Why’d We Do That: Electric Queen Rigid Fok

Why’d We Do That: Electric Queen Rigid Fok

While we've gotten very good at "doing stuff" over the years, we often aren't very good of explaining "WHY" we did that thing. This article is an attempt to explain our reasoning...

Today's topic is the rigid fork on the Electric Queen. We've received a few inquiries from dealers and customers about why we decided to include a rigid fork with the framesets of the new Cyan splatter EQ.

(Shown in the photos is a first run Electric Queen with a painted to match rigid fork, available as an aftermarket part)

Well, here's our line of thought on including it with the frameset. The gist, is that we'd prefer if everyone owned a rigid fork to accompany their Electric Queen. However we chose to build the complete bike with a sus fork, so for those folks we're making it available aftermarket. The framesets come with it. 

We have this belief because we want our bikes to be used and ridden for a very long time, this is a mountain bike, which means that it is more technology dependent than a road bike, for example. While road bike and road bike tech is fairly stable, a 20 year old rim brake road bike for instance isn't going to give that much of a dramatically different ride experience than a new one, mountain bikes are a whole different game. In the last 20, or hell 10 years, geometry has become radically different, suspension is way different, standards (spacing of hubs, etc) is different, etc.  A 20 or 10 year old mtb isn't going to give near the same experience as a modern one. (I know this well as a collector of vintage mtb's, which I love, but generally repurpose as rigid daily riders)

This means that there will come a time at some point when your EQ is dated and may no longer give the mountain bike experience that you're looking for. For most companies in the bike industry, that's fine, who cares? Buy a new one! For us though, we hope you fall in love with your bike and want to keep it around forever. In that situation having the rigid fork is totally sweet because in our minds, it will always be a good useful bike when that fork is in use. You can pedal it around more efficiently, use it for transportation, etc. We think it extends the useful life of the product. 

Not to mention that the rigid fork is the jam for bike packing and snow riding duties. 

You may not intend to use the rigid fork right now, but we hope that some day down the line you'll be super stoked to have that option available to you.