MSRP:$1899.99 now $1539.99 Frame Only
GBS Impression; If your looking for an ultralight hardtail, look no further. The Highball is a nimble little beast that will definitely take some time off your personal best on climbing. Many of the carbon hardtails out there have an exceptional feel. It is hard to beat the combination of stiffness and lightweight that you find in a carbon hardtail. From a service standpoint the Highball makes things easy. Though many people enjoy the sleek look of internal routing, it can often be difficult to re-cable a bike quickly. The Highball, however, uses traditional external routing with cable stops, so working on your bike does not require special tools or extra time feeding cables through the frame.
Santa Cruz Impression; There are still those times and places where the best way to light the fuse and blow everyone else into the weeds is by riding a hardtail. Bigger wheels have revived the venerable double diamond design, and by mixing the smooth rolling hoops with a feathery 2.4-pound carbon fiber frame, we’ve come up with a potent race weapon. Anyone who complains about a bad day climbing while riding this bike needs to find another sport. The Highball is insanely light, razor sharp, nimble but surefooted, stiff as a plank, and designed to do two things: 1. Race. 2. Win.
We have some fancy carbon manufacturing going on, but we declined to give it any acronyms – it seems like that field is pretty well covered by others. In many cases, those acronyms are not indicative of anything special, but are simply a way to stuff some marketing down your throats. Anyway, here are three things that we do with our carbon fiber bikes that are unique, and that we can share with you without having to have your memory erased afterward:
1) One piece lay-up and curing.
By laying up and curing the front triangle all at the same time, and not assembling together pieces, we’re able to decrease the amount of material used by eliminating overlapping joints that have to be bonded or wrapped with carbon. Less material means fewer grams. This method is extremely expensive to do, since each size has to have a lot of dedicated tooling, nothing is shared between each size.
2) Continuing fibers around tube junctions.
The one-piece lay-up of the front triangle allows continuous fibers to be used that wrap between tubes, allowing the structure to distribute loads better, and absorb impact energy. We also are able to truly integrate the shock mounts, pivot mounts, dropouts and disc brake tabs into the structure, using all uni-directional carbon plies. The shock mount isn’t merely riveted or bonded on after curing, but an integrated part of the fiber lay-up. This makes our carbon frames incredibly strong and able to absorb impact better than any other frames we’ve tested.
3) Net shape lay-up and fiber compaction.
Our lay-up process allow us to control the outside shape, inside shape, and to compact the fiber layers during the lay-up. This eliminates gaps between layers, and keeps resin from migrating to the inside of the tubes, or allowing delamination during the molding process. You can’t see this without getting inside the frame, but we’re more proud of how the inside of these frames look than the outside. No gaps, no filler or mystery material. No resin pools, or glued together sections. It’s a frame you wouldn’t be embarrassed to bring home to mom. No skeletons in the closet, and no rider weight limits either.
