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THE FIRST FULL-SUSPENSION MOUNTAIN BIKES

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THE FIRST FULL-SUSPENSION MOUNTAIN BIKES


Full-suspension bikes are so commonplace that many mountain bikers now take them for granted. Hardtails are getting rarer and every year an exciting new crop of fully suspended bikes gets released.To get more news about ebike with suspension, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.

But only 30 years ago, the concept of any suspension on a mountain bike was essentially a fantasy. It took great determination and bold experimentation by some of mountain biking’s visionary pioneers to create the foundation for the amazing bikes we ride today.

Let’s take a look back through time at some of the most innovative suspension designs in our vintage mountain bike museum. These are the early ancestors of today’s full-suspension bikes. Some are good, some are bad, and some are ugly. Naturally, many other bikes could be added to this list (as you'll see in the comments below!).
It would be hard to convince anyone to ride one of these bikes today, but in their time, there was nothing more exciting and exotic. In each of their own ways, these are bikes that helped pave the way to the amazing machines we ride today.
Brian Skinner helped shape the sport by developing some of its most iconic products including Shimano Deore and Deore XT components, the Answer Taperlite bars, A-Tac stem, and Accu-Trax fork, and the Onza Porcupine tires and bar ends. But his most innovative, and maybe least-known creation was the MCR Descender, which was conceived in 1982.
Skinner rode motocross and knew suspension was the key to improving off-road performance. The MCR Descender he designed is credited as the world’s first rear-suspension mountain bike. Yes, that's right, a “rear-suspension” bike. The Descender was designed before telescopic suspension forks for bicycles were invented, so it used a traditional rigid steel fork.

Skinner would have liked to have had front suspension as well, but it was beyond his business's means at the time. He also felt that rear suspension was the more important of the two. His thinking was that a rider’s weight was over the center of the bike, so by placing a pivot in the center, the front wheel would still be able to pivot up, activating the suspension and absorbing some of the impacts. How well this actually worked is questionable.

In another forward thinking move, Skinner tried to augment the suspension with a "mullet" set-up using mixed wheel sizes. The larger 26” front would help absorb bumps, roll over rough terrain, and activate the suspension, while the smaller 24” rear wheel would be stiffer to handle extra load from the suspension and afford more room for the linkage.
Much of the Descender's design was focused on how to fit the large air shock and still have it “look cool.” The first Descender prototype was built by VVA (Victor Vincente of America) and a second was built with the help of Dan Hanebrink. The production version of the Descender seen here had its prominent suspension linkage modeled after a Kawasaki KX250, and in 1984, Champion Bicycles produced the finished frames which cost $650.

The Descender came with a massive (for the time) six inches of rear travel, the equivalent of most modern enduro bikes. If the bike was bottomed out, the rear wheel had a tendency to rub the suspension strut so there were spacers available to reduce the travel if desired.

A coil shock was in the original plans, but Skinner didn’t like the idea of supplying different coil weights and ended up buying gas shocks from a California company called MotoSports as it went out of business. In all, only 25 MCR Descenders were made before Skinner moved on to develop products for Shimano.
In 1990, Manitou founder Doug Bradbury designed and built one of the first bicycle suspension forks in his garage. While most modern forks generally use an air spring, the groundbreaking Manitou fork used elastomers. These were polymer cylinders that acted like a spring and could be tuned using varying levels of firmness. The fork provided a modest two inches of travel and worked as long as it wasn’t too cold outside. The fork was an immediate hit, and at the 1990 World Championships, John Tomac and cross-country winner Juli Furtado both rode Manitou forks.

The next year, Bradbury used his Manitou fork to create one of the first full-suspension mountain bikes. He used a second, reconfigured Manitou fork in place of the seat stays, with a pivot behind the bottom bracket, and a second pivot at the top of the stays to articulate the rear end. This unique Manitou mountain bike was more than just a concept or prototype, it was a real race bike, piloted by Travis Brown in the 1992 season.

At the time, this twin-fork design was the simplest solution to add rear suspension to a bike, and it gave the Manitou efficiency that was comparable to hardtail bikes. However, it was not the most effective design for absorbing bumps. The fork legs were pointed rearward, away from the direction of most impacts. Most modern suspension designs provide a rearward axle path at the beginning of the stroke, which is easier for the suspension to move into travel and absorb bumps. Because of the Manitou's non-linkage design, the rear wheel could only move forward and up, greatly reducing the suspension's effectiveness. It was a simple design worth trying though.
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