The Pinkbike Podcast: What We Got Wrong, What We'd Like to be and How to Enjoy Your Resolutions More

 Missing the Levy even more - bottom right alien has him now

 @threesixtykickflip: *is him

 They never left.

 @handmedowncountry: A lot of the different bike options did...

 @matyk: Sadly, all the adjustable chain stays nowadays have nothing to do with SS

 @handmedowncountry: Yes. It is really sad

 For enduro / trail bikes I think most riders that want to tinker would choose to alter their head angle before reach, something that's easy to do with 1.5 headtubes. You're right, though, adjusting reach with that headtube and a tapered fork does end up affecting the head angle by .5-degree.

And yes, as a 180cm rider I'd love to see more M/L bikes.

 ...bike manufacturers relying on height data solely from Internet forums where those that are abnormally tall /(or engineers) *can't wait* to blurt it out?

 @fiftypercentsure: In Europe 180cm is male height median....

 @lkubica: Same in Canada, UK, etc. (5'10").

Online, 90% are 200cm tall engineers though.

 @mikekazimer: But adjusting head angle is also not perfect, since you need EC lower cups, with extra ~1cm. Which looks bad. And head angle adjustment works the same for standard headtube and 1.5, except extra stack on upper cup. So for most people 1.5 headtube makes no dfference when it comes to anglesets. The only real drrerence is ability to have cable tourism which is well ... meh

 @lkubica, the Works Components ZS56 angle headset for tapered forks only extends 3mm - it's very low profile.

 @mikekazimer: wow, thanks, had no idea something like this exists.

 Y'all are wild. It's always a bunch of men thinking that an extra centimeter makes such a huge difference.

 @mikekazimer: As possibly the inventor/or at least very early adopter of M/L bikes (we started selling an M/L size 7 years ago which I think was before anyone else - and it wasn't copied from anyone I knew of) I would say that M/L is actually a pointless size. As are all other size names.

Everything between your smallest bike and your biggest bike is a size. There's not a right or wrong size for it to be. In a range with 5 or 6 sizes the increments are small enough that if you move it 5mm this way or 10mm that way then all you're doing is shifting group of people that fit it, and changing the name means nothing.

We design our mid sized bikes around a height of 178cm, which is the average male height in the UK and our biggest market. We then spread out from there and try to capture as many people as we can with the sizes we offer. As it happens the two founders of Bird are 178cm, so that makes prototyping easier as we have pretty average riders to test this out but even then, I ride a 'smaller' bike than my co-founder Dan. On average he prefers our a bigger model to me while I prefer a slightly smaller average size, sometimes I ride a M, sometimes an ML, he's always ML.

The name M/L exists because we wanted a name to describe a bike that was designed for a mid size rider (178cm) but reflected the fact that at the time, our bikes were pretty massive reach numbers compared to the average 'Medium' bike on sale. It stands for in our original parlance 'Medium-Long' but over time has become a Medium-Large. We could have easily gone XS/S/M/L/XL, but we wanted to be sure that people buying our bikes wouldn't fall into the trap of buying a large just because thats what they always had, so ML was born. A size created purely to make you stop and think 'Hey thats maybe the one I need' as opposed to actually needing an extra size in the middle.

More recently we've started designing with the reach & stack more closely packed in the M/ML/L sizes, reflecting that there's a bell curve of sizing and trying to evenly space the sizes doesn't reflect the density of the user base in the mid sizes.

So back to ML - its become a convenient moniker for the middle size in a range, but ultimately wanting more ML bikes is probably more like wanting bikes with shorter reaches/taller stack heights, as well as 5 or 6 size ranges with sizing more closely spaced in the middle. That seems to give more flexibility in terms of fit than increasing/decreasing fixed increments of reach alone, smaller gaps between sizes make it easy to find your perfect fit, and since top tube heights and seat tube lengths are broadly irrelevant now (except on those extreme ends of the spectrum) you can choose between at least 2 sizes and see what works best for you.

 @benpinnick: Cool to see industry's opinion, thanks. It's true that we probably need more sizes. Of course the size depends also on riding style and terrain, but much more often than not, we buy bikes more or less blindly. The only way to assess a bike is to do at least a few laps in proper terrain and even then there are lot's of variables. I am currently on buying a new bike and the only thing I know is my current bike. Now, most bikes are either a LOT larger or a bit smaller. The gap is about 20mm in reach and up to 50mm in WB! So now I have a lot to think about. My decision would be much simpler if gaps between sizes were smaller, and I would buy new bike more eagerly, now I have to risk a lot or spend months on actually demoing bikes, but I can demo like 3 brands maybe at best.

 @mikekazimer: I second this. Inexpensive (but well built) to boot.

 I think that's currently my role. I might have to start spending time on the weird parts of the internet to take up the alien/conspiracy theory slack now that Levy's gone.

 @mikekazimer: yes please.

 ^^^ This PB'er doth protest too much, methinks.