the things that some of those guys came up with just because they were forced to.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):At this point they ended up playing around with maybe reducing your thumb unwrapped so that from your normal riding position your thumb doesn't have to disengage from the bar as much in order to reach either one of the shift paddles.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It could be getting a better separation between the two, for sure it could be moving it away so that your first click is kind of at like a natural, comfortable ending point for your like your thumb to move. Because maybe that's something that we can say about a mechanical shifters because if you're locked into a certain position, if, like, your thumb just kind of naturally wants to move this far and you want to have to reach a little bit further to get that second click, so if you're not having to reach a little bit further because of the way that the shifters set up, then you'll have accidental double click sometimes, so to be able to take the electronic one and just move it to exactly the right spot so that your thumbs natural, like end of its stroke is exactly at the end of the first click but not the second click. Then you've got less accidental double shifts.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So, so I think what you're talking about, what you haven't said yet is that you can actually adjust both of the shifter.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, so behind each shifter paddle is a little three millimeter Allen wrench, and once you loosen that you could basically put that paddle wherever you want.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Um it rotates and moves forward and back.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Uh, yeah, we can say swings in and out and twists back and forth, okay all right, whatever tomatoes.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, what's the camber of?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):this saying it two different ways is for sure the way to confuse everybody imagine they're like on a ball and socket joint, it's not, but you've got two axes of adjustment and you loosen that bolt and you can basically put that thing wherever you want, okay, so here's my biggest problem.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I've got two axes of adjustment and you loosen that bolt and you can basically put that thing wherever you want, okay, so here's my biggest problem I've had with electronic shifters on all the brands is, like you said, the engineers seem to change them and they're totally different than my other bike. And so can somebody go from their regular bike that doesn't have XTR, that has a mechanical system, jump on this one and just not have to relearn where the shifter is.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):That would be the easiest transition for sure. The hardest transition is if you've got a transmission pod. Right now and you have, your brain is switched over to two different buttons, so if you were switching brands, it would be harder. It would be a bit harder.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):But going from mechanical to this electronic shifter is very easy.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I love that because I don't feel like that's been a priority before, and that's my life. I'm constantly switching bikes, so I like that. So now the thing that I think Shimano has set themselves apart with the shifter is being able to use that second lever as a trigger or a thumb. Is that?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):still a possibility, so we didn't check that one off the list this time around. What, uh? Um, I'll tell you how it went with, uh, the conversation with the engineers through those series of uh, of skunt camps over the years, that uh, uh, we said we wanted a double click shifter in both directions, and we want the second click to be noticeably harder than the first click, and so the engineer's response to that is was that is very difficult.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So polite. That was exactly the way that they said it, Like that little pause and everything.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Like I don't want to disappoint you and uh, and they don't say no in Japan but we talked about that. If they say something like we will study, then that's not a good sign for sure, but if they're saying, it's very difficult.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):That is definitely the closest to a no, but they pulled it off. They made that second click noticeably harder than the first click, so it's easy to stop after the first click, because if you're pushing with the same amount of force then you don't want to accidentally get a second one. Um and uh, uh. But we got the same answer, basically Like once, like we have kind of our list of uh, um, what we want in the new design, but they're also kind of ranked a little bit.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So we said second click, harder than the first click, is more important than being able to pull the trigger for the release or the outward shift. Harder gear.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So are the? Are the new ones? Push, push or push, push, push? Okay, and then what you're saying is, when you hit the, the one lever, there's a first click and then a second, so you could shift two at a time. Exactly, shift two at a time, exactly, okay, and so in the teaser it was talking about how fast it is.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):does that help increase the speed of the shifts? It sure does, yeah, and so the whole thing is based off the hyperglide plus system, which doesn't have like a revolutionary change, but, uh, the derailleur design has got some smart tweaks in it that make shifting faster than like if somebody's ridden a mechanical hyperglide plus bike, or even the e-bike hyperglide plus system that we have, um, uh, that is electronic shifting has been for the last couple of years. This is faster than either of those because we've got um increased chain wrap and the cog tooth profile is kind of tweaked just a little bit, so it really is the fastest shifting that we've ever done.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:That's, that's probably the biggest complaint with the competitors is the speed of the shift.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So that was one of my questions. Is backward compatibility to the existing acoustic components Like is the cassette have to be?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):it doesn't have to be the new one yet. So we've put in a ton of backwards compatibility, so it doesn't have to be the new crank, doesn't have to be the new cassette, and there actually isn't even a new chain Like, we're just going to keep making the 9,100.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Holy crap, that's going to be huge. That's a big deal. Yeah, that's a big deal.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So. So let's talk a little bit more about the derailleur.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, so shifter. Anything else before we move away from there is?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):uh, yeah, I can check off the list. Uh, I spec system isn't changed. There's both an uh a band clamp version and an I spec version. Um, and uh, uh, yeah, there is a cool feature for this new XTR shifter as well and it kind of is, uh, um, like a racer focused feature and the RN XTR stands for race, so there needs to be some cool little racer features in there.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So, uh, this guy has a lockout so that if you want to disable the second click, you can, and so, um, it's kind of there for race day that, uh, like, the adrenaline's pumping and you're thinking less about operating the bike than you are at any other time, like you're going as fast as possible. So riders that are very well like spend a lot of time on their bike and are very comfortable with doing single click or double click, that like, when it comes to race day, I just want to stab at that thing and get a gear and I don't mind pressing it twice to get two gears. Yeah, like, I just want to turn off that second click so you could disable it in the app and tell it to ignore the second click. But uh, um, it felt like a nice little xtr touch to be able to turn the switch and disable. The second is a physical switch on the physical lockout on the shifter.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, I I got a mechanic question um i-Spec EV. Right, if you buy this shifter or let's say it comes on a bike, which I think is really likely- right. And it's for some reason. You switch your brakes and it's I-Spec EV. Can you then adapt that to a different brake or put a band on it, or do you have to buy a new shifter, like you do on some of the current mechanical systems?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Uh, I don't know the answer for the new shifter cause we haven't gotten all the exploded views yet and kind of I just haven't asked every question about it, but uh for our current mechanical stuff.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):You can buy the outer casing and change something from I spec to a clamp on one. So that would be the really clean way to do. It is to change the outer plastic casing of the shifter and then have the different attachment mechanism. Um, but I can tell you that, uh, uh, if I'm, if I have a test bike, then it's often getting the brakes changed a lot, and if it's a shimano brake then it'll be compatible with i-spec, but if it's competitor brake then it's not.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So I just keep the little the band one uh, yeah, the wolf tooth, oh, the little adapter, yeah, so I, yeah, I got a bag full of those little wolf tooth band clamp things and so yeah, we, we that's a customer question, that's common because we're moving suspense, moving either brakes in and out or bringing in drivetrains, and then all of a sudden you're like I can just swap that over and then you run into that roadblock and you're like crap, and that band is 50 bucks from Wolf tooth. So when you're selling an SLX shifter that's 50 bucks, it all of a sudden gets really hard to tell a customer they got to you know you could show another 50 bucks.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So it should be cheaper to change the housing, especially in the example of an SLX shifter, like just getting the new housing.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but it should be less than a new shifter I think we found in the exploded view and Shimano a, the housing difference and it's like $18. So that's a huge, huge thing for us. But there's some I think the Dior's or something. There's one one. There's one or two of the shifters that don't have that option. But yeah, I imagine when you get into an XTR it's going to be a much higher price shifter and so spending $50 to get a different band if you have to, Probably a different customer.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, a different customer. Okay, so we're done with the shifter.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Anything else on the shifter?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):There's a third button on the shifter.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:I should mention that. What's the?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:third button do. Is it red? No, oh man Lost opportunity right there.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):If you're familiar with our road and gravel shifters. They've got kind of a hidden button underneath the hoods.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And so it's a customizable button so it could pair up with, like your Garmin or computer, if someone made a dropper post. It's a little bit hard to reach that button. I wouldn't want to use it for a dropper post but theoretically, yeah, it's an um. It's an open platform system. If anybody out there is uh uh working on bringing an electronic product to market and you want it to talk to a Shimano system and be controlled by a Shimimano button, like we'll, yeah, it's a no-cost license agreement like we love.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Oh, that's cool so I work for a missile company. Yeah, we could put a little tiny missile on the bike and you could launch it yeah, button, maybe I I mean sometimes yeah sometimes that's probably needed.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:It's very rare that we turn down most common, the button was for maybe a garmin or something.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Uh yeah, that's how I've got it set up on my bike and you get. So it's the same as on my gravel bike. You get three functions out of the button with a single click, a double click or a click and hold. So it's scrolling like left and right on my pages and then on mine. Click and hold brings me back to my map screen at any time, but you can have it turn on the backlight.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:And it's not just garmin either, it's a bunch of other computer makers.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I am forever going to refer to that as the missile launch button. Just that's why I said that's why I said it should be red. Um, so is this button easier to hit with your thumb? Like, uh, is it like I'm thinking on the front, towards the rider?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):that was, uh, another kind of key racer detail. Um, there, uh, there was one racer in particular that was adamant about it Uh, daniel O'Tone. Oh, okay, um, and uh, he, uh, uh. From the beginning of uh, he's been racing e-bikes with Orbea. Basically, they have like a race development team, and so it just like he works on a frame development with Orbea and the team was also working on product development with us.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And uh said that, uh, I know that the system is supposed to be very robust and things aren't supposed to go wrong, but someday I'm going to crash hard in a race stage and uh, uh, and then the derailleur is not going to be working very well and I need to be able to do something about it.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And here's the key thing I need to be able to do something about it without taking my eyes off the trail or taking my hands off the bar.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So I need you to give me a system where I can and it wasn't like adjust the derailleur. It was uh, um, get the, uh, the chain in his favorite gear, like the gear that he was going to need for laying down power at the end of the race stage, so that it wasn't jumping in and out of that gear. Like, I just need to be able to test that gear, make sure I can put down the power and if and if I can hear that it's rubbing up against the next bigger cog, then I need to be able to get it in trim mode and just move it over until that noise has gone away, so that I've got the confidence to put down the power in that gear. So that is out of the box. What that button will do is it gets you into trim mode. So just press and hold that button, count to three, let go, and the shifter will be a barrel adjuster. Now, basically, instead of a cool.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Okay, so you can do it on the trail, on the fly, without looking nice.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So it's dual function. But then when you, that's really cool. So cause we have to do, is that also the button you use for syncing?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):No, there, there, Uh, no, um there. Uh, there's no sync button on the shifter. There's a couple of ways to sync it, Um, but uh, you sync it by pressing and holding both paddles at the same time, and that basically does what a sync button would do All right.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, you had me worried that he didn't have to sync them and I'm like I'm going to go up next to my buddy and start shifting his bike.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):The easiest way to do it actually is get out your smartphone app, connect to the rear derailleur. There's a button on there. If you press and hold the button, the light turns blue. You connect to the app and then there's a QR code on the bottom of the shifter. Take a picture of it with the app and then it just syncs it like it knows the ID of the shifter.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Oh, that's kind of cool.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):You've got shifter number 7,864.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I'm wondering how, though, I can get control of my buddy shifter so that I can shift it while he's riding from my bike. I have a.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):You can pair multiple shifters with a derailleur, so his bike could work totally fine and you can pair another one with it. You can keep it in your pocket, oh yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:That's what I needed to know.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Are you sure we should have said that Is this something we're going to cut out of the podcast? No, no, we're good.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So I would say that one thing about the wireless that always came up before when wireless started coming out was loss of signal, anything like that. Are you having any issues?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):We developed this wireless protocol for the Dura-Ace group a couple years ago, so it's an in-house developed Shimano wireless protocol. It's extremely stable.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay and it's worked out great. It's already already been tested for years.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Okay, Perfect and it's lightning fast too, like it's faster than Bluetooth it actually this was the cool story from when Dura Ace went wireless is that it started shifting faster when it went wireless because the signal goes at the speed of light and the electrons going through the wires like they have to stop at a computer chip along the way as well and then get relayed along. But yeah, it's faster to do it wireless.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:That is so cool. I love that, because that's true technology evolution. Let's talk about the derailleur. All right, that's all we have, right? I mean, we're talking about the system, the deep dive.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:The deep dive on the derailleur.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:But when I think about all these systems that I sell, you basically have a shifter and a derailleur. That's it. That's the real.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, I mean, there's other components that are coming out Brakes.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah, yeah New cranks.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:But when it comes to the Is there a new cassette?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):There is a new cassette, though, so totally backwards compatibility.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Totally Okay. So so deep dive on the derailleur a little bit, go into some more specifics on on I. Well, let me ask you some questions. If I bend my derailleur, uh, hanger um does the system automatically adjust so that it'll shift, or do I have to use that trim feature that we talked about earlier to get it to shift?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):You would have to use the trim feature and like as a mechanic, with the way that you diagnose a bent derailleur hanger is that it shifts good in one part of the cassette but not the other part of the cassette. So that's what you would expect if you had a bent hanger that you could choose some gears to work well, but not others, giving up the others.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Choose some gears to work well, but not others giving up the others. Yeah, okay, what um I? I you need to talk, but um, but I have so many questions on the derailer, so go for it. Well, I'll just start going and then I'll answer most of them, yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So, um, uh, to relate back to cassettes real quick and um, and tell it in a derailleur way, is that there is a uh kind of a standard long cage version, but there's also a short cage version, which we've done before, and it is a very popular spec for aggressive riders. It does pretty well in the aftermarket channel. I don't know how how does it do in Arizona. Do you guys sell short cage derailleurs and 10, 45 cassettes, or you need the climbing gears around.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah Cause, straight up and straight down.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So that's been the compromise that kind of came along with a short-caged derailleur, is that it's a 1045 cassette. So you're giving up that, like the second biggest cog on a 1051 is a 45. So you're literally giving up one full shift. Our new cassette is a 945. So that is not giving up any range. The idea would be that your chainring would get four teeth smaller, but say, a 32-tooth chain ring with a 10-51 cassette and a 28-tooth chain ring with a 9-45 cassette. You've got the exact same high gear and low gear and the same number of steps in between.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Okay, and you're getting some clearance in the front then yeah, still micro-spline, still micro-spline, yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It's a new lock ring with external splines. That's how we made it work.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay, all right, and then still 12 speed. Right, we didn't actually touch on that yet, but the spy photos had a picture of a 12. So I was pretty sure. And then. So you're going to have a 51 option, but you're also going to have a nine. Is the 51 a nine, or is that going to be?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):a 10? 10, 51. Yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So, basically stick into that roughly 500% gear spread, yeah, so basically stick into that roughly 500% gear spread, yeah, and then the nine, 45. Okay, awesome. So, but that it's two different, derailleurs.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So you won't be able to go there's no switching back and forth.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Correct, okay, all right. So, and then I got a question about the nine 45, cause, you're right, we don't see that too much in the shop. Almost every bike is spec with the 51 customers ask for that. Is that a big deal on the World Cup circuit? Are they the guys that are like, hey, I don't need a 51. I want tighter gearing?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Basically every World Cup Enduro racer uses the short-caged trailer and the D45 cassette.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Now are they using it to get rid of the dangle.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, they're doing it for ground clearance.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And I mean Enduro racing, is all about making it to the end of the day, and it's downhill too Right yeah, I mean those guys are also not changing their chainring size or worrying about like they are literally giving up just their biggest cog, they're not giving up their high gear and using a small chainring in order to make the short cage work, which is like what I do at home in Southern California. That, um, I mean basically everybody at the office runs the short cage derailleur and we kind of run small chain rings, cause once you're on the road like you're going to get spun out anyway and uh, so I just keep the same climbing gear, run a small chain ring and so if I run a 34, 10, uh, 51, what front chain ring?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:if I wanted to do something similar, am I going to ride with the nine?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):uh, four teeth smaller, so you'd move down to a 30, 30. Okay, something to keep in mind, though. Like if you're shopping for a new bike and your bike was a 29, or, and your next one's going to be a mullet, you get two teeth back for a mullet, Okay, which is, uh, not very common knowledge. Like, we tend to use the same size chain rings if it's a mullet or a full 29er, but there's a basically a half a shift difference between those two wheels.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay, yeah, and that's just because you don't have as far away the the, the wheels closer. So there's a. I know there's calculations when you're doing gear inches and they take into account the size of the wheel, which I don't know how it works, so I'm not going to claim like I do, but I know that when you go from 29. So when 29ers came out, there was a 29 group that came out and they were, I think, the first 36s. Uh, 11, 36. Oh yeah, do you remember that?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I do yeah and that was for the 29ers so it was buried in the yeah, yeah, the dark corners of my brain. That's the, the, that's the old knowledge that I keep stored for some reason I don't know, but uh, but yeah, okay.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So uh, two different cassettes sizes, yeah, depending.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And then the nine is the big news on the cassette having a 945, so you can do a short cage derailleur with no compromise to your total gear range okay, but you do need to match the derailleur to the cassette. You do, yeah okay, short cage derailleur 945.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Long cage derailleur 1050 you're doing a lot of OE. I mean you basically deal with the OEs. Have you seen the OEs adopt that more or?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):so, uh, with the uh outgoing components, with a 10, 45 cassette, because you were making a sacrifice in gear range. Um, basically, the uh bike brands are not comfortable with putting a bike on the sales floor of a bike shop.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:That's asking a customer to make that kind of choice to give it's scary for a customer, because more gears is better than less gears, you know so um, but, uh, but this was really so appealing.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):The 945 cassette that uh, um, you know it's quieter too because the door derailleur cage is shorter and you're getting like it's lighter. Uh, your chain is shorter. Uh, that has a big effect on the noise of the drivetrain as well. Just being able to run a shorter chain and six lengths of the chain weighs more than you think it does, and when you're in your small car going fast and that thing's what's bouncing up and down, it makes a noticeable difference. So that we had some OEM customers that were saying you know what I'm going to do it, I'm going to do 100% the 945 spec. Weird. Now, this podcast should be coming out in a time where you've got bikes on your sales floor now.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And you will see that they are all the 10 51 spec. Okay, that's what we expect, because OEM customers know, like, how the bike business works and they know that if you are trying to mass produce stuff and bring stuff to market, that some spec is going to be like the golden spec, that's going to get prioritized and it's less risk if you just do the long cage trailer and the 10 51 cassette for the first run of bikes that you do. Okay, so, um, it'll be mostly, uh, 10 51s long cage derailleurs in the beginning, but when we get to 2026, then I expect that to start to change.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:And and that's something as a shop we can kind of tote as like hey, the racer setup is this other way. So for the fast guys, the guys that that want that little edge, we, that's a, that's a, the next level. They can beat that guy that bought the stock bike with their custom bike.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So yeah, for sure, yeah, so okay, uh, all right, keep going.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:What I'm loving, this, what else?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):the uh, I mean the story behind the derailleur, and maybe I can talk about how the engineer, um, like what their pathway was. Um, that, uh, we, um, I guess, yeah, where it started was, uh, um, taking a pile of broken derailleurs from your typical Enduro World Series race at the time, like it just turned into a World Cup recently, yeah, and maybe we could break 20 or 30 rear derailleurs at an Enduro World Series race, especially if it was a rocky, rough terrain like finale leaguerie.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And uh. So, uh, um, every one of those broken derailleurs goes back to Japan for study. And it's actually easier to study derailleurs that have been broken at a race because they're typically pretty new, because the racer is going to be switching stuff out, um and uh. So there's not a lot of distracting other marks on there that the engineer can see. The derailleur got hit here and it broke here and you can get that direct correlation impact here, broken here, and so there are several places around the derailleur where there are just simple little tweaks that you can make to the design to make it so that it either doesn't get hit there or that it doesn't break if it does get hit there. So what they found was that the most common part of the derailleur to get hit was the leading edge of the stabilizer unit, where the clutch, yeah, lives, yeah that that, uh, it kind of sticks out a bit and it's fully squared off, so, like it's front facing surface area like it's the easiest thing.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):This is if you're looking at it from the rocks point of view. That's the thing that the rock sees. It's like this big old target sticking out there.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Awful in a wind tunnel.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So then the other part of it is that, if it's also the most fragile part of the derailer, or it's the part of the derailer that if it gets hit there, it's the most likely to cause a failure, so I'll I'll try not to spend an hour and a half on this topic, because I certainly could.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Basically, yeah, if you have a complicated stabilizer mechanism inside of there, then you either have to have a really thin hollow housing or the way that we've done it is that the front part of the parallelogram on a derailleur it's called the P-body, it's what the pulley cage attaches to.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):That we make that thing like a flat plate. So when you see the big stabilizer unit on the derailleur, that's just a plastic cover for the whole thing. The structural part of it is coming off of this parallelogram. That's nice and robust, but it's thinning down to a plate and so that plate just shears off from how it attaches to the parallelogram. And yeah, I'm sure you've seen some broken ones that break exactly there, like behind the clutch or to the left of it.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So the idea was to make that P body both as strong as possible and as narrow as possible, and it turned into let's slim down that leading edge of that P-body and basically turn it into a wedge. So the wall of that P-body can be a lot thicker than it could be before. And because it's a wedge, then we're already starting down the path of having rocks push the derailleur out of the way instead of taking that force head on. So the other big challenge that they had to work out at the same time is where are we going to put the battery in this thing? And we were really limited on where we could put it because of patents. But the parallelogram kind of opened up and presented this opportunity that if you follow that wedge shape of the P body of the derailleur and have the parallelogram follow that shape as well, then you end up with a big opening on the inside.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:It was the perfect place to put the battery so your parallelograms got taller, I guess, um so like uh it's kind of bigger in every direction really.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So, uh, uh. But it follows that wedge, like the whole derailleur looks like a wedge and really the idea is that, uh, a rock will start pushing the p-body out of the way and then slide across the parallelogram and just be nudging the derailleur out of the way.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:The entire time. Okay, and the derailleur can still rotate back too.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, which is a key part of it. I think we said that during that whole process. It's naturally going to want to rotate backwards a little bit, so we call that the B axle, the bracket axle, where the derailleur mounts to the derailleur hanger. So, uh, preserving free rotation around that point was a key part of the derailleur design. Um and uh, yeah, so we got our wedge shape, we got our battery inside. Uh, so the way that the battery mounts is uh, there's a little uh like trap door that comes off the bottom of the parallelogram. Um and uh, it's got a another wedge that sits in a track. So you pop the derail, the battery, up inside the um, the trailers parallelogram and then that wedge slides into the track to push the battery up towards the terminals. So it's great that the uh, um, uh, the terminals are facing down.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah and uh, they've got a very small round seal around those terminals and the battery is pressed up against that seal as you close that little trap door, so you get a lot more water tight yeah, so no water pooling, everything's facing in the right direction and we've got a small round seal and if you want to make the best seal that you can, you want it to be as small as possible, a little surface area possible, and you want it to be round with no corners. Square is weird, so it's yeah, it's harder to make the seal effective if you do it that way and the battery.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So the battery is removable. Do you charge it on the bike or off the bike?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):charge it off the bike. There's a little like charging receptacle okay all right what's the life um about 200 miles. Um the battery off the top of my head I could open my laptop is 310 milliamp hours. So this has been my go-to little jab is that we didn't do a 53 tooth cog, we didn't do a 310 milliamp hour battery versus somebody who may have a 300.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Somebody might have a 300. Okay, okay, gotcha, gotcha, that's fine. You know I love it, you know it's awesome. So shift time, compared to like the road, because that has a much bigger battery I feel like you could go six months on a road bike without charging. Do you think it's like average rider is going to be like a week or four rides, or?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I mean it would vary a lot depending on how much you're doing. Like, if you're doing a 24 hour solo race, then be prepared to switch your battery at some point.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So okay, so that's a great. That's a great metric, because that's harder, that's easier for me to like relate to her miles right, yeah, but 200 miles at Honeybee is different than 200 miles at 50 year and so. But the 24 hours? So that would be a great metric If you're. Can you do a full 24 with one charge? So you're saying you may need to switch.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I'm sure I could yeah. Well, if you're riding solo, I guess.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, like I only do one lap and then drink a lot, you'll be fine, yeah, so um, but a solo rider, who's doing like 11 laps they yeah, yeah, I mean, you're not going to do the whole thing with one light battery? Yeah, yeah, Okay, All right, so that that helps. That helps people understand, you know so any other nuances on the derailleur.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Uh a ton.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So, uh, yeah, there's some cool stuff. Uh, oh, right, I talked about smart, simple solutions. So let's talk about a couple of other places where, uh, the derailers, uh, or the engineers, found that if the rock hits it here, that it'll cause a failure. So one of them, for sure, is a rock direct impact to that parallelogram, especially on the bottom, that, like it, can cause something to bend and uh, um, that's uh, yeah, basically a shortcoming of our current design is that if that parallelogram takes a direct impact, it's easy for it to twist something in the derailleur so that it looks totally fine, but it shifts like it's got a bent derailleur hanger. And you replace the derailleur hanger and it still shifts like it's got a bent derailleur hanger.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So the solution was to put little plastic bumpers on them and they're like bumpers off of like a 1980s volvo and so yeah, and if people look for pictures of the derailleur, like you'll be able to pull them out, like they're not going to get called out, they're not that glamorous. The battery door is actually one of the bumpers okay, um and uh, but then behind it, on the other parallelogram, there's still just a little plastic bumper. So those bumpers are totally replaceable if you crack them, but it just, it like spreads out the load when you take that impact. So it's that sharp, singular impact that can cause harm. Um and so spreading it out and making the little bumpers replaceable, like that actually is more useful than being able to replace the parallelogram is just like, yeah, put a bumper on there and the replacement part's super cheap.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then along those lines of like also being cost-effective, smart solutions is that the pulley wheels are solid. They don't have any holes in them, so impossible for sticks to get inside and jam things up. The other place where a stick can get inside, the drive train, is like it just kind of falls inside the loop of the chain and then the lower pulley wheel like tracks that thing in. So the pulley cage just extends out past the teeth of the lower pulley so that it can't do that. Okay, interesting Nice.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, so you still have the simple, smart, simple, still offset on the lower pulley.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, so it looked bent Yep.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:The first one we got, we returned. Yeah, and like yeah, and it was like this thing's bent out of the box and we called them up and and then we found out it's not.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It's not yeah, it's supposed to be like. Luckily, that's pretty common from everybody, right yeah?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:They're starting to figure it out, and that was mainly a one by move, because super wide range.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, but uh and then. Um, now what's the difference between? Are you calling them SG and SGS?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):GS and SGS Okay.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:All right, gs and G. Okay, all right. Um, what's the difference on the body versus the cage? Is there any difference?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):You know, I uh, I don't actually know the answer to that question today.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And uh, so, yeah, maybe, um, somebody can find out on their own if you can swap them. The app like knows if it's a long cage or a short cage. Um, and I can tell you that with the, the product that's on the market now, the, um, the p body, is taking a different path. So, um, it's, uh, it's designed to kind of follow the, the shape of the cassette, so it's moving in a different way. There is a chance that it's interchangeable, but I'm not sure if, uh, if we were able to pull that off or not.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Okay, now um also mechanic question what are the adjustments? Do you have a high, low limits and B tension?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):We still got regular old B tension and high and low limit screws Um, we actually could. Um, because derailleur hangers like we could rely on the UDH if we wanted to, that those have all got the exact same dimensions and as soon as that happens you can get rid of limit screws. That you know exactly how this thing is going to interface and where the cassette is going to sit. Like it's all keyed up against that UDH, but super easy to gain backwards compatibility to older bikes that don't have a UDH if we keep the limit screws in there.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So that's right as well. Yeah, that's pretty awesome, cause there's the other brand has made it so that if you have an older bike, you're out, you know you can't do anything, whereas this sounds like this If I have an older bike that I absolutely love that's not UDH, I can still run the new.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):XTR, and for sure. We don't want to go down a road of making it in compromises to a product in order to do something cool like that. Like if they're able to make a better product and have to give up backwards compatibility. Like we can all recognize that 95% of the rear derailleurs that I sell are sold on complete bikes. Like that's just how it works.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So, and it's just a phasing out eventually, of stuff.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So and I mean a lot of those like you might get bummed that you can't put the new transmission derailleur on your bike, but you would not be bummed if you got yourself a new bike.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, that's true.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It's true. There are going to be other better things about it, yeah.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:So new cranks as well.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):There is a new crank, yeah, and so it. One of them gets heavier, one of them stays about the same. There's a cross country and an Enduro spec one, but the Enduro one really is an Enduro spec crank and we kind of didn't do that in the last generation. And, um, any keen observers would have seen that, uh, um, in the 2024 racing season, richie Root started using XT cranks, um, just because he kind of had some scares with XTR cranks, like he never had a failure. But you hit those things hard enough, and what we had done in the past was basically the lightest aluminum crank that we could, and so we made the arms in two pieces and then bonded them back together. What we had been famous for for decades before that was a proprietary, secret process. That's a hollow forged process yeah, the original hollow tech. So you're starting with a solid piece of aluminum and you're forging it and ending up with a hollow cavity inside, and not like by hollowing it out afterwards or putting something in there or drilling holes down the middle of it?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It's just just from forging it, just hitting it from the outside, and you end up with a hollow cavity on the inside, and so that makes a very strong and light crank. And we thought that we had pushed that technology as far as we could, which is why it capped out at XT for the previous generation. But we were able to make it a bit lighter and we're comfortable with putting the XTR logo back on that hollow forged crank arm and it's just at that point. It's something that you absolutely never have to worry about, Like you're never going to break uh, a hollow tech crank arm and uh, so, to make the Enduro crank like, uh, a, the arms, yeah, get more durable. But we paired it with an Enduro specific spindle.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So the XTR crank um, as the future groups come out, we'll see. In comparing it with stuff that's on the market right now, Um, we can see clearly that the strongest crank we make is the Saint, but that only fits on downhill bikes really, and uh, um, but then the XTR Enduro crank is going to be the next one. Behind it it's almost like a Saint spindle. It's not quite to that level of a Saint spindle, but, um, that makes for a very robust crank and um, it really is, the Richie roots back, Like we kind of made it for him, Like it's to his you didn't name it that, but that's the unofficial name yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Same um chain ring interface.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Uh, it basically. Yeah, the chain rings um can fit from previous generation to this one. It's the same spline interface, it's the same lock ring, but we're moving from uh, uh well, we're moving to a dedicated 55 millimeter chain line to kind of to fit on modern bikes.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, so just for people that may not know this, on XT cranks, if you buy a certain width crank and then all the chain rings are the same offset.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, is that correct? We've always done yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Only. Is that correct? We've always done yeah, Only one offset for now Chain rings. Is that now changing to where you're? You're going to have like basically one spindle length and then maybe change the offset of chain rings on the chain line of the bike.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So, uh, yeah, the cranks that have a that are the outgoing cranks. Now the way that we got different chain lines was that we did a longer spindle and then we just put spacers between the crank and the frame and so we could do a 55 or 56.5, which is like a super boost chain line. Yeah, everything is getting unified to 55 millimeter chain line and there will be no spacers and no different spindle lengths, it's just 55 chain line all the time. So with the outgoing cranks, if you didn't have any spacers, you'd have a 52 millimeter chain line. So now that we got no spacers in a 55 millimeter chain line, it means that the chain ring is offset three millimeters.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Okay, so you could. There's some amount of interchangeability with the chain rings, like if you had lots of spare chain rings for your current XTR crank and you wanted to use it on the new one. Just keep in mind that your chain line is going to go back to 52, like you had on your previous crank. Okay, that's, and that'll work on some bikes. I need a white board to any difference in the lengths of the cranks.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Oh, that's the big news.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):We are uh introducing 160 millimeter uh length option, thank god, yeah it. Uh, the trend for sure is going shorter and shorter and so, um, we, uh, we kind of wanted like I don't know, right now the standard spec is either 170 or 165, even depending on who you talk to, right, but uh, we wanted to make sure that people, that the like the bulk of the market wasn't riding our extreme spec. So if the shortest one we made was 165, then there was nothing that a shorter rider could could hop onto and get like their version of that benefit. So the 160 was really important, kind of just for that. And if the trend keeps going and everybody ends up on 160s, which already it's got a lot of people's attentions, like man especially, I mean, yeah, I said I've got a transition patrol and riding it in uh, arizona that mullet with a low bottom bracket pedal strike monster.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:There's one component on my bike that's not Shimano and it's the cranks, because yeah, you had to go shorter, cause I had to go shorter and I didn't have an option with you guys yeah, so what length do you run? 155 or 160 depending on the bike.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Okay yeah.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So when you guys went to this decision on 160 and you caught I call it a trend and stuff like that, are you getting like racer input on this or are you looking more at like the consumer demand side, like is that decision coming from? Like racers are starting to adopt shorter crank lengths and seeing a benefit that one in particular?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I feel like we saw um more consumer yeah, we could, uh, I mean we can say from a business point of view, through the aftermarket channel. But that means that we're getting it from going into bike shops or talking to riders directly at events and uh, or just seeing what people are cobbling together Like the amateur enduro racers in North America, like that's where a lot of the good info comes from.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Like uh, I mean, there is a? Um handful of North American amateur enduro racers that are currently running our short cage derailleur with the 1051 cassette, and so we see it and we're like those don't go together. And they're like I need the short cage derailleur and I can't give up any range, man. And then it's like, oh okay, so if we can give you the short cage derailleur and you don't have to sacrifice range, then you'd be happy. Sweet, yeah, um. So, yeah, those guys that swung by um, those North American EWS races a couple of years ago, that we're running that, like we turned it into a product for you yeah, not just you, but yeah, like that's where sometimes, that's where you see stuff earliest, and well, that's kind of true innovation right.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I love looking at Enduro bikes just to figure out where to put tubes on my bike. You know, cause they strap them all over the place, like to like. Tool and tube management on enduro bikes is awesome, you know, trying to get them strapped under your cage or under the bike or at the back. You know, under the seat, over the top tube. You know, all over the place.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So let's move to the brakes yeah so we think so big big thing on the cranks. Uh, dedicated spindle chain rings could be cross compatible, but for the part the new rings will have an offset.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It's a good idea to stick with the right ring for the right crank. But go into your bike shop and they'll be able to tell you, big news is the 160.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:That hasn't been around 160.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:And then you also may run Still 24 millimeter Yep.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:No change to the.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:If you run the short cage and the 945, you can take four teeth off the front, so if you're at 32, you can go down to 20.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, if you want the racer setup, you go 945.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I think there's a lot of appeal for that short cage derailleur actually, because it's lighter, so it's a good cross-country setup and we get some driving efficiency back from our derailleur design actually. So, um, they, uh, oh yeah, the conclusion of that whole thing that that, uh, uh, in order for that wedge shape of the P body to work, we needed our stabilizer unit at the front of the derailleur. Uh, to get really, really slim. Okay, and uh, there was a real simple answer there that was just to put two thin springs inside of there. So it's a spring that's as strong as a clutch was.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Okay, so it's dead simple inside of there, and there are some kind of down the road benefits that we get from that as well. So we can think about your shifting will be better. Also, your driving efficiency will be better if your chain is wrapped around the gear more completely or if it's engaged with more teeth. Yeah, and so we need to be careful to not think about just a static situation where the bike is in the repair stand. Think about it when you're riding down a rough trail that your chain's bouncing around and your chain is, uh, unwrapping from the bottom of your cog in the back, and so you're losing driving efficiency on bumpy terrain and we can get some of that driving efficiency back by having a spring inside the derailleur that's stronger, so it's wrapping the chain tighter around your cogs, keeping it more engaged and increasing your driving driving efficiency and now a mechanic question is there a switch to turn it on and off?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):you don't need one um, because it's a spring instead of a of a clutch, like we needed the on off switch with the clutch, because a clutch lets the pulley cage kind of jerk forward and then it's hard to move in one direction and easy to move in the other direction. And uh, and if it's just a spring, even if it's stronger, like it wasn't the strength of it, it was the jerkiness and the uh yeah, so it's the spring, is nice and smooth, so it's very easy to get a wheel in and out the.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:the other thing about the clutch is we would service them and make sure that they get serviced and not rusty and things like that, so that's not needed anymore.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah. So that for me, coming from like a career as a as a bike mechanic, first in a shop and then a race mechanic with Shimano driving the race truck around the country.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):That was a hard thing for me to let go of was that I really liked having serviceable parts on the on the derailleur, that I could take that clutch apart and clean it and grease it and keep it running Absolutely beautiful year in and year out for many, many years. Job security, exactly Well, the reality of the situation, though, is that you service them because you have to service them, and what happens? Like that last ride before it's come in for service, like it was pretty bad, like the? Um, the shifts could be super rough, um the? Uh, the pulley cage might not spring back, so your chain might end up drooping. You could be dropping the chain in the front, um, you could be dealing with noise from the derailleur because the clutch isn't working right, and in some cases, right it'll seize up completely, and then you just can't shift gears. And then about the on-off switch I've this is kind of turned into my hobby that I can come to a festival like this and I can just count the clutches that are in the off position.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So true, and nobody noticed, and so you just went out for a ride and you didn't have a stabilizer on your bike at all. Yeah, and so getting rid of it probably really does, uh, overall, improve the riding situation across the board for um any mountain biker, like having no service interval but also no degradation of performance okay um, and a system that never needs to be turned off, but you can never forget to turn it back on now um.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:The main reason for that switch, though, was not so that you could turn it off.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It was just so you could pull the wheel out, just so you get the wheel in.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Yeah, and so not as big issue, cause you're dealing with a strong spring, so it still moves. It's not locking like the clutch, kind of way it breaks free nice and smooth.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So the force to get it to move is the same, but because it doesn't jerk forward, it doesn't mess you up when you're trying to like get the wheel lined up with the dropouts.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Can we move to the brakes now? Oh my God.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Look, we could do five hours of this I mean, if I, if we got to the end of this? And I didn't talk, I just wanted to know cause.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:that's the question I'm going to get. Is there a clutch? You know things like that question on the brakes.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Uh, I got it.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Okay, I got it I got it, got it. Any change to the hydraulic fluid? Still mineral? Uh, there is a change to the hydraulic.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:You went dot didn't you, uh no I've been.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I've been teaching well as a race mechanic and then as an instructor for shimano for many years.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):I taught a lot of break clinics and the. The way I would break it down is that uh, um dot fluid is an easy system to get into because it's kind of an established industry standard. That uh, it dictates what your seals are going to be made of and what your fluid is going to be, and you know what your performance level is going to be. Like Um and mineral oil systems are of the next level that it takes a lot more engineering to go out and find your own fluid and maybe engineer your own seals. Like you're really still shopping for a lot of this stuff, but you're choosing it on your own, your fluid characteristics and your caliper seal characteristics, which are just as important as the seal, and that really is the point to drive home, I think too. So it's a new uh, low viscosity, high performance fluid and what's different about it is that it performs uh with very little change in uh across the broad range of temperatures that we ride bikes in.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So, um, yeah, it was uh in the thirties today out here at the Sedona Mountain.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Bike Festival. It'll be 120.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah exactly so. This new fluid will work exactly the same in all of those conditions, and so really what that helps to improve is bite point. Consistency is that if our seal is rebounding at different speeds and our fluid is flowing at different rates as the system is heating up or cooling down, or just as the weather is changing, then the brake feels different. So if we can make those things perform more consistently, then we'll get a better, more consistent um feel out of our some more consistent across the entire range of temperatures that you'd ride your bike in backwards compatible.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Absolutely none. It would be uh especially in Arizona it would. It would be lethal. We'll say that so so we have so.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:So there's something on the break that like screams that caliper seal.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, so we need. If we're going to have a low viscosity fluid that moves quicker, we need a seal, that at the caliper. So the quick break clinic here is that there has to be a return spring that pushes the fluid back up to the lever after you let go. Okay, and it's not that spring that's in between the brake pads, that's just to keep them from rattling around and you could ride without that spring in between your brake pads. The real spring in the system is the seal at the caliper. So it's, uh, it's some people call it a square edge seal, like it flexes outward and then it returns to its normal position, and so when it does that, that's what's pushing the fluid back up to the brake lever. So we've got those.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Things are rubber seals. They've got like a rebound speed to them, um and uh, and so the that rebound speed is really crucial and right now the seals that that we use they're as good as we could get for like the long time, yeah, but uh, the new one is more consistent, like it's got a more consistent rebound speed. So what will happen if you use the new fluid in old brakes is that on a hot day, those, uh, those caliper seals will rebound really quickly and the fluid will return to your brake lever so quickly that it'll overshoot the mark. And if you pull the um the brake lever like if you're pulling the brake lever and then you let go and then you pull again the lever will just come to the bar because there won't be any fluid in the well, there won't be enough fluid in the line. It'll all be up in the reservoir.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Wow, wow. Absolutely Not backward compatible. Okay, we've got very little time. You guys have an appointment.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I'm looking at your time here.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Just one final. I want to make sure, cause you talked about the different way the levers pull and it's and it's my understanding is it's back in up.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Uh, so the like, the main pivot point for the brake lever gets five millimeters closer to the bar. And so if we can just imagine, like where your finger rests on the brake lever towards the tip, when you pull it, it's not going in a straight line, it's following an arc that's rotating around that pivot point for the brake lever, got it? So you're riding with your elbows out, your fingers are kind of pointed in, they're not reaching straight out from the bar and pulling straight back.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Right.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):So you want to be on the top of the arc of that brake lever, pulling down.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I'm making lots of finger gestures. It looks really good. We're all doing it together, so hopefully you're doing it at home.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Like imagine your hands on handlebars and like but ride elbows out and like, your fingers are pointing in a little bit. So you want that pivot point of the brake lever to be nice and close to the handlebar, so that you're on the top of that arc, so that the brake lever is kind of moving outward or, at the very worst, straight back at the end of the so you're not saying that the reach is longer or shorter, right, because it's just where.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:It's just where the pivot point is. It's just where the pivot point is Awesome, yeah.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):And then so that was a one of our skunk riders came up with that idea that I want the like, and we kind of had learned that before. We've done a radial master cylinder before, where the pivot point was really far out, and the benefit of doing that is that you're pulling on the brake lever and the master cylinder is also coming in towards the handlebar and it's a very efficient system. But your pivot point has to be really far from the handlebar in order to do that. So we scrapped it after just that 970 generation.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I remember that I actually liked those brakes. They did great. Yeah, all right.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Anything else you guys got to go with, anything else that you want to highlight on the break, specifically, so the other thing is that the lever blades are upswept a little bit because the engineer got that kind of assignment that figure out how to put the pivot point closer to the bar. And then they also realized that like your hands aren't parallel with the earth, like you've got angles to your body, and so the lever blades need to be upswept a little bit to come out.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:That totally makes sense.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):It's a subtle difference, Like you don't really notice it when you go for a test ride, but once you get used to it and you go back, you're like my levers are all bent down.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:Now the pivots aren't tilted, it's it's just the levers. It's like a kink in the lever yeah, almost like it crashed which we have to fix.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Don't, don't, don't return. So when you get the first one in the box, don't call customer service and be like these are bent. Well, Nick, we really appreciate it. Thanks for coming and spending some time with us man, my pleasure Do you have any final thoughts? Uh well, one final question, yeah, just trickle down. When can we expect?
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:XT.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:SLX Dior. When is this tech going to trickle down?
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Yeah, I'm not going to make you wait that long at all.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:Awesome, okay, that's good, that's cagey and good.
Nick Murdick (Shimano):Any final thoughts for our listeners? Man, yeah, I hope people like it. It's been a long like I know everything that's wrong with the group and there's been a lot of blood, sweat and tears and yelling that went into the development of this group. And uh, um, yeah, if anybody sees me in an event, how about that? Then? Uh, I'll, I'll always give you the full, honest story, like I'm not a pitch man for a Shimano, like I work in product development and I'm a bike mechanic and I'm a shy, I told you.
Josh "Magellan" Anderson:You did you did you, absolutely did Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming, man. I also want to thank you for taking your time and doing this right with quality, and I'm very confident, just like I said, it's going to be durable, it's going to be good price.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgins:I'm stoked. It's just going to work. Man, I'm stoked. Yeah, I think people have been waiting and they're sal use XTR. I'm probably going to buy it. Yeah, all right, thanks a lot, man.
