More Progression and More Travel, Cascade Components' New V4 Santa Cruz Tallboy Link

The downhiller’s trail bike taken a step further. We give you our new V4 Tallboy link. When we first started in on the Tallboy link there was some hesitation. With a 120mm bike, would the changes be as noticeable as desired? That question was answered on the first test ride. 

This link amplifies the Tallboy’s best traits without hindering its agility when you’re on the pedals. The link increases the amount of progression to 32%, bumps travel to 128mm, and increases the chainstay length by 5mm. This link, as with our others, is about the leverage curve changes though. The leverage curve is designed to provide a smooth ramp up between a supple top of travel and a supportive bottom of travel, which results in a surprisingly bottomless feeling for a bike in its travel range and improves descending across the board.

The Tallboy link is designed around the stock 190x45 shock size and is compatible with all shocks that are compatible with the stock link. We get a lot of questions about coil shocks and Santa Cruz bikes that are listed as not compatible with a coil. Here’s our take on it with the Tallboy. Yes, coil shocks will fit with this link, as they do with the stock link. For most riders, a coil shock is not the way to go on the Tallboy. The size of impact that a coil spring can absorb is decreased very quickly as the shock stroke is decreased. The Tallboy uses a relatively short shock, so this requires over-springing or running excessive damping, both of which are generally detrimental to how the suspension behaves. As such, our recommendation is to stick with air.

Specs and Details:

• 128 mm of travel (with stock shock)
• Progression increases to 32% from 26%
• + 5 mm chainstay length
• Sealed Enduro MAX bearings
• CNC'd out of 6061-T6 in the USA
•  $331 USD

Typically, we don’t include anti-squat data with these releases since we don’t want people to get too caught up in them. The pedaling performance is always comparable to the stock link. In some cases, it’s improved, but not to the extent that it would be noticeable. Since this bike is more pedal oriented than any of the other bikes we have done links for in the past, we figured we’d include it this time.

This graph will take a slight bit of explaining so bear with us for a second. It displays the chain growth rate, which is almost like a leverage curve for your chain forces. The reason for doing this as opposed to anti-squat curves as they are normally displayed, is that it removes all variables that must be arbitrarily chosen (rider CG location, gearing, etc.). This makes it more clear how the pedaling will be compared to the set up you use.

As you can see in the graph, the two curves practically overlap for the entirety of travel. The chain growth rate for our link is actually a hair higher than that of the stock link, but not by an amount that is anywhere near noticeable on the trail.

For more details check out CascadeComponents.com