The Abigail experience

For many and varied reasons I now have a Merida 96. Not your blinged out carbon job,.just started with the basic aluminium frame although it does have carbon seatstays.

I've had a lot of ideas I wanted to try and in building this bike a lot came together in the one place, hopefully more harmonious than the No 96 of aussie tv fame. So in this post(s) I hope to share some of my ideas and hopefully enlighten us all in some way.

2009 Merida 96 3000-D frame
X-Fusion Velevet R Fork
X-Fusion 02 RPV shock
SRAM X-9 Shifters and front derailleur
SRAM 2010 X-9 Rear derailluer medium cage

Truvativ Stylo Team cranks
Enduro BB
Hygia Usagi brakes
Maxxis Ardent 2.25 front
Maxxis Aspen 2.0 rear
TA Specialite chain rings 40 mid 28 granny

The frame

Apart from holding all the gear together the 96 frame has some interesting points. The main ones of interest to us are the rear end. The 96 is one of only a few bikes that use a 2:1 ratio for the rear shock.(most are like 2.6:1) it also adds a swing link with angles that create a hesitation in the initial part of the travel, which is like a mechanical lockout or pedal platform. Anyway we can talk about that later. The other part of note is the carbon seatstay, and nice touch on a bike at this price point and fairly useful given it is designed to act like a hardtail at least some of the time.
Merida have used some really neat little cable clamps on the down tube which also mount under the bottle cage. Unfortunately on the small frames this furtehr reduces the space available for an actual bottle so I decided to leave these out and simply run the cables either side of the cage. I also ended up drilling a couple of new holes in the cage to allow it to sit further down the tube allowing it work a bit easier and it stil sits just off the downtube.




Fork and Shock.
Choice of suspension was obviously going to be X-Fusion and the aluminium framed 96's all come with X-Fusion rear shocks anyway.

Whack the Velvets on the front and it's an all X-Fusion full boinger. All our Velvet R forks now come spec'd with our valve/shimming to balance the compression and rebound circuits to suit trail/enduance, so that part was a simple install.

The rear stock rear shock (X-Fusion 02 RC) has received varied review and so I thought we should pay attention to the setup here. The first obvious thing was that straight out of the box the shock topped out badly. A simple check and it was obvious that there was no negative spring pressure, and a quick air sleeve service later it was performing much better. See footnote about negative springs on air shocks. This is not uncommon with any shock fitted to a new bike, but the 02 RC is dependant on the negative spring to work well.

Sharp eyes will note that the shock pictured on this bike is not the stock 02 RC but an 02 RPV. Why? Two reasons. The 02 RPV is probably the most underrated shock in the X-Fusion line-up. Simple but effective and very reliable it also has the advantage that it is easily tuned to suit varying frames and applications. So when I am trying to determine the best shock config for a frame I almost always go back to the RPV. Oddly given the non-standard 2:1 ratio the RPV worked brilliantly straight up. A couple of minor tweaks and I don't want to change it. The only odd thing is that conventional shock set up goes outs the window. For instance my current sag is running at about 2-3mm. The RPV has a light pedal platform (02 RC does not) and this would also reduce the effective sag. Obviously this sag vary depending on the shock used and rider preferences but I would expect minimal sag of < 7mm would suit most riders.