Starling Cycles Twist M

After having my second Orange alloy frame developing a crack it is time to take the steel is real path! I had good experiences with UK bikebrands using Reynolds tubing and loved the single pivot kinematic and flex of my last two Oranges. So the choice fell on Starling Cycles. Right now I'm stuck in the frustrating phase of playing shock and bottle tetris since few weeks. Let's start with the basics: From a technical perspective the shock should be mounted so that the heavy internals and the piggy back is fixed on the front triangle. Imagine this as calm and steady sprung mass. On the other hand the light and stiff piston side of the shock should be attatched to the rear part of the frame. This is unsprung mass. The unsprung mass is hammering as fast and as often as the back wheel clears obstacles on rought sections. Sticking to this ideology means tere is only one possible position on his frame. I'll refere to it as the EXT position. In the EXT positon the piggy back is positioned very central making it inpossible to fit a bottle on the toptube. This is the position for the best shock performance. The downtube looks plenty spacious for a bottle and would be a central and low place to add 500g on my bike. BUT, the vertical tubes of the rear triangle will move so far that it's impossible to even carry a small bottle there. I know it looks a bit funny but my favourite way to mount the shock is in the double reverse position. What I mean by double reverse is not only switching the front and back of the shock but switching up and down too. Like this the piggy back is facing down and freeing a lot of space to move the bottle back along the toptube. I checked with EXT because of the oil flow-gravity and internals. As performance oriented perfectionist they did not like my double reverse idea but they still gave me a go to do it if the piggy back wouldn't touch the downtube. BUT it did. So I got forced on to turn it back up. I'll refere to it as the best compromise position. The compromise of turning the piggy back up to get enought space for a bottle on the toptube with the 65mm safety margin for using all the travel. The double reverse position keep hunting me at night and it would 100% work with a shorter stroke. EXT makes 62.5, 60 and even 57.5mm strokes but I wouldn't want to go less than 230x60mm as this already reduce the rear travel from 165mm to 150mm. Because of the unchanged 230mm length it wouldn't mess up the geo. Now the first step it to find out how much the sroke needs to be, to clear the downtube. Second step is to decide if this is worth it. After some investigation step one was completet with 50mm stroke. BUT there is no 230x50mm. The only option is to go for a 210x50 Shock but even with the Trail setup this would mess up the geometry. I don't wan't to make this sacrifice and I can't imagine a 135/160mm bike beeing well balanced so once again I was forced back to the best compromise position. BUT a week later in my next nightmare a voice told me this: "Why don't you use a taller triangle connecting the frame to the shock?" Like this the piggy back would clear the downtube even with a 60-65mm stroke. The kinematic would even be a bit more linear. The geometry would stay the same and I'm sure Joe would be keen on making me two custom steel plates. But first I'll print out some pictures, cut out the rear, -front triangle, a Bottle and a shock and pin it together so that it can rotate it. Comes out that the piggy back would clear the downtube but making the mount higer takes up even more of the precious room between coil and toptube so that I woud need to shift the bottle even more forward. In the first place I wanted to mount the shock with the piggy back facing down to free up space for the bottle but if achieving the the doublereverse shock position moves the bottle even further up it's a nobrainer because it's the exact opposite of why I wanted to do it in the first place. So back again to the best compromise position and big shoutout to Startling Cycles for having the best solution already as OEM starndart option.  The colorchoice was easy when having the opportunity to coulourmatch it to my beloved pink UK steel commuter. The plan is to buid it up as og mtb with innertubes, massive mirrorpolished CNC Stem, 31.8 riser, coil shock and not a single carbon part. This bike will completly lack modern marketing gimmics like o-chain, electronic shifting, wireless droppers and big cassettes. It should be ready in june/july 2024 just in time for the new EXT Storia V4.