FlexPivot

Our FlexPivot is a Horst Link pivot, done better.

The concept is simple. Take all the bearings, bolts, washers, and excess material required to put a Horst Link pivot in a swingarm, and replace it with the lightweight, functional, elegance of a precisely engineered flexing carbon fiber section. Voila! You get all the benefits of a Horst Link 4-bar suspension design while saving weight, reducing maintenance, and, thanks to the directional tunability of carbon fiber layups, getting a more durable, laterally stiff, and responsive rear end to boot. Talk about a win-win!

Carbon fiber is amazing stuff. By selecting different types of carbon, and layering them with the fibers precisely oriented within that carbon “sandwich”, you can control how that structure responds to forces. For FlexPivot, our engineers created an incredibly durable layup that allows effortless flex along the vertical axis, while remaining exceptionally rigid laterally and torsionally. And because the flex happens at a precise point on the chainstay, versus along the entire length of the stay as with a more traditional flex stay, it behaves like a pivot, creating a true Horst-link style, 4-bar suspension system.

How much the suspension compresses or extends under pedaling or braking (anti-squat and anti-rise). What the axle path looks like, and how much chain growth or pedal kickback there is as the suspension moves. All of these elements together really define how a bike performs – how much traction it provides when climbing or descending. How responsive or supple it feels under power. How it responds to bump forces, and how much those bump forces affect your pedal stroke and efficiency. Whether you’re designing an XC race rocket, a do-it-all trail rig, or a rowdy enduro machine, the Horst 4-bar gives you the ability to really tailor the suspension performance to the bike’s intended use.

It also allows us to take it one step further than most, and customize the suspension design by size. It’s something we call Proportional Response kinematics, and it ensures that riders get the same, dialed, suspension performance, across all frame sizes.

FlexPivot was inspired in part by the flexing carbon suspension members, or “flexures” in F1 cars. Flexing carbon structures like these work because, if you know what you’re doing, and you know the parameters of the kinds of forces they’re going to see, you can design them to have a near infinite fatigue life – at least on human timescales. And we know what we’re doing. We’ve been working with the concept of replacing pivots with flexing carbon members ever since the original Scalpel debuted back in 2001, and carbon technology and our understanding of how to manipulate it to achieve specific goals, has grown massively since then. We’ve done extensive (and frankly, pretty damn savage) testing in the lab, and it outperformed even our elevated standards. We never got one to fail in fatigue tests, and in destructive tests, other components, like cranks, would routinely fail before FlexPivot would. We even set Josh Bryceland and the Waves crew loonies loose on different iterations to prove what you can’t in the lab, and the results are simple. FlexPivot works, and works well. It is just a better way to build a Horst pivot. It's lighter. It’s stiffer. It’s more durable. It requires no maintenance. And with its full-wrap guards, it’s tougher than traditional pivots too. It’s not unbreakable. Nothing is. But if you hit something hard enough to damage a FlexPivot, you would have destroyed any other kind of swingarm.

FlexPivot is pure goodness. It brings you all the benefits of a great Horst-link 4-bar suspension system, with less weight, better responsiveness, more durability, and less maintenance. It is the lightest way to great suspension. Watch for it across our range of mountain bikes, like Scalpel, Moterra SL, and more.