NS BIKES DEFINE AL 170 1
With big travel and mullet wheels, the enduroready Define is easy to pigeonhole... or is it?
Can you define a bike’s intended use by travel alone? I don’t think you can, and the new NS Define AL 170, an aluminium enduro bike that boasts 170mm travel and comes with a 180mm-travel fork and mismatched wheels, is a prime example.
There are two models in the Define AL 170 range and both use the same chassis – the 1 here and a sibling called the Define AL 170 2. That model has a Rockshox Zeb fork instead of the Fox 38 and a coil-sprung X-fusion rear shock, not the air-sprung Fox X2 you see here. Yes, it is a heavier build but it’s also £1,100 cheaper and, when I spotted it on the NS website, it looked like a bike you could take to Bikepark Wales for a dirty weekend or find some steep off-piste to let your hair down.
Now, the reason I’m banging on about the Define AL 170 2 when I’m supposed to be doing a comprehensive first ride on the 1, is because I’m convinced that they’re different sides of the same bigbike coin.
The Define AL 170 1 is essentially a long-travel bike with aggressive geometry that you can pedal to the mountain top and ride down it, whereas the coil-sprung Define AL 170 2 is the kind of bike you’re more likely to sling on the uplift.
And there’s overlap. At the heart of both bikes is a hydroformed aluminium frameset. It’s nicely put together and has some cool features like the hybrid cable routing which runs inside a recess on the underside of the down tube. This means you can’t see the cables from the side, so they don’t spoil the clean hydroformed lines, but you can access them easily for maintenance or servicing.
There’s also a geometry adjust feature built into the lower shock mount and by flipping the offset chip you can change the BB height by +/- 5mm and the head tube/seat tube angle by roughly half a degree. The default setting is the lower one, and having spent some time in this configuration I can’t see anyone changing it (except maybe out of curiosity) especially if you use this bike for its intended purpose.
The specification on the Define
AL 170 1 is totally in keeping with its hard-charging attitude. The Fox 38 Performance series fork and X2 rear
The lower shock mount offers geometry adjust