This year kona brought out a new Hei Hei, which as a hei hei owner got my attention. I've been riding mine for 5 years and 8000 miles and have started thinking about a replacement bike. I like mine perfectly well, it's been tweaked and tuned and modified greatly over the years and has turned into a bike I like that works really well for my uses, which range from wed night XC races to all day adventures and 100mi events. But, it's getting old and the parts on it are now a bit out of date and would you look at all the new and shiny things out there!
So yeah, last week kona sent us a bike to try out and hey hey it even happens to be my size
So what's new with the new bike? well, as is the trend, it got a bit longer and slacker and has a steeper seat tube angle, but not by much. The front fork went from 120 to 130mm while the rear stays at 120mm of travel. It gets nice suspension- a pike and deluxe ultimate, decent tires, and the rest of the parts are kind of meh. motive bronze brakes, eagle 90, trans-x seatpost, basic kona bar and stem, dt370 hubs to wtb rims with 3c/exo/tr 2.4 dissectors. And a wtb saddle literally no one will like. You're basically buying the frame and suspension. For $5300. With XTR pedals and one bottle cage it was just over 31 pounds. My hei hei is under 25 with my lightest wheels, but usually more like 25.5, also with pedals and bottle cages.
The HTA is 1.5deg slacker at 66 and the chainstays got 5mm longer. In my size, an XL, the reach got 9mm longer, stack got a lot taller (more than I'd like at 640mm, old bike is 610). The listed sta is almost a degree steeper; however, like the old bike, the seat tube does not line up with the BB and gets slacker the taller your seat is, so as ridden I am definitely not at those listed 75-76 degree numbers on either bike. This isn't too bad when it comes to pedaling on flatter and rolling terrain, but does put you a little farther back than might be ideal for steeper climbs and gets worse the taller you are. But, seat tubes can only get so steep, chainstays can only be so long, and it's just something a tall person has to deal with. On my bike, and this one, I do have the saddle about all the way forward, but I find that it's far enough before i start having too much weight on my hands. This whole "you need a 77deg sta" thing seems a bit much if you're actually pedaling around.
It's still a single pivot but no more flex stays like the previous version. This adds weight but does let the suspension move a bit more freely. The whole linkage is generally similar, but with more anti-squat and a straighter leverage curve (so less ramp up of progression). With my bike, it took a bit of tinkering to get the suspension to feel like I wanted and be better at pedaling. Cranking pressure up only goes so far as then you never use all the travel and it feels harsh, so I went to smaller volume spacers which means a less progressive spring curve, allowing me to have a higher spring rate and better initial support while still actually using the suspension travel. I also had the shock revalved to be "firm digressive," which basically means a lot of low speed force to keep the suspension from moving as much under slow movements like pedaling hard. I'm fairly happy- it has good response but stays smooth over the rougher stuff. Still, I ride it at just under 20% sag and use the lockout switch.
Setting up the new bike I erred on the firm side with the shock, doing a quick, "sit on bike and check" and wound up right at 20% and then set the front so it felt soft enough. I generally don't worry about measuring fork sag and instead just go by how the balance feels and keep an eye on the travel indicators to further fine tune. I have trended toward a pretty soft fork for better comfort and don't worry if i lightly bottom out sometimes. I think I was at about 65psi in the 130mm pike. I weigh about 160. I got the seat in the right general position, slammed the stem, and called it good.
For my ride I did my usual saturday night thing, going straight up the barmeyer trail to the top of dean stone, across house of sky, through pattee and crazy canyon, and out the moZ to wally and buck. It's a really great ride- lots of climbing, backcountry-esqe ridgeline riding, and then whatever sort of variety you want on the way back into town. Sometimes I go to the top of mount sentinel too, but on this ride only had time for chopsticks, which i really wanted to go down on the new bike to see how it feels on the rougher stuff.
The ride climbs 2500 feet straight from town so I was going to get a feel for how the bike rides up hill. As it's not on XC tires, and weighs 31lbs, I was not particularly optimistic. At a moderate pace it moves along fairly well, but does not really reward harder pedaling. It seemed like the extra anti-squat was useful but the extra weight and slower tires really dragged the bike down. Stranding up and cranking was kind of an exercise in futilty. Can we get moving please? I swear I can pedal pretty hard why am I not going anywhere. There are no lockouts or mode switches on this suspension but they do get a couple of fancy dials, and like I said, the extra anti-squat seemed effective at keeping the rear end from moving much when you stand on it and I would say that out of the box this suspension is in a better place than my bike. Probably it's just the weight and tires I'm feeling and if I ride it again I'll at least use my wheels and tires. What's tempting is to swap over like, everything, but that seems like a lot of work.
Anyhow, I finally made it to the top, 4 min slower over an hour than last week at a similar effort and HR.
Riding down, I'd describe this bike as "smooth." It's a small step from my bike, but the fancy suspension, extra fork travel, longer wheel base, and slacker head tube are all noticable. The 18t ratchets are also practically silent, whereas my 54t 240 exp hubs are very much not, so the very quiet ride did stand out. I also only had like 18/19psi in the dissectors so those were pretty grippy compared to my usual xc tires. Nothing is really drastically different though so it was easy enought to adapt to that little bit extra traction and stability and have a fun time riding the bike. Downhill anyway. The only funny thing I noticed was that in quick direction changes the rear end got pretty slidey and loose, which i wasn't really expecting given the longer bike and longer chainstays. I think that might have just been the tires, which have a pretty open transition zone, and so probably that sliding was just happening when the tire wasn't on the edge knobs.
After the ridgeline trail and house of sky down to deer creek, I went down sam braxton and then crossed the road and climbed up to chopsticks, which is steep, fast, and a bit chunky. This got the bike up to speed and had the suspension working and it all felt pretty good and I actually expected the rear to be harsher with my sag setting. I made it to the bottom within a couple seconds of my PR (that I set last week on mezcals). I was, however, a little surprised to see that I'd used almost all of the suspension travel (plus I dinged the front rim at some point). The trail is rocky, sure, but there are no big hits or g-outs or drops or anything like that, and on my more linear rear spring rate hei hei i don't come anywhere close to bottoming out at the same speed on the same trail. So I'm not sure what that's all about and I really did not expect to go through that much travel at 20% sag on an off the shelf shock- I guess I would need more volume spacer in the air spring.
Anyway, I didn't not like the bike but it also didn't make me want to go out and buy one immediately, and it had me wondering if a bigger travel bike that weighs a similar amount might be a better option if I was willing to deal with all this chunk on the uphills. But nobody likes a heavy XC bike.
IF I got a new hei hei I would definitely have to start from a frame because I don't want this version of the bike or really any of the parts on it. I'd even want a more XC oriented shock and a lighter 120mm fork.
The eagle 90 is fine but a bit slow and unhappy when you try to make a bunch of shifts in a row (just like the electric version I suppose). It also never seemed to be perfectly dialed in and I kept going back and forth one notch on the barrel adjuster. If you make yourself only shift one gear at a time you definitely do notice that it's better at making one shift under high load than the previous stuff, and presumably i would get a little better at anticipating shifts. Still, think of that case where you come out of a steep slow uphill switchback and the trail flattens out- you need like 3 gears right away. When I started going a litle faster and pushing the drivetrain a bit it got kind of unhappy.
The extra seatpost drop (175mm vs my 125) was nice, the motive bronze brakes actually feel really good and have much less initial free stroke and better bite than my guide rscs with a fresh rebuild and bleed and mtx red pads. I also suppose that with my bike i went through the same thing- changing all the parts to make it lighter and tinkering with the suspension to get better pedaling performance. But I think I'm better off starting with a bike more like the cannondale scalpel next time around.
One thing kona did with this frame is put a lot more mounts in it. There are 5 bosses on the downtube, 2 more on the seat tube, and then 2 under the top tube in front of the shock, offering you way more ability to mount things to the frame. Sort of. My hei hei has room for two big bottles in the frame and a little tube roll tucks in between them nicely.
You can do two inline on the downtube on this XL at least but I'm not sure about the other sizes or if it'll fit big bottles. I was trying to get out after work and so I just pulled that cage back off, stuck a bottle in my hip pack, and called it good enough. Maybe a little more experimenting with the arraingement would make me less annoyed and i could probably make use of all the extra mounts with things like bear spray and a bolt on tool roll/strap thing.
Anyway, as someone who has possibly ridden the previous hei hei more than anyone short of Cory Wallace, it was nice to get to try the new one. But I still like mine better.
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