My first Ti or the Lynskey Review

I'm not afraid to admit, I've never ridden a titanium bike before.
I've always wanted to give it a try though so I was very stoked when George said that we'd be building up the small Lynskey Pro29 in my size. And if it wasn't enough that I'd get to test out this cool new bike, George also got it into his head that this would be a Ridiculight build. What started as a straight part swap from my Niner EMD to the Pro29 - became an exercise in shaving grams.

He weighed every Schwalbe Racing Ralph in stock to find the lightest pair in stock. The front was a not very heavy 551g, the rear 547g. All in the pursuit of Ridiculight.

The Mother's Day Royale wheels were deconstructed and rebuilt to go tubeless using the 355 rim.

Every part was carefully considered for it's weight contribution. Of course, in order to have it ready to roll up at the Kingdom Trails over the weekend, we had to make a concession or two. For example, the new Easton bars and stem didn't arrive in time to make the initial build.

Completely built, with Speedplay Frogs but without a water bottle cage, the bike weighs a respectable 22.6 pounds.

But how does it ride?

Fantastic.

It's light and zippy. Very responsive - but not twitchy in any way. It handles like a dream on singletrack. I was very pleased with it's ability to scale technical steep sections, and since it hardly weighs anything, you feel like you're just flying up the hill.

The curved top tube offers a lot of standover - I've said it before, although 5'6" isn't that short, I have short legs. This frame has plenty of standover and could definitely accommodate a much shorter rider than myself.

The Ti frame is stiff, but soaks up a lot of the trail chatter, making this bike inherently more smooth and pleasant than aluminum hardtails that I've ridden recently.

The only negative for me is occasional toe overlap with the front wheel. This is probably peculiar to the small frame, and happened only randomly on tight switchbacks, but nonetheless it was a little disappointing for a fame of this calibre.

Other than that, this bike is fast and solid. It would be a fantastic choice for racing and I hope to be able to test it out at some off-road tris, one of these days.