2015 Canfield Brothers 27.5 Jedi

On the Trail

As I mentioned above, one of the most noteworthy features of the Jedi is the amount of rearward movement in the rear suspension as it compresses. Bouncing around on the bike in the driveway, this isn’t completely obvious; you can tell that the rear wheel kind of swings backwards, but the parking lot test doesn’t reveal anything in the suspension to be all that different from any other DH bike.

But on the trail, that rearward movement becomes obvious pretty quickly. Smack into a protruding root or a square rock, and to a large extent, those bumps just disappear. It’s pretty neat.

On my first real day on the bike, I got off line and plowed into a hole that had a rock on the far side of it. I got my front wheel over it cleanly, but was a little out of control, and fully tagged the rock with the rear wheel. It wasn’t something that was going to cause me to crash, but it was the kind of thing that really saps your momentum when the rear wheel sinks into it. But … it didn’t. Not that the wheel didn’t sink into it, it definitely did. But I blew right through that hole like it wasn’t even there, which was a distinctly cool feeling, and one that I’ve never experienced on a bike that doesn’t have a substantially rearward axle path.

On my prior bike, a Specialized Demo, I’m 100% sure that my rear wheel would have hung up in that same hole. Not in any kind of hugely catastrophic sense, but it would have robbed a bit of momentum.

Here’s a quick slow-mo video of the Jedi in action. Even here, it can be a little tough to see the rearward action of the suspension, but I think the easiest way to notice it is to watch the rear wheel’s movement relative to the front wheel. As they smack bumps, they each move backwards in roughly the same plane. The front wheel is moving backwards at the angle of the headtube, and the rear wheel largely follows that same trajectory; the bike’s wheelbase doesn’t change all that much as the suspension compresses.

Compare that to a video of (for example) a Trek or Specialized, and you’ll see that the wheelbases on both of those bikes gets substantially shorter as the suspension compresses; the front wheel still moves backward, but the rear wheel moves much more vertically.

It’s that kind of plowing over rocky, rooty, rough stuff that is exactly what the Jedi is built for. And it’s not just the axle path. The low bottom bracket, slack head angle, and larger wheels make this bike work really well when you just sit back a little bit, point it in the right direction, and let go of the brakes.

It’s also worth noting that the Jedi does great if you case a jump. Of course, this is the internet so no one will ever admit to shorting a gap. But hypothetically, if such a thing were to happen, the Jedi would be really good and it wouldn’t hang up like some other bikes might.

But all of these great attributes of the Jedi come with a caveat: this is a plow bike. It’s slack, long, and fairly heavy. This is not a whippy little park bike. I’ve commented on some other bikes, like the Knolly Podium, about how they like to pop off of every little thing along the trail. The Jedi is not one of those bikes. It is much more inclined to either stay low and steamroll, or huck big and then deal with whatever junk might be in the runout.

The leverage rate on the Jedi is decreasing to begin with, but turns increasing for the last ¼ of its travel. In other words, the suspension is fairly progressive for the majority of its stroke, but becomes regressive for the final ¼.

I found this made for a fairly predictable rear end that was very supple at the beginning of its travel, but it also meant that I’d noticeably bottom out the rear end on larger hits. Like I mentioned above, a stiffer spring helped this a lot, as did a few clicks on the high speed compression knob.

A couple things I did notice about the rearward axle path:

First, and most importantly, it makes the bike corner quite a bit differently than something with a more vertical or forward axle path (like a Specialized Demo or Trek Session). This actually took a fair amount of getting used to on my part (and it included more than a few blown corners).

Most of the more common bikes out there don’t have a ton of rearward movement as the suspension compresses; my seat of the pants guess is that around 20mm or less of rearward movement is average. So that means, as you press into a hard corner and the suspension (both front and rear) compresses, the bike’s wheelbase is often times getting shorter (since the front wheel is effectively moving backward relative to the rear wheel). A shorter wheelbase will go around a turn more easily, so this is generally a good thing.

But the Jedi doesn’t do that; depending on your weight bias, the wheelbase will either stay the same or get longer in a corner. This is pretty noticeable on tight little berms, like (for example) the ones on Ninja Cougar in Whistler. On more playful bikes you can whip through those corners and use the suspension to pop you from one berm to the next. The Jedi doesn’t really like to do that though. It wants to go straight and hold a line, and that means I find that I really have to work to make it corner properly.

The second thing I noticed is that the rear wheel moves dramatically rearward for the first ⅔ of its travel, but it actually reverses direction and swings into a forward arc for the last ⅓. The bike came with a 400lb spring on it initially, and after much fiddling, I finally concluded that I was getting too deep into the travel too often, and I wasn’t getting the full benefit of that rearward movement.

So I swapped for that heavier 450lb spring, which kept me riding a bit higher in the travel. Even though this means I’m running relatively little sag (for a DH bike), I actually prefer it rough stuff, which might be somewhat counter-intuitive.

The last thing I noticed about the rearward axle path is that I seem to get a lot of rim “pings.” As best as I can tell, this is because as the rear suspension decompresses, the wheel is returning to a more forward position. If another bump comes along right at that moment (which happens pretty often), the rear wheel tends to smack it extra hard. The suspension still does its thing and the wheel still gets out of the way of that next obstacle, but I get those audible “pings” from the rear rim pretty often on the Jedi. So far, it doesn’t seem like this is actually taking much of a toll on the rim, but it makes me feel like a hack.

NEXT: Varied Riding Situations, Comparisons, Etc.