Coming off the back of the original Tallboy’s success, Santa Cruz have gone back to the drawing board to design two new 29er’s based on the original Tallboy frame. Harnessing what many riders have been looking for from a 29er, Santa Cruz have integrated long travel and responsive geometry into an already proven and celebrated product. I think it’s fair to say these will be popular…

Tallboy LT Carbon.

The blurb from SC – Here’s where we get into the flagship of our flagships. We put a lot of emphasis on the suspension performance and ride characteristics of our VPP suspension-design tuneability of shock rates for individual designs, superb pedaling AND bump absorption characteristics, awesome chassis stiffness and ride dynamics, short stiff links with really good hardware, durability, ease of service—but we get real geeked out when we can build all that stuff into a carbon fiber bike. Carbon fiber processes are not all equal, and this is not all just random “black metal.” We are very proud of what we can achieve with carbon fiber, and the way we do our layup gives us the advantage to build bikes that are lighter AND stronger than just about everyone else. That said, this is the Tallboy LTc. Same geometry, same suspension, same intent as the aluminum version, but crafted from carbon fiber using our proprietary onepiece layup process. This is also our first foray into 142×12 rear axle territory. For lack of any better hyperbole, this bike is siiiiiick! 135mm travel, all the good juicy features already mentioned in the Tallboy LT blurb above, but also stiffer, stronger, and really, really effing light. Weight for a frame, with shock included, is 5.3 pounds.

And the Tallboy LT Alloy.

The Tallboy has been a hugely successful bike for us. And it is clearly evident that the 29″ market is evolving, and the industry is figuring out how to make these bikes handle and perform well in a wider set of terrain than was thought possible a few years ago. (Somewhere we can hear Wes Williams laughing at us all) So, in order to meet the needs of riders who want aggressive allmountain bikes AND big wheels, here’s the Tallboy LT. It’s a 135mm travel bike with VPP suspension designed to run 130150mm forks. The TBLT head angle is a degree and a half slacker than that of the Tallboy, seat angle just under half a degree slacker. Doing the apples to grapes comparison that inevitably crops up whenever people start getting into wheel size arguments, think of this as a bigwheel alternative to our Blur LT—versatile enough to handle daily duty as a doitall bike, but burly enough to run hard in the big ugly stuff.

More from Santa Cruz here on FJ later in the year…

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