Ancillotti Scarab Evo Prototype
Ancillotti is a small brand steeped in racing history that goes all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century when the family became acquainted with early motorcycles. A huge chronicle of racing and tweaking motorized two-wheelers culminated in many wins and world records.
Fast forward to 1980 and Alberto Ancillotti invented the 'Pull Shock' linkage that's now found on nearly every single motocross bike of the last four decades. After a spell of building motos and around the time of the incoming Japanese invasion, mountain biking was growing. Alberto's young son, Tomaso, wanted a mountain bike as they were fast becoming the latest must-have.
After crafting various bikes, including the claimed first full carbon downhill mountain bike in the world, Tomaso took the lead of the company, and in 2009 they earned the rainbow stripes thanks to the success of Brook MacDonald's Junior World Championship win in Canberra. Read more about their story here.
After crafting various bikes, including the claimed first full carbon downhill mountain bike in the world, Tomaso took the lead of the company, and in 2009 they earned the rainbow stripes thanks to the success of Brook MacDonald's Junior World Championship win in Canberra. Read more about their story here.
Ancillotti motocross bike circa 1980, and a mini-shredder Pull Shock machine for the newest addition to the family's lineage.
Alberto, now seventy years old, still cuts and jigs the frames in Florence, Italy, before a welder puts them together. The other half of the company has moved to Ivrea, and their local test track is now the infamous Pila course. Tomaso, in his modest workshop, designs, assembles and finishes the bikes, as well as builds their own shocks.
The small company has no grandiose plans for making it to the big time, content with crafting around fifty frames per year and supporting small race teams. Their focus lies in building some of what I believe are the most beautiful high-performance frames in the world, in true Italian style.
This latest incarnation, the new Scarab Evo, takes its name from the open-winged beetle on their emblem and was the name gifted to their earliest motorcycle. It has been on downhill bikes of past but is now found on this all-mountain chassis. The DHY downhill bike is still available, and the long-travel 180mm Enduro FRY race destroyer is also still in the lineup.
Scarab Evo Details
• Intended use: enduro / all-mountain
• Wheel size: 27.5" or 29"
• Rear wheel travel: 160mm
• Custom geometry, linkage and shock
• Adjustable geometry
• Handmade to order
• MSRP: €2900 frame only
• www.ancillotti.com
• Intended use: enduro / all-mountain
• Wheel size: 27.5" or 29"
• Rear wheel travel: 160mm
• Custom geometry, linkage and shock
• Adjustable geometry
• Handmade to order
• MSRP: €2900 frame only
• www.ancillotti.com
The geometry is customized and decided by the consumer and Tomaso together, and prospective buyers are invited to visit Ancillotti so they can try out various demo bikes and sizes as needed to help make a decision. Every single bike is made to order, however, and most numbers can be tweaked, along with the linkage ratios and shock tune.
The open-winged Scarab beetle adorns the head tube of all of Ancillotti's bikes
The frames are spectacular in the flesh, with a highly polished raw alloy finish, swooping tubes and machined and turned junctions. Every Ancillotti will be slightly different as there are no standard tubes or off-the-shelf shapes.
The frame pictured here is a benchmark large size. The seat angle is around 75-degrees, the reach measurement is around 460mm, and it has a 435mm chainstay length and a 1215mm wheelbase.
While Ancillotti's other bikes see the shock positioned behind the bottom bracket shell, the new Scarab Evo has its shock moved forward to sit in front of the bottom bracket. This update has been done to allow the bike's chainstay length to stay within size range when using 29'' wheels.
Unbolt the front part of the linkage and then rotate it to let the threaded tube fine-tune your geometry and balance.This particular prototype's head angle can be adjusted between 65 and 63.5-degrees, which also changes the bottom bracket height between 350 and 335mm. The linkage is very similar to the adjuster found on their early motocross bikes, and riders have close to infinite adjustment through the given range.
Why a Pull Shock?
First, we should clear something up. Ancillotti using the phrase ''Pull Shock'' may confuse some, especially given that the bike compresses its shock as per normal and that there have been previous designs, like one iteration of the older Yeti/Schwinn Lawwill bike, which have used a pull shock. What Ancillotti is actually referring to is how a section of their linkage pulls on the rocker link that activates the shock. Yes, it is pulling, but the shock itself is being compressed. In other words, Ancillotti's design uses a conventional shock, but it is the swingarm that pulls the linkage to drive the shock.
Ancillotti states two claimed benefits about their design: the linkage's geometry can be easily tweaked to change travel or rates, and the linkage will tend to stay in a straight and true line through the travel. Any system that is being pushed towards the shock will be trying to move laterally due to the forces from the rear wheel, which will rarely be in a perfectly straight line with the frame.
Tomaso isn't a fan of current air-sprung suspension, with him believing that air is great for the masses and for bikes that need easy setup or balance, but not for true on-the-trail performance. He also agrees they can save weight but denies this could be a benefit over the loss of performance and grip.
Each Ancillotti coil-sprung shock is handmade and tuned to suit the rider and bike. If you're not happy with it, re-tuning of the shock is included for life. The shock also has basic external rebound adjustment and a low-speed compression lever to firm the damping for climbing.
All Ancillotti shocks are handmade to suit each bike and rider.
For riders who are desperate to change the damper to their preferred
Tomaso is a real tuner and tinkerer; he lightly machined the outside of this coil spring down to reduce its rate ever so slightly.
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for a start
I can't spot any missing welds. I'm no engineer, but gussets should never be welded on all sides, this causes too much stress build up in a certain area and causes cracks, leaving an open side allow some movement. The top seat tube gusset is an example.
Zoom in, you can see the weld bead along the front side.
The main selling point for four bar design á la FSR have been Specialized's exaggerated claims about how we will all die from brake jack on single pivots. Just ask the guys at Guerilla Gravity who will openly admit that they only added a horst link to their bikes because the consumers thinks it makes a huge difference even though the actual change in performance is minuscule.
You forget they were one of the biggest champions of single pivot for a very long time. Lack of sales (& older single pivots from many brands that were indeed terrible coloring people's perception) probably killed off their single pivot bikes far more than the advantages of VPP.
At the end of the day, a lot of the advantages of pivot linkages disappear when you can tune the pivot placement to one chainring instead of 2 or three. Devinci, Salsa, Evil, Kona, are all making single pivot bikes, & they all ride great.
Second, you don't know what you're talking about. brake jack isn't due to linkage type, it's due to anti-rise & anti-squat characteristics. Which are tunable with main pivot placement & a simple control link(meaning, a link that affects the way leverage is applied to the shock, rather than one that changes wheel path. Which is the point SC's designer is making with the quip "axle path don't matter no mo.")
Go watch some of @Andrextr 's videos on youtube. He explains what's happening in great detail.
That consistency might be difficult to achieve if the geometry is "infinitely" adjusted by twisting the linkage. The user could be left asking, 'how many twists did I do the last time I rode this trail?'
It's a cool idea to allow infinite fine tuning of geometry but I wonder whether it's worth losing the certainty that fixed geometry settings provide.
I'd expect that they will give you tips on different settings when you buy the bike too, or would at least be able to advise you if you contacted them.
@paulaston: You must meet some great photographers, please try to get some feedback on your work. I'm not saying it is bad, but when photographing a bike you must kind of treat it like portait photography. I've got two pointers for you which may help you improve.
1. Don't shoot wide angle. Focal length for this picture is 18mm, same with that ARBR. It makes the picture look deformed and I attribute much of the hate (in the comments sections) that went towards that ARBR to the way that picture was taken. Compare it to the work of your colleagues. Most of those pictures were shot with a focal length of around 50mm, which (for the full frame cameras these professional photographers use) gives a picture similar to the way we see things. The Intense bike here was shot at 100mm, makes it even flatter. Good as well. You may not have a full frame camera body so you may rather dial the focal length to 35mm or so. Your lens allows for that, use it.
2. Shoot at (rear) axle height. Due to perspective, there are always components going appear misaligned. A larger focal length (and as a consequence a larger distance to still see the complete bike) as mentioned in point 1 is going to help, but still. Worst thing to have misaligned for a bike is the wheel. It must appear round and the hub, cassette, rotor and rim have to be aligned. This went wrong with that ARBR bike as well as with this Ancillotti. Again, look at how other bikes are shot for catalogs, press releases etc when they're shot straight from the side.
Other than that, I think your work is great
"What if there was no room to move further back?"
I think it is up to the photographer to decide on the setting and gear where and how to take a product photo. Indeed if he can't move further back, this is what you end up with. Then you decide, do you really want to take the product photo here.
"What if @paulaston only brought a 11-18mm lens."
If you click the picture, you can see the metadata in the right column. It says he used a 18-55mm lens and that he set it to 18mm. So I'll go with that. I don't know all these camera types by heart so I don't know if he has used a full frame SLR or the consumer grade gear. 18-55 is typically the kit lens for consumer grade gear so he could aim for 35mm. If it was a full frame SLR he could try the 50mm region.
"I think the pictures are better than 99% of the bike pictures shown in the photo section of PB. Yes, ideally you shoot with 50 or 100mm, but do you know the circumstances?"
I don't know much more than what I see on this page. A while ago Paul published an article on a new bike by ARBR. He was impressed and thought it looked and worked great. The article received loads of negative (and not quite constructive) comments. I didn't comment there. It upset Paul so much that he dedicated another article to it. Again loads of negative comments. And as I mentioned here, I attibute part of the negativity on the deformation in the picture. So I wrote some constructive criticism in the comment section there, similar to what I wrote here. He may not have read it back then, so that's why I put it here again. I thought he'd care. See, I'm no pro either so I welcome anyone to chime in.
By the way, if you have any experience with Italian anything they build from passion and not cold efficiency. Italian machines have personality and charm and usually some quirks that you come to love instead of disdain because the entire package is just so cool. I could've had a Honda that runs forever with no issues but got a Ducati instead, I'd rather grin like a maniac for short bursts than yawn over a lifetime.
Low COG, nice linkage (however i prefer four-bar systems, but this is really cool), made to suit a person, not masses, just.. a beautiful aluminium tubes, crafted to make a bike, that suits a Person. It's not common nowadays. Dunno 'bout their shock, but I'm impressed.
Ability to fine tune geo in incremental, low as possible, stages is awesome, and should be common. Just pure genius (dunno 'bout reliability, but it shouldn't be a problem in this particular case).
Not less, than with this 16'(?) high-pivot-whatthafck-awesome-linkage bike,
Where is the protection for the lever from rocks and roots?
yes, when Cannondale and others did 70° stem angle, Ancillotti did 66° !
Another feature common now is the low gravity center, now for everybody, 25 years ago only few manufacturers...
The company is going for something...may or may not succeed. Go troll on Facebook.