The worst bike ever made.

Gabe, you should take the BCD down. That thing is legit.

 

How about another Ibis Gem... The Bowti


Or aTrek Y bike (aka the summersalt) I've seen a ton of riders go OTB on them. Not sure if it was a design flaw or rider error but it wasn't all the same rider and it seemed like it was usually over some minor obstacle.

 

These are all champions in my book

 

dude, the ibis bowtie is legit for how weird it is. it's like a softail i-drive. I could live with a titanium full squish singlespeed with a nice rearward axle path... :lol:

and to contribute:
29er fiends can suck it!


and for when one DHX air and one front brake aren't enough:


oh ya, and slack head angles are for newbs! :lol:

 

Dingdingding!!!

Actually, you're right about that. Many people did stack hard on them, but because decent adjustable rebound dampening (not to mention every other facet of shock performance) well, frankly, sucked or was completely missing in early shocks. Lets just say Fox has come a long way since the Alps4. There's nothing mechancially going on that makes the Y dump pilots on their heads any more than any other bike, but riders who didn't set up their shock to stop them from being catapulted over the bars learned fast, since the Judy came stock like mashed potatoes, and the Alps4 kicked like ...an undampened airshock. and since many just bought the bike and rode it without any setup, well...

But for those that did take the time to set them up properly, there is still much to complain about. This is a bike that garners strong opinions, though few have ridden one, and even fewer have ridden one properly (though no fault of thier own).

By now most people know there were several rear ends intended to finish the Y bike, none of which made it to production. I still have a couple prototype linkages in a box somewhere. The single-pivot URT was only a temporary solution. But, the MTB market died down quickly enough that management called "good enough", and gave up on completing the bike.

Nice to hear that the few who've actually spent some time on them have nice things to say. Still, the Y was a fairly compromised production bike, and while every bike has setbacks and shortcomings, there are some fairly major ones at the bottom of most of the negative perceptions of this bike, then and now.

A few of them:

1. We designed the Y around a Risse shock. Marketing pulled a last minute switch to the Fox unit based on color. These shocks were longer, and screwed the geometry up. Also didn't have the same stroke, compression & damping properties. Put a Risse on your Y to feel it ride as intended...

2. ...in 1993. But only if you want the ride qualities we wanted in 1993. We also wanted front suspension that rode like it was locked out all the time, and if it moved, you didn't know it. The bike was designed around the Mag 21 (& not Treks own forks, since the Y's design didn't originate there), but by the time it hit the market, it shipped with RS's new Judy, for a very mismatched feel front to back. Run it with a mag 21 to feel the ride as intended. ...in 1993.

3. To compare rides, ride the alternatives. ...from that same period. Spend some time on a Mac Strut AMP bike, or a high pivot Iron Horse or Boulder, etc... then get on the Y/Risse/RSmg21 and compare. Only then will you get an idea for why the designer and the engineering team bothered to put all that time and effort into the project. It was a considerable step [in the direction XC FS was going at the time] further than anyone else had gone [at that time].

4. The Y was designed to be a FS XC race bike. It was not supposed to be plush and fully active, it was not supposed to be locked out by an over-tensioned chain with every pedal stroke. It was supposed to be more efficient than low pivots, more active than high pivots, and lighter (lets not forget, it was the early 90's) then either, but most importantly, by removing the major mechanical impact of pivot placement of the former systems, we sought to move as much of the feel and efficiency of the bike from the frame to the shock itself. This is acheived to lesser effect in the single pivot rear end, as there are still a couple mechanical hurdles left, but too, shocks back then were pretty crude, so the frames only rode as well as their clunky dampers. They had none of the stable platform trickery we have today that keep our favorite modern FS bikes from riding like pigs either. Try a new Fox with ProPedal on your Y for an interesting ride, if you're going to compare it with modern suspension goals, and having climbed off modern suspension bikes.

...then you'll just hate the geometry.



It's a bike that was rarely built right, and thus never reviewed right, now or then. Anyway, the time for single pivot urt's thankfully passed quickly.

 

Holy Crap! This guy is in love with old TREK FS bikes. They were terrible!

 

I sure would love to have a BowTi in my collection.:beer: Think there were only 269 of these ever made.

 

Thank you for quoting the entire full-page post in its entirety. And did you even read any of it?

Want to try something fun? Take the nifty stable platform shock out of your new FS rig, and put a 1993 Fox Alps shock in there instead. That's how awesome your suspension bike is.

Apples to oranges, isn't it...

 

Are you saying you are the master mind behind the Y bikes? :-k

 

amusingly enough, gabe's one of the few people I could actually see mounting a '93 air shock on his stinky, and STILL going out and riding something crazy on it (and likely faster than a lot of other people at that)

 

Really? Honestly, most of those bikes are decent. Some are older than others, but none features a wacky or archaic suspension design.

Clarify, please.

If you categorically hate suspension bikes, just say so.

 

Wait a minute... These are legit. The Amp is the grand father of the Horst Link or now known as the FSR which is licensed through Specialized. Specialized, Chumba and Ellsworth still use the horst link design. And many companys have used that design in the past including Turner, Intense, Giant and GT to name a few. The GT on your list is basiclly the same design with differant a shock pivot location.

Plus, that Amp had disc brakes and weighed in the low twenties in the mid nineties. It was way ahead of it's time.

 

GTS or STS?

I had a '96 LTS-1 that I rode for about 5 years. It was good to me. True, you had to take apart the back end and grease the bushings regularly, but that was the only drawback. The suspension design was, and still is, a good one.

My LTS was the aluminum version. I've heard people complain about the carbon version...sounds like I'll add you to the list.

As for AMP, I never owned one but I have heard similar reports of those things being too flexy and being short-lived. It was/is a good design, but AMP built them too light.

 

I worked for AMP. They were piles....

If and when the thing shipped out within a day or two something would be broken and I was on the wrong end of a phone call with one extremely pissed of customer. You could practically set your watch by it.

 

It has to be expensive, look retarded and ride like crap and be based on a terrible I

Ah, come on.. It's nothing like saying, "all homes that have 3 doors are a great design" at all. It's more like saying "all doors on a home are basically the same design". They might look differant but they all work the same.

I had 3 differant GT LTS's in the 90's. The GT Team LTS, the LTS 1, and the LTS DS-1000. I gotta say those bikes kicked a$$. Plus, GT's warranty was good back then. You had that GT after Pacific Bike had bought GT and would no longer honor the previous warranty. I had the same problem with those crappy Rockshox shocks and the swing link. But every time it blew or I broke the swing link they sent me a new one. A crappy shock does not make the bike design crappy. If you had a problem with your shock you should of had it fixed. That's like riding around on a flat tire and saying the bike is a piece of crap because your tire won't hold air.

Yeah, the Amp was flimbsy but Amp's basic suspension design is sound. Plus, if you bought that bike in 2001 it was probably all ready 5+ years old and probably all used up. You got to remember when the Amp came out when most everyone was still on hard tails and where hard converts to full suspension. Most being concerned with the weight and pedaling efficiency of full suspension. I'm sure they could of beefed it up but I'm sure it was aimed at the weight weenie XC crowd. It was the predecessor of thing to come.

All designs have to start somewhere. With your logic 10 years from now you'll be looking back saying, "That SC Blur, Pivot Firebird, or Yeti 575 was crap because it's old and I had a couple of problems because I bought it used.

 

This one's pretty recent, Niner WFO #-o

 

What's wrong with the Niner WFO?

I'm not a 29er fan, by the way.

 

I don't think tht a lot of these bikes are the worst design ever. When compared to what is avaliable today yes they are pretty bad. But dont forget a lot of these designs where right at the beginning of the FS revolution. Bikes like the Y bike are not great when compared to todays bikes, but at that time they where right in line with other URT designs. Without these failed designs we would not be where we are at today.

@diamondback. I remember racing at mammoth and borrowing my friends M1 with a Judy DH (Yes the red one) to do town trail, thinking this was the coolest bike to ride around on. I was racing XC at the time and that bike blew my mind.....lol

 

Wow! Interesting information (I'm referring to the whole post but I didn't want to clutter up the page). My riding buddy actually has a Y bike and rode it religiously up until about 6 months ago. He swore by the bike and maintained it was the coolest design he ever saw. He even rode it when we took Joe Lawwill's Bikeskills class. Unfortunately, he is not the most confident rider and was an OTB frequent flyer on the downhills. After being berated incessantly, he finally upgraded to a more modern mountain bike (no offense to your design).

 

Thanks, none taken. It always surprised me that people who actually had em like them as much as they did, considering all the compromises we made. Personally I only rode the single pivot version for a few months before moving on to floating URT & VPP versions, and back to more complex (non-URT) 4bars & 3bars, & screwey integrated drive/susp systems. 15+ years and several hundred frame designs later, I can definitely say the single-pivot URT was not my finest work.

But whenever I see one atop a car all muddy, covered in stickers, and beat to hell, I can't help but smile.