Ibis Ripmo 3 Olive Green Swamp Monster 5

Size spe­cif­ic everything.

Ibis Geometry Story

Regard­less of your height or pro­por­tions, we believe every rid­er should enjoy a great rid­ing expe­ri­ence. This is not depen­dent on a sin­gle dimen­sion but on a com­bi­na­tion of ele­ments that help the rid­er to feel cen­tered, com­fort­able, and in control.

Ibis Cycles Ripley V5 Blue Hour complete bike
The Rip­ley V5
Ibis Cycles Ripmo V3 Olive Swamp Monster, complete bike GX build kit
and Rip­mo V3. Size spe­cif­ic everything.

We’ve always used our seat tube angles, low stan­dover height, high­ly evolved layup, and shock tunes to achieve this. With the new Rip­mo and Rip­ley, we’ve refined every detail even fur­ther. We now offer size-spe­cif­ic chain­stays, bot­tom brack­et heights, sus­pen­sion kine­mat­ics, and rear wheel sizes to ensure every rid­er has a sick rid­ing bike.

Every­thing in bicy­cle engi­neer­ing starts with your cen­ter of grav­i­ty. When ped­al­ing your bike on flat ground, imag­ine a point a few inch­es in front of your bel­ly but­ton — that’s your cen­ter of grav­i­ty (COG). The most effec­tive tool for adjust­ing your cen­ter of grav­i­ty to main­tain the desired bal­ance between the wheels is the seat tube angle (STA)

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As frame sizes increase, we need steep­er seat tube angles.
Ibis Ripley V5 Blue 11
We keep the rid­er’s weight more cen­tered on the bike.

As frame sizes increase, we need steep­er seat tube angles (STA). This is because seat tubes angle rear­ward and the taller you are, the more rear­ward your sad­dle sits. If we kept the STA the same across all sizes, the high­er sad­dle posi­tion on larg­er bikes would move the rid­er’s weight too far rear­ward which caus­es han­dling prob­lems. By steep­en­ing the STA as the frame size increas­es, we keep the rid­er’s weight more cen­tered on the bike.

For taller rid­ers, this makes it eas­i­er to keep your front wheel from wan­der­ing on steep climbs and los­ing trac­tion in cor­ners. Con­verse­ly, slack­er STAs on small­er sizes pre­vent those rid­ers from being pushed too far for­ward, ensur­ing prop­er fore-aft bal­ance and comfort.

When we adjust the seat tube angle, we pre­serve the top tube length to main­tain your fit on the bike. Sim­ply mov­ing the rid­er with­out adjust­ing reach would throw off the bal­ance. So, we kept each size’s top tube length the same and moved it along with the seat tube angle. This approach cen­ters the rid­er and dic­tates the geom­e­try, allow­ing us to use size-spe­cif­ic chain­stays with­out mak­ing them extreme. This increas­es the reach, but the bar posi­tion keeps cen­ter of grav­i­ty in the right spot, even when descend­ing with your seat down

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Size-spe­cif­ic chainstays.
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Size-spe­cif­ic bot­tom brack­et height.

There has been a lot of focus recent­ly on size-spe­cif­ic chain­stays to bal­ance out each size’s change in reach and keep the rid­er ide­al­ly placed between the wheels. If you only used chain­stay length to adjust bal­ance, the chain­stays would have grown by as much as 30mm per size. This would result in the larg­er frames per­form­ing very dif­fer­ent­ly than the small ones. Mov­ing the seat angle for­ward by one degree is equiv­a­lent to adding about 25mm of chain­stay length. By using every tool avail­able (seat tube angle, top tube length, reach, bot­tom brack­et height, and wheel size) to help cen­ter the rid­er, our larg­er frame sizes can main­tain their play­ful­ness while remain­ing sta­ble due to their long wheelbases.

Anoth­er key com­po­nent of our new plat­forms is the size-spe­cif­ic bot­tom brack­et height; rais­ing the BB on larg­er sizes helps avoid get­ting caught on things and hit­ting your ped­als, while low­er BB heights on the small­er bikes improve han­dling, tak­ing advan­tage of short­er cranks and their greater ground clearance.

Get­ting the sus­pen­sion to per­form at its best across the size range while chang­ing the BB height, chain stay length and seat angle requires more than just mov­ing the swingarm mount­ing points for­ward and back­ward on each frame. We devel­oped size-spe­cif­ic sus­pen­sion designs to opti­mize ped­al­ing per­for­mance for each size.

Com­bined with increased anti-squat to resist ped­al-induced sus­pen­sion move­ment, the new bikes are incred­i­bly efficient.

Ibis Ripley V5 Riding 25
Opti­mized ped­al­ing per­for­mance for each size.
Ibis Cycles Ripmo V3 Huckleberry Purple action shot outdoor
We’ve cre­at­ed bikes that main­tain their play­ful­ness and sta­bil­i­ty across all sizes.

The new Rip­mo and Rip­ley are the cul­mi­na­tion of metic­u­lous refine­ment, incor­po­rat­ing size-spe­cif­ic adjust­ments in chain­stays, bot­tom brack­et heights, sus­pen­sion kine­mat­ics, and rear wheel sizes. By focus­ing on the cen­ter of grav­i­ty and using every tool avail­able to achieve bal­ance, we’ve cre­at­ed bikes that main­tain their play­ful­ness and sta­bil­i­ty across all sizes.