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.
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)
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
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.
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.