Why is it other manufacturers can produce kevlar-foldable bead 29 x 2.35 tires for 750g but Bontrager can barely manage to keep a 26" tire in that range ?

It probably IS... cut an existing product into smaller portions, market it to another industry and raise the price tag. Phil's tenacious oil is winter grade chainsaw bar oil. The difference is the little green/white bottle of Phil's costs 10 times what the generic chainsaw oil does. But it comes in a cute little bottle so the masses snatch it up. I got suckered into two bottles of phil's before I learned what it really was. Now I just mix my own oil blends and refill my old Phil's bottles.

Haven't you ever read the commentary and forum posts on here? 50% of the canadian pinkbike population can't form a proper sentence or spell correctly in english, and its technically one of canada's two official languages.

Actually polish wouldn't be a bad choice to learn here, we do have a fairly significant part of the population being of polish ancestry.

Price is why carbon anything isn't used more often. The larger the part the more expensive it becomes to do it out of CF than in say, Aluminium. A headset spacer for example, which is nothing more than a straight carbon fiber tube, cut into slices on a band saw is about 2 1/2 times the price as one made from aluminium. Is it 2 1/2 times better? Not really. Its lighter sure, and looks prettier most would agree, but its less durable and in fact can be completely incompatible with some stems. If you have a stem made from titanium or chromoly, then the steerer section of the stem is likely to be very thin in profile, and as I discovered years ago, when you tighten a thin stem section down with the preload cap of the headset, it can press a groove into the carbon headset spacer which then causes your headset to loosen while you're riding. Coil springs are basically precision wound wire, which can be made on automated machines over and over all day long, quick and easy. In steel as is most common they're dirt cheap to produce. In titanium they're a bit more expensive due to material costs but still, its something you can do with little human supervision. But making one out of carbon fiber in the right spring ratings for bicycle shocks/forks... that would cost quite a bit more than titanium. In the car world, you now see CF coil springs in car seat backs replacing what used to be steel springs. But they cost about ten times as much per spring. And that's when you order them a thousand at a time.

Outward appearance doesn't matter for regular patents... design patents sure, but for things involving mechanisms and ideas... not so much. They may not have a similar clutch mechanism, but it depends what is in shimano's shadow plus patent description. I'm sure knowing shimano's patent history that they didn't simply file a patent for a very specific design of a derailleur with a clutch mechanism in the cage pivot. SRAM and Shimano have a long history of suing one another over patent and design infringements, and getting court injuctions to hold up sales of products.

All this speculation assumes that Shimano doesn't sue SRAM for patent infringement first.

One M900 for $20 is a lucky fluke. Six to Eight of them for $20 shipped apiece would require voodoo sacrifices, celestial alignments, an undiscovered mayan calendar that starts on 12.13.12 and goes another few thousand years, angelina jolie getting into the professional porn industry, and Arnold Schwarzenegger being elected president of the united states to all happen first.

Carbon springs (coils and leaf springs) have been around for at least TWO decades. At the 1992 Eurobike show, several manufacturers were showing full suspension bikes with carbon frames and carbon coil spring equipped shocks.

Someone probably tried to do a blink/highlight html code to make one word or something POP out... and they forgot to CLOSE the font change again and so everyone is stuck with white comments.