Video: Hard Tail Mountain Bike Tips & Advice

This Season: Tailgating; New Year, New You; Tax Time

Expert bicyclist talks about hard trail mountain bikes, or front suspension bikes, to help you find out if the hard trail bike is the best bike for your needs in this free sporting video series.

- Touring Bike Tips & Advice

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Video Transcript

Hi, this is Aaron Phillips for Expert Village. This is choosing the right bike for you. I am standing here with what is called a hard tail mountain bike or suspension only mountain bike. It is really common bike for the beginning mountain biker to get into. The kind of cost benefit ratio is kind of perfect with a bike like this. You end up with front suspension, it is a really nice thing to have. It soaks up the impact of most the bumps that you are going to encounter on a typical trail while not breaking the bank and giving you rear suspension. Rear suspension is nice to have, it is increasingly common. But there is something a little bit better on the cost benefit ratio with just having a rigid rear end. So we call this a hard tail or a front suspension bike. Here you have got a flat handlebar, which it allows for a more kind of aggressive body positioning then you get for some other bicycles. You could fit a bike like this with a handlebar that gives you a more upright position on the bike, that helps. This bike is designed to you know, this is actually a racing bike. So this is designed to go fast on the dirt, so it is got a pretty tight sort of rear triangle here, it is fitted with two bliss tires on fairly light wheels but there are infinite varieties of this bike, you know this basic configuration called a hard tail. So you walk into your shop you know to buy your bike, you might end up riding out on one of these depending on how much you have to spend. For probably about six or seven hundred dollars in today's world you can get a pretty good hard tail. So if you are looking for a bike that is going to get you around, be durable enough to go on most trail surfaces, then the hard tail is probably your bike. Just as with most mountain bikes you get a really nice wide range of gearing. This right here is like a very large gear, it gives you a nice low gear ratio for spinning up even the steepest hills. In the front you of course have a very small, small chain ring that allows you to keep your peddling cadence very high as you rise up even the steepest hills. The brakes here are V-brakes or direct pull Linear brakes. They are pretty good, they are also called just rim brakes and they stop, they have pretty good stopping power. The braking surface here is ceramic, so that helps give you a little more braking power. Many new bikes, especially if you are spending more than about a thousand dollars are going to have disc brakes and people tend to be very fond of disc brakes for their amazing stopping power in all kinds of conditions.

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Hard Tail Mountain Bike Tips & Advice

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