With hardtails, I only have one previous mullet experience, which was my personal Kona Explosif. It boosts the fun factor, increases tire clearance for my 5'9" frame, and the trade-offs in reduced attack angle and traction are largely equalized by a good suspension design and sag.
#Santa cruz chameleon full
I've been plugging 27" wheels into 29er full suspension bikes for years and have no plans to stop. I wonder if they'll send me the 29er dropouts? The latest from Santa Cruz has an even cleaner version of their excellent sliding dropouts. The new geometry, now using a 65° HTA with a 130mm fork, looks good on paper. I smile as I pull the sweet yellow Chameleon out of the box. *Shout out to the wonderful works of Frank The Welder who builds in aluminum and steel The Chameleon's frame-only price of 950 USD | 1350 CAD is easily justified. Add in some very intelligent sliding dropouts, a sub 5-lb (claimed) frame weight, a lifetime warranty, and then compare it to other volume-produced hardtails. It's not a custom frame but that doesn't mean that a heck of a lot of thought wasn't pumped into the design. I attribute that to the effort put into the tubing and frame design, like the lack of a chainstay and seatstay bridge which carries forward to this generation of the frame. For a direct comparison, both generations of Honzo ST frames I owned and loved were notably less compliant. But before readers jump into the comments with tired tropes about how 'Steel Is Real,' I've owned a fair few hardtails and ridden a lot more, and if we're drilling down to the ride of the frame itself, the last generation Chameleon aluminum is one of the nicer ones I've ridden. That's not saying that a Kona Honzo ST or Unit isn't a fantastic machine. That's not meant to take away from your Surly, Stooge, or Chromag Stylus. And frankly, the majority of steel frames out on the trails aren't either. The vast majority of custom frame builders create with steel,* with any number of masters also working with titanium, and one of the reasons is complete control of their process from tubes to a finished product.īut the aluminum Chameleon isn't a custom frame from someone's small shop in FoCo, Frome, or Heriot Bay. A talented garage welder with minimal tooling can build a beautiful machine with fantastic ride qualities and bleeding-edge geometry. As a material, it has great qualities for building bicycles, and perhaps the key among them is that it is the most straightforward to work with. More specifically, we built up a custom IWC alloy wheelset for it.Steel. We spec’d out this particular build as a 27.5″ wheel size with 2.35 tires. The bike was easy to build up, easy to find the correct build specs for headset, bb, etc… More importantly, the frame came prepped so I could start throwing parts on immediately! This bike went together like a beginner Lego kit. Upsized to either 29-inch or 27.5+ wheels, the Chameleon shifts from trail-worthy hardtail to bikepacker to garbage-weather weapon of choice with simple, elegant aplomb. The wheel change is accomplished via interchangeable dropouts, and there’s a singlespeed version for each wheel size. Santa Cruz had this to say about it:ĭirt or asphalt, mountain or urban, geared or singlespeed-the moniker Chameleon has never rang more true than on this updated-for-2017 Santa Cruz classic.
The Santa Cruz Chameleon has been in the line-up for some years now as a regular hardtail option.
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