575

I'm really pretty bad about buying maintenance products until I absolutely need them. I mean, I'll go out of my way to stop in a bike shop, just to stare at really expensive bikes, that I cannot possibly afford in the foreseeable future. And as soon as I can afford any little upgrade, I'll drop everything to ride over to whichever store has the best deal. But as soon as I need maintenance products, I'll procrastinate and find whatever reason possible to buy it later.

Now that fall is officially here and snow isn't that far off, I needed to replenish my stock of waterproof lube. I finally got off my ass and rode over to Wheat Ridge Cyclery for a bottle of oil, and some window shopping. Honestly, Performance would've been a quicker ride, and probably a little cheaper, but I dislike Performance Bike (and chain stores in general) and I've been feeling kinda guilty about not supporting my fave local bike shop lately. Plus, WRC has a much better selection of awesome stuff to drool over.

On prominent display were these two lovelies:

Yes, they have two of the 25th Anniversary Yeti 575's. They're pretty much the same as a standard 575, with a few key differences: first, obviously, is the paint job in the retro Yeti race colors. I'm not a huge fan of it, but I don't hate it either and I think it's mostly because I just don't really like the color yellow. It also has a tapered headtube, which will come with a matching Chris King headset and a matching turquoise Fox Float fork. One of the biggest differences is the direct-mount front derailleur: because of the shape of the seat tube and added reinforcement (and it's really beefy), there's no way a standard clamp-on front derailleur will fit. Yeti is implementing these changes on upcoming frames as well, so the 2011 575's will be identical to the Anniversary frames aside from the paint job.


The Anniversary 575 also features Yeti's new "Chips" rear dropout system, which will allow different dropout setups simply by swapping out the dropouts themselves. It looks like this is going to be standard on all new Yeti frames as far as I can tell (unfortunately though, I've been informed that the new "Chips" system will not come with Erik Estrada.) The chip system is a pretty smart idea and will let people change dropouts to accommodate wider rear hubs, thru-axles, horizontal dropouts for single-speed use, etc. A lot of manufacturers are putting sliding dropouts on their frames now (to accommodate single-speed setups), but I think this system is far more refined and it looks like it'll be much more stable.

WRC also had one of Yeti's Big Top 29'ers on display. They look very similar to the ARC hardtail, although they've got carbon fiber seat stays, the direct-mount front derailleur system and the "Chips" rear dropout. One thing I'm really hoping to see is carbon fiber seat stays on the ARC frame; it's probably just wishful thinking on my part, but it would be a nice upgrade (Salsa and Voodoo both have hardtail frames with carbon seat stays, and they're supposed to offer a pretty nice ride.) the Big Top is typical Yeti high quality, although the smallest frame size is 18.5", which is way too big for me...and a pretty standard drawback to the 29'er platform for people of my size (ie, "really short".) Unfortunately there's only so much manufacturers can do with frame geometry, unless they figure out how to bend the laws of physics. As it stands, the 29'ers that do fit people my size tend to have pretty slack head tube angles, which tends to make for more awkward steering compared to a 26-inch bike.

In typical Yeti style, neither of these bikes are cheap. The Big Top was right around the $2800 mark, and the 575 Anniversary was $4500. Even though they've only got the framesets on display, the pricing is for the complete bike with Shimano XT and XTR parts (maybe I'm being nit-picky, but I personally think that a bike that costs $4500 should come with all XTR- or X.0-level parts, especially when that bike is primarily aluminum and doesn't have the high overhead costs that carbon fiber does. FYI, the only carbon fiber on the Anniversary 575 are the seat stays.) Anyway, that's about $600 more than an identically-equipped "standard" 2010 575 they had, so I guess it comes down to whether someone thinks the limited edition paint job and matching fork/headset is worth the extra money. Every article I've read on the interwebz states that all of the 25th Anniversary 575's are sold already, although that's a bit misleading. All of them are already allocated to dealers, but there are certainly some available for sale to actual consumers. By the way, I came across an article (I believe it was on BikeRumor, but I can't remember for sure) wherein a Yeti employee stated that they are going to do a run of the 303 DH models in the anniversary paint job as well.

Also, SRAM is working on getting out some direct-mount front derailleurs soon, at least for the XX group. I would imagine they'll be making them for other groups too, but from what I gathered, SRAM is starting off with the XX group. The only downside I can see to direct-mount front derailleurs is chainring clearance: if the mount isn't manufactured spot-on, it's going to cause all sorts of alignment problems.