2014 Giant Glory

The Rear End

The topping-out rear shock was pretty surprising; I thought that problem had been solved around 2002. But as I mentioned above, all of the Glorys in Whistler’s rental fleet did it. I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that not all Glorys have this issue, so while this was one of the most annoying traits of this bike, I don’t think the blame really falls on Giant’s shoulders. But I’m kind of baffled by this, since I’ve ridden other Vivids that didn’t have any sort of topping out problem, so I’m not sure the blame rests with Rockshox, either.

I think the topping out issue is also related to the second and third issues: the rear wheel hanging up, and the suspension feeling harsh. The best way I found to mitigate the topping out problem was to run the beginning stroke rebound all the way slow. Having the slow rebound kept the shock from topping out as badly, though it still topped out.

Generally speaking, running the rebound adjustment on a shock really slow means that over small bumps in rapid succession, the rear suspension will compress over the first bump, but it isn’t able to uncompress quickly enough before it hits the next bump. So when it hits that next bump, it just gets compressed even farther into its travel, and that goes on until the trail smoothes out enough that the suspension can recover, or until the shock is compressed enough that the force from the bumps is insufficient to compress it any further, effectively making the bike a hardtail.

What this means is that on rough trails, the suspension is sitting too deep in its travel. And since the suspension is deep in its travel, the spring is already fairly compressed, so it takes a relatively large amount of force to compress it more. Small bumps don’t generate enough force to compress the shock further, so the suspension doesn’t really do anything at that point; the trail just feels rough.

As best as I can ascertain, this is what was happening on the Glory; the rear wheel would hang up badly in holes, and the rear suspension just didn’t feel like it was doing much.

Where this was the most uncomfortably apparent was actually on Whistler’s A-Line, which is supposed to be a smooth jump trail. The thing about A-Line, though, is that it gets a lot of brake bumps. This is actually a pretty good test for suspension because it’s a series of more or less consistently shaped holes, and there generally aren’t a lot of other distractions–it’s an otherwise smooth trail with bumps in it, which makes it easy to pay attention to what the suspension is doing through those bumps.

All of the other bikes I rode in Whistler skipped through brake bumps with minimal fuss. Sure, the bumps would take a toll on my hands over time, and some bikes (like the Specialized Demo) were a bit smoother through them than others, but all of the other bikes handled the brake bumps in a relatively composed manner.

The Glory, on the other hand, struggled mightily in brake bumps (and most other bumps, for that matter). Coming into a line of brake bumps with some speed, the Glory would very noticeably hang up on the bumps and lose significant speed. In most situations, the best way through unavoidable brake bumps would be to go fast and skim over the tops, but I found it very difficult to do this on the Glory. I’d get about half way through a set of brake bumps and the bike would start hanging up and losing speed, which would then make the bike hang up even more, and lose even more speed, and so on.

Giving Giant the benefit of the doubt, I’d like to blame this on the shock and the topping out / beginning stroke rebound issue. But without riding the Glory with a different shock, I can’t say for certain that was the only problem. Some suspension designs do a better job at passing over bumps of different shapes without hanging up, so I’m not prepared to say that the Glory’s issues were solely due to the rear shock.

That said, the Glory’s wheel path is fairly vertical, and I’ve ridden other Giants with a Maestro rear end (like the Giant Trance), and I didn’t notice any particularly bad hanging up on those frames. I’m hoping to get on a different Glory in the near future and see if I can make heads or tails of this.

The Front End

The fourth issue I had was keeping the bike’s front wheel in check. I’d frequently found that the front wheel would push out in corners, causing the bike to significantly understeer. To make matters worse, this phenomenon wasn’t predictable, which is the sort of thing that leads to hard crashes.

One of the reasons for this was probably the front tire; the Glory I rode had a Maxxis DHF, which is possibly my favorite tire ever made. But, this being a rental bike, Whistler had equipped the Glory with a 60a DHF; a harder rubber than I’d normally ride. The harder rubber makes the tire last a lot longer, but it also means that it sacrifices a bit of traction.

Although some of the front end drifting can be attributed to the harder tire, I’ve spent plenty of time on 60a tires in the past, and that definitely wasn’t the sole cause of the problems I was having. Another possible source of the problem relates back to the rear suspension issue I noted above; if the rear end was packing up and sitting low in its travel, that would effectively slack out the front end of the bike, making the already slack-ish 63.5º head angle even slacker. This could potentially contribute to the rear end feeling like it wanted to push out of corners, especially on flatter section of trail.

Getting the Boxxer a bit more dialed in also could have helped, but I didn’t think the Boxxer felt bad, and I set it up very similarly to how I set up my own Boxxer. Perhaps more tellingly, I rode the Glory and the S-Works Demo back to back, both of which have the same fork. The Boxxer on the Demo was new, not quite broken in, and didn’t feel all that spectacular. But I didn’t have any of the front-end issues on the Demo that I had with the Glory.

So, long story short, I don’t have a great explanation as to why the front end of the Glory felt wander-y. The tire had something to do with it, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.

Pros

There were a few things that this particular rig did well. For one, it’s a very efficient pedaler. When you crank on the pedals, the Glory gets up to speed pretty easily, and you don’t feel like you’re wallowing around in a bowl of pudding. It didn’t feel quite as efficient as the GT Fury, but the Glory is significantly lighter than the Fury, so on pedal-y courses, I’d probably give a slight nod to the Giant.

The Glory also did pretty well on jumps. Or, I should say, if the rear shock wasn’t topping out in a super annoying fashion, the Glory would have been good on jumps. The Glory definitely falls into the category of “bikes that will pop.” It was happy doubling up small features on the trail, and it also made cruising through larger jumps pretty effortless.

In a more general sense, the Glory felt like a bike that rewards someone who is more active on the bike. This may just be because the rear suspension sucked on the bike I rode, and any time I tried to plow through anything, the rear end threw a minor shit-fit. But notwithstanding that issue, the bike did feel fairly maneuverable, despite it’s relatively slack head angle and long-ish wheelbase.

Compared to the Specialized Demo, the Glory is longer and slacker, but I still felt like the Glory would get through tight spots in a similarly efficient manner.

Conclusion

Reviews like this are super tricky, and point to why bike reviews in general are so difficult. (It also is a clear example of why we keep insisting that bike and boat and ski reviews require more than a few laps if they’re going to be truly useful.)

Glorys are pretty common, popular DH bikes, and there are lots of guys that go plenty fast on them. The only logical conclusion that I can draw from this is that the Glory I was on, and specifically the rear shock on it, needed some work.

So to some extent, this is a review of the Glorys in Whistler’s rental fleet. I can’t say that every Glory there had similar problems, but I bounced on four of them, and all of the rear shocks topped out badly.

I can certainly see promise in the Glory. It pedals well, I liked the fit and geometry, and despite being on the long / slack end of the spectrum, the bike still felt very maneuverable. All of those attributes point toward a bike that treads that fine line of agile yet stable and, on paper, that’s what I expected it to be.

Unfortunately, that definitely wasn’t the case for the rig I tested, but I’m not writing off the Glory based on this test. As soon as we can rustle up another Glory, I’ll get more time on it and report back.