User Guide

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5
Gary rides. A lot.
Gary Fisher does a lot of bike riding.
He has for years. He holds the RePack
record, and won the National Mountain Bike
Championship for Masters in 1997. Basically
what we’re saying is this; Gary has skills.
Inspiration doesn’t always come easy
So one day this skilled rider is out for an
epic ride on his favorite bike. He’s cruising
down a hill, not terribly tricky or anything,
when he gets one of those free flying lessons
and as he’s laying on the ground he’s won-
dering “What happened?”
So he picks himself up off the ground only
to find that he’s broken his wrist. Not a big
deal, but nothing he really wanted. During
the next few weeks of recovery Gary has time
to think about his little accident and the bike.
And that’s how Genesis was born.
Whu’ happened?
Gary analyzed the accident. He had simply
been too far forward and pitched over the
front wheel. The pivot point of his flip was
the front axle. If the axle were further for-
ward, he might have stayed upright.
If we look back in time, we see that Gary
had worked on geometry for years. Years ago,
he even had a fully adjustable bike. It had
adjustable dropouts so you could change the
wheelbase, chain stays, or fork rake. It had
an adjustable head tube to change the head
angle. Basically, you could try any geometry
you wanted as long as the top tube stayed the
same length. Using that bike, Gary developed
what we now call “classic NORBA geometry”
with a 71 degree head angle and 73 degree
seat angle.
Gary knew that changing the fork offset
or head angle to move the front axle would
make a bike handle poorly. The only way to
get the front axle forward was to lengthen
the top tube. But he didn’t want to move the
bars forward and change his position. He’d
have to use a little short stem.
Gary defies convention
Common knowledge said that a short stem
would handle weird. In a typical unconven-
tional Gary Fisher way, he ignored common
knowledge and built a prototype with a really
long top tube. The genius here is that he
didn’t change his position on the bike, only
the orientation of the bike’s parts. Since he
had moved the headset forward considerably,
he had to use a 75mm stem to replace the
135mm stem he normally used. This setup
added 60mm of top tube, moving the front
axle 60mm forward, almost 21/2 inches. And
it worked!
This first prototype was a revelation. But
Gary knows the bike to be an organism,
where everything affects everything else. He
had developed enough frame designs to know
that he had just scratched the surface and
that every dimension on the bike, from chain
stays to seat angle, could benefit from the
increased front center. But instead of telling
you that long story of test riding and proto-
types, let’s just skip to the finished Genesis
frame and what defines it today.
Genesis advantages
The primary benefit of the long front/
center (distance from the bottom bracket to
the front axle) is stability. This certainly
helps in conditions like those that caused
Gary to crash. But the long front/center
makes the bike more stable all the time.
Short stems steer great
The shorter stem used with Genesis geom-
etry puts your hands closer to the steering
axis. Steering can be done with your arms
instead of a sweeping sideways movement of
your shoulders. Your hands can move faster
than your shoulders, and with more control
of fine movements, so technical steering is
precise at high speed.
Centered between the wheels
On a bike with a long front-center the
front wheel is pushed further ahead of you.
Anytime you find yourself moving back on
your bike, it’s in response to your body want-
ing to flip over the front axle. This happens
on steep downhills, and also any time the
bike is moving at high speed in rough ter-
rain. With the front axle moved forward,
there is added resistance to over-the-bars
flight. You’re more relaxed at speed, and
since you’re more in the saddle than behind
it, you’re in a better position to keep the
pedal power on.
Climbing prowess
Common sense tells us that a longer front
center places less weight on the front wheel.
Intuition tells us that with less weight on
the front wheel, the bike might not climb
GENESIS GEOMETRY