Vital MTB's Top Reviewer Award - Presented by Jenson USA - Mountain Bike Feature

Every 30 days, we award the Top User Reviewer with a little prize. This month Jenson USA pitched in a $100 gift card! Vital MTB member TheRage43 wrote a handful of good reviews, and we'd like to highlight the ones that helped earned her the Top Reviewer spot.

Canfield Brothers 9t Microdrive Hub - "Enter the Canfield Bro’s 9t Micro Drive Hub. Using this hub with a 10 speed setup, I have a low end of 28x36 and a top end of 28x9, which, if you crunch the numbers, is just shy of the full range of my previous 24/36t x 11-34t. The range on this hub is absolutely amazing for being a 1x system, and I was able to eliminate the weight and clutter of the second ring, FD, shifter and cable. SRAM’s XX1 series is the only thing close to the range currently and is drastically more expensive for the full set. The setup on this hub and cassette conversion was a breeze as well. I used the PG 1070 and the 4 lower rings just get swapped out for the stack from Canfield, which just stacks one on top of the other and the final lock ring threads on and locks it all securely. It’s a very simple and effective design, another winner from Canfield!"

Canfield Brothers Jedi Frame - "I can’t say enough about this bike… The rumors and claims are true, this thing eats the gnarliest lines and feels like it’s accelerating through them! The rearward axel path really does work as intended, allowing the forward momentum to pull the rear wheel up and over square rocks and deep roots without losing any speed. Going off of drops or jumps, any time you get deep in the suspension the bike just rockets forward. This might seem dangerous or frightening if it weren’t for how amazingly stable the bike is at speeds. There were many times this last season that I had a solitary moment of “oh no this won’t end well…” and the bike just walked right out of it. “Confidence inspiring” is a term I have heard used for this bike but that’s just the tip of the iceberg for me, riding this bike is like cheating. I always rode to have fun and never tried to push myself over the limit, but with this bike I keep pushing and pushing and it just keeps going and going. By the end of my first season on the Jedi I felt I had progressed more than in the last 10 years of riding. I’ve demo’ed almost all of the major bikes available from shops in my area over the last few years, and while a lot of them were amazing rides (like the V10c and the Glory), none of them felt as good as this bike, straight out of the gate."

Canfield Brothers The One Frame - "The pedaling power is what really struck me about this bike. While there was natural pedal bob from the forces of my leg pushing down, there is NONE generated from the actual motion of the crank spinning. I really noticed this when I would change gears from the 36 outer ring to the 24 inner. Different gearing, same ratios, but the smaller ring always has a burst of acceleration as soon as you hit it. I found myself staying in the lower front ring as long as I could most of the time for this benefit. I looked into it and the reason for this is the up and forward curve in the lower suspension link. The design is such to prevent the rear triangle from being pulled in or traveling upwards under pressure from the cranks, mainly with a smaller ring. If you can imagine an increasing chainring size in the front, the larger it gets the more it pulls the rear triangle up, and the smaller it gets, the more it pulls the rear triangle in towards the bb... If you have a very clean pedal stroke you can crank this thing uphill with ease, but as soon as you stand up on the pedals and mash away, you are reminded that you are, in fact, riding an 8” travel bike. This is where the geo comes in again with shining colors, as the seat tube angle makes this bike do the crossover with grace. With the seat low you have a very capable FR/DH bike that rips corners and berms, jumps with pop and handles DH with all the other 8” bikes... Both the suspension and transmission work together so flawlessly that neither interferes with one another, both work great and don’t hamper the others performance. A truly unique design... Fun, fast, graceful."

Big congrats to TheRage43! Thanks for helping out the riding scene with your thoughts on these products.