103 - Deep Dive: New XTR M9200 Di2 Wireless Groupset with Nick Murdick (Shimano’s MTB Product Manager). - Mountain Cog

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgin (00:16):
I still think it's funny that you
feel the need to do that.
I can't stop it.
So I got a dad joke.
Go for it.
When does a joke become a dadjoke?
When does a joke become a dad?

Josh "Magellan" Anderson (00:27):
joke.
When does a joke become a dadjoke?
I don't know.
Nick, you got any idea.
He knows the punchline.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgi (00:34):
We all do, I'm sure you've heard
this uh, when it's apparent,yeah, uh, yeah he's like I'm
gonna be real disappointed ifthe answer is something to do
with a parent.
No, yeah it is.
You're always going to bedisappointed with our dad jokes.

Well, I'm giddy, I'm super excited.
Our listeners know how much Ilove Shimano Yep and I love
Shimano for their quality, theirdurability and their price
Fishing.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Higg (01:00):
You said fishing.

Josh "Magellan" Anderso (01:01):
Fishing yeah.

I don't think Nick deals with the
fishing size of no, but it's,you know, like you, you, you and
you, uh, you love the brand, Ilove the brand.

I'm, I'm a, I'm a fan boy.
Um, performance is consistentacross the entire range from
Dior up to XTR on the on themountain bike side.
Um, it just fucking works.
Uh, and we've talked about thisa lot- yeah.
Um, but today we are uh up inthe Sedona mountain bike
festival.
Um, didn't get to ride the daybecause it snowed like crazy.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Hig (01:30):
Yeah , Snow Dona.

Snow Dona, again Snowopolis or
whatever.
Um, but we're here with.
Nick Murdoch is the NorthAmerican mountain bike product
manager for Shimano.
How'd I do?

Nick Murdick (Shimano) (01:42):
Yeah, that's great.
Product manager for Shimano.

How'd I do?
Yeah, that's great, and he'sgot some really cool things to
tell us about.
Um, before we get to that Ihave.
I have one question for youbefore we get to what you're
going to announce.
Uh and I'm sure our listenershave heard a little bit about
this already Um, you, in yourrole, are managing the North
American products.

(02:04):
How do you balance the desiresfrom other parts of the world
with the desires, the uniquedesires, of your North American
customers?

Yeah Well, so my role is to sit on
the global product developmentteam, and so, for whatever
product that we're working on,typically there's three product
managers in Japan, and then I'llhave a counterpart in Europe.
For whatever it is that we'reworking on, too, in North
America, it's really just me andone other guy, so it's a
mountain bike guy and a pavementguy.
I cover everything from tourneyup to XTR and all the bike

(02:37):
stuff as well, so it's a lot ofstuff.
So I work with a bunch ofdifferent teams in Japan and
Europe even, but my jobbasically is to represent the
North American mountain bikerider, uh, in those discussions
that we're having and kind offight for what is important to
riders in our market.

What are some of the key differences
between the desires that theNorth American riders have
versus our international?

That is a good question, cause I don't
really think that it's all thatdifferent.
Like we hear this all the timeand we chalk it up when we're
having disagreements in ourmeetings to like, well, riders
are just different out here, um,but uh, basically I can say
that, uh, the guys in Japanconsider the North American
office to be the leading officefor mountain bike trends and so

(03:19):
they'll always defer to us.
Oh, that's cool Stuff tends tohappen here first and happen
here first and uh.
So if crank arms start gettingshorter here we can see that
it's lagging a little bit behindin europe, but we kind of feel
like it's probably going tocatch up and that really like
we're talking about um, ourdiscussions are really oem spec
focused, so rider trends mightbe moving just as fast in europe

(03:41):
as they are in north america,especially like when you're
talking about at Enduro WorldCups, like obviously that's
where the trends are, arehappening in a lot of cases at
least, and so maybe it's just abigger lag between those trends
setting in and them showing upon OEM spec.

So I could see that on acoustic bikes
, but on e-bikes, is Europe notmoving faster than the United
States on?

acoustic bikes.
But on e-bikes, is Europe notmoving faster than the United
States?
Um, I think it is uh different,and actually a great example is
how much spec Shimano got fore-bike drive units in kind of
those early days of e-mountainbikes coming to North America.
Uh, like pivot was our firstcompany customer that jumped on
board with our system and then abunch of other of those core

(04:26):
mountain bike brands followedsuit.
Uh, because we kind of ourdevelopment team was our North
American mountain bike team andwe didn't.
We didn't hire new e-mountainbike product testers or anything
, we just made the drive unitthat we thought that mountain
bikers would like.
So it was actually a little bitout of step with uh would like.
So it was actually a little bitout of step with uh, uh like

(04:48):
the European arms race, like itwas uh, uh a bit weird that we
weren't publishing a max wattagenumber for a long time.
They're like how can you playin the arms race?

You don't have the number Like.
Well, I don't really care aboutthe number man.
Well, you guys have someexciting news.
Yeah, you got some newinformation.
What do you got going on, man?

Well, so it's.
When is it?
It's March, right?
So this is going to come ourway in the future.

Yeah .

So I'm presuming that listeners have
heard the story of our new XTRcomponent product launch and so
yeah, greetings.

Dane "Suspension Guru" H (05:24):
future dwell dwellers I hope the world
is treating as well, yeah, whoknows what's right?

and I know that there's going to be a
bunch of other new productlaunches that come out between
now and then.
Like this is early enough that,if I'm not referencing some
other new thing, that yeah,don't hold it, don't hold us
against this, yeah or, and Imean I'll be polite and not
mention the stuff that I know iscoming, because I don't hold us
against us, yeah.
Or, and I mean I'll be politeand not mention the stuff that I
know is coming, cause I don'thave all the information on it,
like from competitors, um, butuh, uh, yeah, so it's been a

(05:54):
long time coming working on thisnew XTR group, and how long?
Uh, I mean the last group, um,we launched it in 2018, and
maybe it started shipping at theend of 2018.
But we were already working onthe next group at that point.
That's kind of how it goes.

What do you guys consider a new
group?
So you'll have versions andyou'll do a revision on
something.
So when do you guys consider ita total relaunch?

We'll work on revision on something.
So when do you guys consider ita total relaunch?
We'll work on like agenerational project.
So this is the M9200.
Xtr group Okay, all right andyeah, if I can take a moment, I
heard in the in the SRAM versusShimano podcast calling us out
for our numbers and I just usedit there, yeah, kind of proudly,
but then also cause you guysknow them right, but you totally

(06:46):
lost me on the like.
Uh, on the 3.1 versus 3.0 or2.1 damper, I'm like you guys
are using numbers.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.
He threw it right back at you.

No , no I agree, I agree, I would
like them to use names likecharlie this is the charlie
group, or this is the bob group,or something like that.
But yeah, it's tough with thenumbers, then nine.
So xtr has always been like anine something, 900 or what it
was.
The first, the first one wasm900, m900, so m is for mountain
, 900 would be the, the quality,the quality level, yeah.

(07:17):
And then then where I getconfused as a retailer is the
9100, or or 90, 200, like whereyou know, cause sometimes
they'll come out 90, uh, nine,20 or nine.
You know what I mean.
So like I start to lose whereeight speed and nine speed.

I bet you, nick, can explain it to us.

Well , manny, our rep is, is
explained it and I still don'tget it Like how's it?

how's it work, nick?

Well, there we have like guidelines on
how you uh get to choose amodel number for the new thing
that you're working on, causethere is a, there's a product
manager in Japan that has tochoose the like.
Okay, this, uh, uh, the breakis going to be the 92, 20, right
and the.
So the cross country break, thetwo piston one is 9,200, the
four piston one's 92, 20.

(08:02):
It doesn't matter which one wesell more of.
It's that the two pistontechnology came out first, so
that's the base number and italways will be okay.
Um and but the the littlemodifiers are going to come in
the third digit position, sothat's like a spec variance.
So we've got uh, uh, yeah,actually.
So there is no, uh.

(08:22):
9200 rear derailleur because,the 00 would mean that it was
mechanical and there is nomechanical XTR derailleur.
So the kind of the base specthe one that everybody's
imagining in their head is thenew wireless XTR derailleur is
RDM9250.
It's the first Di2 derailleurthat came out.
It got that modifier to saythat it's the Di2 version, so
it's the 92.

At the time so 50 meant Di2 uh,
for rear derailleurs at the time?

yeah, it did, and so then there's also
an e-bike version that insteadof having a battery pack on
board, it's got a wiredconnection and plug into a drive
unit.

So that's the 9260 I saw the
leaked pictures of that andeverybody was kind of coming to
that conclusion.
But they were trying to figureout why they were different.
So does that make you?
Let you change the pricing ofthe derailleur?

Not so much the pricing, but what is
the goal in making it totallydifferent and not adaptable?
It's really being able to takeadvantage of the single power
source on an e-bike, and itdoesn't just hook up to our
e-bike drive unit either.
And not all of them are goingto be announced at the time of
XTR launch, but easy to imaginethat it plugs into a Shimano
drive unit and those other driveunit manufacturers will be
making announcements about howit can work with our derailleur.
That's awesome In the comingmonths, especially around Euro

(09:39):
bike timing in July.

Okay , in july, okay, so tell us more
about the grupo we got.
We got lost in digits andnumbers there.
I'm still just so you know I'mstill confused.
I'll make a spec sheet for you,yeah I think when you live it
it's easier to understand.

So for sure, yeah, I mean you uh well,
and like I, I was that guy atthe bike shop that would, uh
that, learned the system.
Uh, um, not that I was like ahuge Shimano fan boy.
It was just like somethingtechnical to get obsessed about,
and that's part of why I endedup in this job right Like it was
a career mechanic that thoughtabout what details can I

(10:15):
memorize?
Like okay, I'm in Um, but uh, uh, any topic like that, because
of that nature, like I can gofor an hour so yeah, yeah, like
don't be shy that uh, right.
So, uh, hopefully people have,uh have gotten the news and kind
of gotten the basics and we'llbe able to kind of go into

(10:36):
details on, um, any individualcomponent that you guys want to
Um, but uh, yeah, the highlightsand, yeah, for sure, check out
those articles and especially,like we've got a little 10
minute teaser video that, uh,we'll give you the highlights,
uh, right away, like the quickversion.

It's a great video.
Yeah, it helps put it all rightout there.
You know it's it's and it'seasy to remember.

Yeah, and there will be a series of
those too, so there'll be acouple more that go uh like as a
deep dive and yeah, so cammccall hosts the whole thing and
he'll produce them all for usand they turned out great.
But, uh.
So the big question I thinkthat uh, a lot of people have
been asking, or the group thatpeople have been asking for for
the last several years is, uh,can we please have a full

(11:20):
wireless di2 version of ashimano xtr group?
And so that's exactly what itis.
There's a battery on board onthe derailleur.
Uh, it lives, uh, safely tuckedinside the parallelogram on the
derailleur.
Um, the uh, the shifter isshaped like a shifter.
It's got pawls and clicksinside of it.
Um, it's a double click shifterin both directions, so you can

(11:42):
keep pushing on the paddle andget a second click out of it.
Um, so it really is intuitive.
I think anybody can hop on itand like it feels like shifting
a bike.
It's not pressing buttons, um,and then that shifter is super
customizable as well, still kindof given like the if we want to
go, if you pick anything thatyou want to go down the rabbit
hole on that.

I do, but I'm going to let you finish
and then I'll come back and getthe questions.

Yeah, Um , the uh, the derailleur is
really focused, uh, around whatcauses a derailleur to fail on a
bike, and so we didn't just gothrough and make everything
stronger.
We tried to look at things froma practical point of view and
the way I like to say it is, welooked at things from the rocks
point of view.
Um, and actually riding inTucson.
It proved so many of thosepoints for us and and a good

(12:27):
amount of the filming that wedid for the video was done in
Tucson.

Yeah , Shout out to Tucson bug
Springs.
You can.
You can tell the trail.
It's really cool.

And we actually use that trail for our
media camp as well.
So we took all the journalistsdown bugs in Milagrosa and the
50 year trail they Rosa.

And the 50 year trail, they live, I
mean how many died.

Some of your media guys may not have
been able to clear that I thinkwe did have a separated shoulder
.

I totally believe that.

I absolutely believe that I'd be
surprised if that's all you had,basically All right, but so
it's pretty rare that you canhear your derailleur kind of do
its impact recovery mechanismbut we had journalists saying
that they heard it three or fourtimes that they know of, and so

(13:13):
to be able to come down thebottom of that, knowing that
that derailleur contacted a rockhard yeah.
Yeah, Multiple times, and it'sstill um, and it's still kicking
and uh, um.
So part of that, uh, thehighlight for the derailleur,
the overall story, like thispractical on trail use
experience, Like what really is,makes a derailleur fail on a

(13:34):
trail when it hits a rock, andhow do we solve that?
It's, uh, um, about making thederailleur, uh, a big wedge so
that it gets pushed out of theway, Okay, and then, um, it also
is free to rotate back and uh,and then recover on its own.
So that's one of the key thingsthat you get with a hanger that
you give up if you go to aframe mounted design.

(13:54):
So we intentionally didn't do aframe mounted design because we
didn't feel like it waspractical to give up that free
rotation of the derailleur whenyou hit a rock.
So you hit a rock, thederailleur moves backward, it
gets scooped in board and thenit recovers all on its own and
you keep riding.
So, whether you're just goingto hit the next rock in another
50 feet or just don't like theidea of getting off your bike
and resetting something, or ifyou're doing an Enduro, uh,

(14:17):
world cup race and you can't getoff the bike until the end of
the stage, like it just doing iton its own is.

Uh, we felt like did you hear all the
little subtle jabs in there?

Yes.
Yeah no-transcript sense tohave a bigger single power, and

(15:02):
then you don't have twobatteries.
So yeah, yeah, it was.
It was clear.
It was very difficult to getaround the patents around
putting a battery in aderailleur.
And that's why we're doing thisin 2025 instead of two years
ago.

So how does this derailleur take a
hit, move and then get resetand you don't lose like any
adjustment?

Uh, so, um, I mean, the truth of the
matter is, is the derailleurhanger Wasn't really that
fragile in the first place?
That, uh, uh, derailleurhangers can bend and should be
able to bend.
They should be kind of ourbackup plan.
But we can hit a rock over andover and over again and if the
derailleur is able to get out ofthe way and not transmit that

(15:40):
force into the derailleur hanger, then it's not going to bend
the hanger.

So it's like MIPS for your
derailleur, it's like slowingdown the force and taking it
away from the fragile stuff.

Yeah, it's giving things an
opportunity to kind of, yeah,slip out of the way and slip
past the obstacle.

I got so many questions but I want to
let them finish the group.

So before we get to the deep dive,
you know me, I'm a squirrelmaster.

So there , there's another very key
reason to uh to still have aderailleur hanger, but I'll come
back to and the Mila GrosserTrail was a great place to
showcase it.
I actually did it.
I bent a hanger during themedia camp and replaced it on
the side of the trail, nice.
The whole thing took 10 minutes, but I'll come back to that
point later when we starttalking about the derailleur
more.
So the brakes are new as well.

(16:23):
No-transcript.
The caliper is uh a lot uhstiffer and stouter, like you

(16:46):
can tell looking at the thing umthat uh that it's a big beefy
caliperiper.
But the brake levers have pickedup a ton of efficiency too.
We threw a bearing in the mainpivot point for the brake lever,
but we also looked a lot atergonomics of how your hand is
interacting with the lever andif we can move the brake lever

(17:07):
blade more in the same directionthat your finger is already
moving, then we can be moreefficient and transfer more of
the power that you're puttinginto the brake lever, into the
brake pads, and giving you morestopping power.
Um, so that's why the brakefeels more powerful and like we
tuned the modulation of thebrake just a little bit like
kind of re, uh visited, uhEnduro racers and kind of asked,

(17:30):
like what actually is yourpreferred brake modulation right
now?
So that basically comes to tunedown to tuning the system,
stiffness, that, like how onoffer the brakes going to be.
And of course I think, yeah,that's our reputation for being
kind of an on off break andpeople who love Shimano brakes
that's what they love about it.
So we're certainly not going togo away from that.

Yeah , they.
So I watched the pink bikebreak test, which was cool Cause
they I think they just keptswitching out brakes on their
bikes and going through them andI was surprised that the
Shimano didn't do as well, and Iwas really surprised it was, I
think, they were doing atWhistler, so it was a lot of
downhilling and I don't know ifXTR is necessarily the right

(18:12):
brake to put at Whistler, likeSaint would usually be the brake
you'd choose on a downhill bike.
Was that the Vital one?
Oh, maybe it was Vital.

Yeah, because they did it at Whistler
and it was towards the end ofsummer last year.
What was funny is we chattedabout this with those guys but
it was the brake that we sentthem and somehow it had resin
pads in it instead of metal pads, and every other brake that was
on their test had metal pads.
So in their little matrix on,like the web version that has a
big breakdown they, they like.
They did call out that it wasresin pads, but they were saying

(18:43):
that uh, like, uh, man, shimanobrakes are famous for having
like an on-off feel, but theseones don't have that and I
don't't know why.

I'm like I didn't realize it until
later.
And that makes sense, Causedon't the non-series brakes run?
Resin stock.

It is up to bike manufacturers to choose
the pad compound that comeswith the brake.

So they also tested those and they
were really surprised on howwell they did.
They're like the four 20.
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah , and they were just really yeah
.
And we sell a ton of the 420brakes, which is basically I
don't know all of the technical,but for us it's a non-branded.
So we see it on a lot of bikes.
I don't think it's OE, only weget them.

No, we sell it aftermarket.
It does quite well.

Four piston, nice feeling, good
brake.
It just doesn't say SLX doesn'tsay XT or XCR.

Okay, so let's run down, so we got a
new shifter, we got a newderailleur Yep.
We got new brakes, fullywireless Yep.
Can we take like one thing at atime?

So on the shifter, let's start
there.
Yeah, uh, is there?
There's a battery in there.
Yep, replaceable, it's a.

(19:58):
It's on the roadside, it's onthe tri side of the SRAM.
They have these little blipsthat are need to replace it.

Um, we're longer than I've had
prototypes.

I think, uh, I think two years is what
we're expecting, based on whatwe know from uh, I think 105
uses the doubled up coin cells.
The dura ace and maybe ultegrajust use a single coin cell
right inside of there, but youget a longer life and these are

(20:26):
the simple.

You can go down to ace hardware and
pick up these, these coin cellbatteries.
Yeah, nothing special they'reuh, uh.

So if we want to go down the rabbit hole
about the coin cell, that's,the coin cell was originally
chosen for the Dura Ace group,so they wanted something that
was that could fit inside of ashifter hood.
That has to like fit insideyour hand, uh, and so you don't
want to have that thing be toowide and affect the overall
shape of the thing.
So 1632 was kind of chosen for,um, I think, almost an

(20:56):
ergonomic reason as much asanything else.
So 1632 is not as common as a2032 battery, um, but it's
definitely not hard to find likeyou can.
You can get them at the grocerystore, drug store.

So for the layman uh, most of us
know what the cr2032s are, orlook like.
They're like a little disc.
Is this the smaller ones thatyou would like you?
Know like a hearing aid stylelike not that small.

No, I think that, uh, the first two
numbers are the um are thediameter of the battery.
So okay, so, and then 16millimeter versus 20 millimeters
and it's not.

The little tiny looks like a, like
a half of a triple a.

It's not one of those no, it's like a
like a half of a triple a.
It's not one of those.

No , it's like a, it's like a coin
man, yeah, but.
But, but they're bigger thanthe ones that I'm picturing,
which are like, like you said,they're like 10 millimeters, so
this is 16.

Okay.

So what excited?
They're tactile, tactile.

And then the second thing was the
adjustability.
Can you talk to us a little bitabout the adjustability and
what you can actually do tocustomize those?

Yeah, for sure this is a great story
because, um, I have, uh, I'vewritten a lot of prototypes for
electronic shifters and a lot ofthem were terrible.
I, I, I hated almost all ofthem.
Sometimes maybe you could seewhat the point was, but it
really speaks to.
There's this temptation that ifyou're an engineer that is

(22:19):
making an electronic shifter,you will almost automatically
are like the temptation is toostrong to throw away a
mechanical shifter and startfrom scratch.
that like I'm not constrained bya mechanical shifter, like I
get to make whatever I wantJoystick like dream shifter and
fast forward to the end of thatstory is that when we get to our

(22:41):
skunk development camp and havethe test riders try something
out, um, the best that any ofthose radical designs could do
was, uh, like a 50% approvalrating and uh, and so the other
half would be like I don't likeit at all.
Um, and what was unanimous atevery single one of those test
camps was can you please justmake an electronic version of a

(23:03):
mechanical shifter.
Like I just want to try it.
I just want to have like abaseline.

You've said that before on this
podcast I've been saying thisfor years.

Why is that so hard?

yeah.
So, um there, uh, we got, Ithink, kind of closer and closer
to it, and I'll say too that Ithink that a reason that a
mechanical shifter shape endedup working in the long run is
that we've gone through severalgenerations of refinement with
mechanical shifters already, andwe had very clever engineers
that were figuring out theergonomic problems that related

(23:35):
to this.
Thing has to pull a cable andboth levers have to interact
with the same cable even thoughthey're moving in different
directions.
Like they sorted all that stuffout.
Um, and so the ergonomics of amechanical shifter were already
really good and, uh, so the whatthe idea turned into was let's
start with a shifter that's gotthe paddles in the exact same
place as a mechanical shifter.

(23:56):
Um, so anybody who hops on thebike for a test ride, like it
feels very intuitive, likeanybody can get along with it.
Like our acceptance rate ofthis shifter, somebody saying
like no, yeah, it didn't get inthe way, like I, basically like
it is more like 99%.

Oh, thank.

God, it's very rare that somebody is
like I really need to make somebig adjustments to this thing to
get her to get uh, to get alongwith it.
But so that's the key thing isthat, uh, that temptation is
still there that we can make itbetter because it's electronic,
and so that just turned intolet's make it super customizable
so that after you bought thebike then it's the rider that

(24:31):
gets to choose what would makethis thing better if they could
really do whatever they wantwith it because it's electronic.
And so it's been a year and ahalf since we got our first like
big batch of prototypes that wecould start showing to OEM
customers.
And so when we went out in theroad with all of those guys, we

(24:51):
would stop in the middle andhave like a little refreshment
station and I would pull out anAllen wrench and I'd go up to
all the product managers and sayyou have homework now you need
to put that shifter paddle in adifferent position and just try
something, like if it makes itworse or makes it better, like I
want you to have some idea ofwhat this thing can do and the I
like the things that some ofthose guys came up with just
because they were forced to.

(25:12):
At this point they ended upplaying around with maybe
reducing your thumb unwrapped sothat from your normal riding
position your thumb doesn't haveto disengage from the bar as
much in order to reach eitherone of the shift paddles.
It could be getting a betterseparation between the two, for

(25:33):
sure it could be moving it awayso that your first click is kind
of at like a natural,comfortable ending point for
your like your thumb to move.
Because maybe that's somethingthat we can say about a
mechanical shifters because ifyou're locked into a certain
position, if, like, your thumbjust kind of naturally wants to
move this far and you want tohave to reach a little bit
further to get that second click, so if you're not having to

(25:55):
reach a little bit furtherbecause of the way that the
shifters set up, then you'llhave accidental double click
sometimes, so to be able to takethe electronic one and just
move it to exactly the rightspot so that your thumbs natural
, like end of its stroke isexactly at the end of the first
click but not the second click.
Then you've got less accidentaldouble shifts.

So, so I think what you're talking
about, what you haven't said yetis that you can actually adjust
both of the shifter.

Yeah, so behind each shifter paddle is a
little three millimeter Allenwrench, and once you loosen that
you could basically put thatpaddle wherever you want.

Um it rotates and moves forward
and back.

Uh, yeah , we can say swings in and out
and twists back and forth, okayall right, whatever tomatoes.

Yeah , what's the camber of?

this saying it two different ways is
for sure the way to confuseeverybody imagine they're like
on a ball and socket joint, it'snot, but you've got two axes of
adjustment and you loosen thatbolt and you can basically put
that thing wherever you want,okay, so here's my biggest
problem.

I've got two axes of adjustment and
you loosen that bolt and you canbasically put that thing
wherever you want, okay, sohere's my biggest problem I've
had with electronic shifters onall the brands is, like you said
, the engineers seem to changethem and they're totally
different than my other bike.
And so can somebody go fromtheir regular bike that doesn't
have XTR, that has a mechanicalsystem, jump on this one and
just not have to relearn wherethe shifter is.

That would be the easiest transition
for sure.
The hardest transition is ifyou've got a transmission pod.
Right now and you have, yourbrain is switched over to two
different buttons, so if youwere switching brands, it would
be harder.
It would be a bit harder.

Yeah .

But going from mechanical to this
electronic shifter is very easy.

I love that because I don't feel
like that's been a prioritybefore, and that's my life.
I'm constantly switching bikes,so I like that.
So now the thing that I thinkShimano has set themselves apart
with the shifter is being ableto use that second lever as a
trigger or a thumb.
Is that?

still a possibility, so we didn't check
that one off the list this timearound.
What, uh?
Um, I'll tell you how it wentwith, uh, the conversation with
the engineers through thoseseries of uh, of skunt camps
over the years, that uh, uh, wesaid we wanted a double click
shifter in both directions, andwe want the second click to be
noticeably harder than the firstclick, and so the engineer's

(28:13):
response to that is was that isvery difficult.

So polite.
That was exactly the way thatthey said it, Like that little
pause and everything.

Like I don't want to disappoint you and
uh, and they don't say no inJapan but we talked about that.
If they say something like wewill study, then that's not a
good sign for sure, but ifthey're saying, it's very
difficult.
That is definitely the closestto a no, but they pulled it off.
They made that second clicknoticeably harder than the first

(28:48):
click, so it's easy to stopafter the first click, because
if you're pushing with the sameamount of force then you don't
want to accidentally get asecond one.
Um and uh, uh.
But we got the same answer,basically Like once, like we
have kind of our list of uh, um,what we want in the new design,

(29:08):
but they're also kind of rankeda little bit.
So we said second click, harderthan the first click, is more
important than being able topull the trigger for the release
or the outward shift.
Harder gear.

So are the?
Are the new ones?
Push, push or push, push, push?
Okay, and then what you'resaying is, when you hit the, the
one lever, there's a firstclick and then a second, so you
could shift two at a time.
Exactly, shift two at a time,exactly, okay, and so in the
teaser it was talking about howfast it is.

does that help increase the speed of
the shifts?
It sure does, yeah, and so thewhole thing is based off the
hyperglide plus system, whichdoesn't have like a
revolutionary change, but, uh,the derailleur design has got
some smart tweaks in it thatmake shifting faster than like
if somebody's ridden amechanical hyperglide plus bike,
or even the e-bike hyperglideplus system that we have, um, uh
, that is electronic shiftinghas been for the last couple of

(29:56):
years.
This is faster than either ofthose because we've got um
increased chain wrap and the cogtooth profile is kind of
tweaked just a little bit, so itreally is the fastest shifting
that we've ever done.

That's , that's probably the biggest
complaint with the competitorsis the speed of the shift.

So that was one of my questions.
Is backward compatibility tothe existing acoustic components
Like is the cassette have to be?

it doesn't have to be the new one
yet.
So we've put in a ton ofbackwards compatibility, so it
doesn't have to be the new crank, doesn't have to be the new
cassette, and there actuallyisn't even a new chain Like,
we're just going to keep makingthe 9,100.

Holy crap, that's going to be huge.
That's a big deal.
Yeah, that's a big deal.

So.
So let's talk a little bit moreabout the derailleur.

Yeah , so shifter.
Anything else before we moveaway from there is?

uh, yeah , I can check off the list.
Uh, I spec system isn't changed.
There's both an uh a band clampversion and an I spec version.
Um, and uh, uh, yeah, there isa cool feature for this new XTR
shifter as well and it kind ofis, uh, um, like a racer focused
feature and the RN XTR standsfor race, so there needs to be

(31:02):
some cool little racer featuresin there.
So, uh, this guy has a lockoutso that if you want to disable
the second click, you can, andso, um, it's kind of there for
race day that, uh, like, theadrenaline's pumping and you're
thinking less about operatingthe bike than you are at any
other time, like you're going asfast as possible.
So riders that are very welllike spend a lot of time on

(31:24):
their bike and are verycomfortable with doing single
click or double click, that like, when it comes to race day, I
just want to stab at that thingand get a gear and I don't mind
pressing it twice to get twogears.
Yeah, like, I just want to turnoff that second click so you
could disable it in the app andtell it to ignore the second
click.
But uh, um, it felt like a nicelittle xtr touch to be able to
turn the switch and disable.

(31:44):
The second is a physical switchon the physical lockout on the
shifter.

Yeah , I I got a mechanic question um
i-Spec EV.
Right, if you buy this shifteror let's say it comes on a bike,
which I think is really likely-right.
And it's for some reason.
You switch your brakes and it'sI-Spec EV.
Can you then adapt that to adifferent brake or put a band on

(32:10):
it, or do you have to buy a newshifter, like you do on some of
the current mechanical systems?

Uh, I don't know the answer for the
new shifter cause we haven'tgotten all the exploded views
yet and kind of I just haven'tasked every question about it,
but uh for our currentmechanical stuff.
You can buy the outer casing andchange something from I spec to
a clamp on one.
So that would be the reallyclean way to do.
It is to change the outerplastic casing of the shifter
and then have the differentattachment mechanism.

(32:37):
Um, but I can tell you that, uh, uh, if I'm, if I have a test
bike, then it's often gettingthe brakes changed a lot, and if
it's a shimano brake then it'llbe compatible with i-spec, but
if it's competitor brake thenit's not.

So I just keep the little the band
one uh, yeah, the wolf tooth,oh, the little adapter, yeah, so
I, yeah, I got a bag full ofthose little wolf tooth band
clamp things and so yeah, we, wethat's a customer question,
that's common because we'removing suspense, moving either
brakes in and out or bringing indrivetrains, and then all of a

(33:11):
sudden you're like I can justswap that over and then you run
into that roadblock and you'relike crap, and that band is 50
bucks from Wolf tooth.
So when you're selling an SLXshifter that's 50 bucks, it all
of a sudden gets really hard totell a customer they got to you
know you could show another 50bucks.

So it should be cheaper to change the
housing, especially in theexample of an SLX shifter, like
just getting the new housing.

I couldn't tell you off the top
of my head, but it should beless than a new shifter I think
we found in the exploded viewand Shimano a, the housing
difference and it's like $18.
So that's a huge, huge thingfor us.
But there's some I think theDior's or something.
There's one one.
There's one or two of theshifters that don't have that
option.
But yeah, I imagine when youget into an XTR it's going to be

(33:57):
a much higher price shifter andso spending $50 to get a
different band if you have to,Probably a different customer.
Yeah, a different customer.
Okay, so we're done with theshifter.

Josh "Magellan" Anders (34:08):
Anything else on the shifter?

There's a third button on the shifter.

I should mention that.
What's the?

Dane "Suspension Guru" Hi (34:12):
third button do.
Is it red?
No, oh man Lost opportunityright there.

If you're familiar with our road
and gravel shifters.
They've got kind of a hiddenbutton underneath the hoods.
And so it's a customizablebutton so it could pair up with,
like your Garmin or computer,if someone made a dropper post.
It's a little bit hard to reachthat button.
I wouldn't want to use it for adropper post but theoretically,
yeah, it's an um.
It's an open platform system.

(34:42):
If anybody out there is uh uhworking on bringing an
electronic product to market andyou want it to talk to a
Shimano system and be controlledby a Shimimano button, like
we'll, yeah, it's a no-costlicense agreement like we love.

Oh, that's cool so I work for a
missile company.
Yeah, we could put a littletiny missile on the bike and you
could launch it yeah, button,maybe I I mean sometimes yeah
sometimes that's probably needed.

It's very rare that we turn down
most common, the button was formaybe a garmin or something.

Uh yeah, that's how I've got it set up
on my bike and you get.
So it's the same as on mygravel bike.
You get three functions out ofthe button with a single click,
a double click or a click andhold.
So it's scrolling like left andright on my pages and then on
mine.
Click and hold brings me backto my map screen at any time,
but you can have it turn on thebacklight.

And it's not just garmin either,
it's a bunch of other computermakers.

I am forever going to refer to
that as the missile launchbutton.
Just that's why I said that'swhy I said it should be red.
Um, so is this button easier tohit with your thumb?
Like, uh, is it like I'mthinking on the front, towards
the rider?

that was , uh, another kind of key racer
detail.
Um, there, uh, there was oneracer in particular that was
adamant about it Uh, danielO'Tone.
Oh, okay, um, and uh, he, uh,uh.
From the beginning of uh, he'sbeen racing e-bikes with Orbea.
Basically, they have like arace development team, and so it
just like he works on a framedevelopment with Orbea and the

(36:07):
team was also working on productdevelopment with us.
And uh said that, uh, I knowthat the system is supposed to
be very robust and things aren'tsupposed to go wrong, but
someday I'm going to crash hardin a race stage and uh, uh, and
then the derailleur is not goingto be working very well and I
need to be able to do somethingabout it.
And here's the key thing I needto be able to do something about

(36:28):
it without taking my eyes offthe trail or taking my hands off
the bar.
So I need you to give me asystem where I can and it wasn't
like adjust the derailleur.
It was uh, um, get the, uh, thechain in his favorite gear,
like the gear that he was goingto need for laying down power at
the end of the race stage, sothat it wasn't jumping in and

(36:49):
out of that gear.
Like, I just need to be able totest that gear, make sure I can
put down the power and if andif I can hear that it's rubbing
up against the next bigger cog,then I need to be able to get it
in trim mode and just move itover until that noise has gone
away, so that I've got theconfidence to put down the power
in that gear.
So that is out of the box.
What that button will do is itgets you into trim mode.
So just press and hold thatbutton, count to three, let go,

(37:12):
and the shifter will be a barreladjuster.
Now, basically, instead of acool.
Okay, so you can do it on thetrail, on the fly, without
looking nice.

So it's dual function.
But then when you, that'sreally cool.
So cause we have to do, is thatalso the button you use for
syncing?

No, there, there, Uh, no, um there.
Uh, there's no sync button onthe shifter.
There's a couple of ways tosync it, Um, but uh, you sync it
by pressing and holding bothpaddles at the same time, and
that basically does what a syncbutton would do All right.

Yeah , you had me worried that he
didn't have to sync them and I'mlike I'm going to go up next to
my buddy and start shifting hisbike.

The easiest way to do it actually is
get out your smartphone app,connect to the rear derailleur.
There's a button on there.
If you press and hold thebutton, the light turns blue.
You connect to the app and thenthere's a QR code on the bottom
of the shifter.
Take a picture of it with theapp and then it just syncs it
like it knows the ID of theshifter.

Oh , that's kind of cool.

You've got shifter number 7,864.

I'm wondering how, though, I can
get control of my buddy shifterso that I can shift it while
he's riding from my bike.
I have a.

You can pair multiple shifters with a
derailleur, so his bike couldwork totally fine and you can
pair another one with it.
You can keep it in your pocket,oh yeah.

That's what I needed to know.

Are you sure we should have said
that Is this something we'regoing to cut out of the podcast?
No, no, we're good.

So I would say that one thing
about the wireless that alwayscame up before when wireless
started coming out was loss ofsignal, anything like that.
Are you having any issues?

We developed this wireless protocol
for the Dura-Ace group a coupleyears ago, so it's an in-house
developed Shimano wirelessprotocol.
It's extremely stable.

Okay and it's worked out great.
It's already already beentested for years.

Okay, Perfect and it's lightning fast
too, like it's faster thanBluetooth it actually this was
the cool story from when DuraAce went wireless is that it
started shifting faster when itwent wireless because the signal
goes at the speed of light andthe electrons going through the
wires like they have to stop ata computer chip along the way as
well and then get relayed along.

(39:16):
But yeah, it's faster to do itwireless.

That is so cool.
I love that, because that'strue technology evolution.
Let's talk about the derailleur.
All right, that's all we have,right?
I mean, we're talking about thesystem, the deep dive.

The deep dive on the derailleur.

But when I think about all these
systems that I sell, youbasically have a shifter and a
derailleur.
That's it.
That's the real.

Yeah, I mean, there's other components
that are coming out Brakes.

Yeah, yeah New cranks.

But when it comes to the Is there a
new cassette?

There is a new cassette, though, so
totally backwards compatibility.

Josh "Magellan" Anderso (39:50):
Totally Okay.
So so deep dive on thederailleur a little bit, go into
some more specifics on on I.
Well, let me ask you somequestions.
If I bend my derailleur, uh,hanger um does the system
automatically adjust so thatit'll shift, or do I have to use
that trim feature that wetalked about earlier to get it
to shift?

You would have to use the trim
feature and like as a mechanic,with the way that you diagnose a
bent derailleur hanger is thatit shifts good in one part of
the cassette but not the otherpart of the cassette.
So that's what you would expectif you had a bent hanger that
you could choose some gears towork well, but not others,
giving up the others.

Choose some gears to work well, but
not others giving up the others.
Yeah, okay, what um I?
I you need to talk, but um, butI have so many questions on the
derailer, so go for it.
Well, I'll just start going andthen I'll answer most of them,
yeah.

So, um, uh, to relate back to cassettes
real quick and um, and tell itin a derailleur way, is that
there is a uh kind of a standardlong cage version, but there's
also a short cage version, whichwe've done before, and it is a
very popular spec for aggressiveriders.
It does pretty well in theaftermarket channel.
I don't know how how does it doin Arizona.

(40:58):
Do you guys sell short cagederailleurs and 10, 45 cassettes
, or you need the climbing gearsaround.

Yeah Cause, straight up and straight
down.

So that's been the compromise that
kind of came along with ashort-caged derailleur, is that
it's a 1045 cassette.
So you're giving up that, likethe second biggest cog on a 1051
is a 45.
So you're literally giving upone full shift.
Our new cassette is a 945.
So that is not giving up anyrange.
The idea would be that yourchainring would get four teeth

(41:25):
smaller, but say, a 32-toothchain ring with a 10-51 cassette
and a 28-tooth chain ring witha 9-45 cassette.
You've got the exact same highgear and low gear and the same
number of steps in between.

Okay, and you're getting some
clearance in the front then yeah, still micro-spline, still
micro-spline, yeah.

It's a new lock ring with external
splines.
That's how we made it work.

Okay , all right, and then still 12
speed.
Right, we didn't actually touchon that yet, but the spy photos
had a picture of a 12.
So I was pretty sure.
And then.
So you're going to have a 51option, but you're also going to
have a nine.
Is the 51 a nine, or is thatgoing to be?

a 10?
10, 51.
Yeah.

So , basically stick into that
roughly 500% gear spread, yeah,so basically stick into that
roughly 500% gear spread, yeah,and then the nine, 45.
Okay, awesome.
So, but that it's two different, derailleurs.

So you won't be able to go there's no
switching back and forth.

Dane "Suspension Guru" (42:16):
Correct , okay, all right.
So, and then I got a questionabout the nine 45, cause, you're
right, we don't see that toomuch in the shop.
Almost every bike is spec withthe 51 customers ask for that.
Is that a big deal on the WorldCup circuit?
Are they the guys that are like, hey, I don't need a 51.
I want tighter gearing?

Nick Murdick (Shimano (42:34):
Basically every World Cup Enduro racer
uses the short-caged trailer andthe D45 cassette.

Now are they using it to get rid of
the dangle.

Yeah, they're doing it for ground
clearance.
And I mean Enduro racing, is allabout making it to the end of
the day, and it's downhill tooRight yeah, I mean those guys
are also not changing theirchainring size or worrying about
like they are literally givingup just their biggest cog,
they're not giving up their highgear and using a small
chainring in order to make theshort cage work, which is like

(43:05):
what I do at home in SouthernCalifornia.
That, um, I mean basicallyeverybody at the office runs the
short cage derailleur and wekind of run small chain rings,
cause once you're on the roadlike you're going to get spun
out anyway and uh, so I justkeep the same climbing gear, run
a small chain ring and so if Irun a 34, 10, uh, 51, what front

(43:25):
chain ring?

if I wanted to do something
similar, am I going to ride withthe nine?

uh, four teeth smaller, so you'd move
down to a 30, 30.
Okay, something to keep in mind, though.
Like if you're shopping for anew bike and your bike was a 29,
or, and your next one's goingto be a mullet, you get two
teeth back for a mullet, Okay,which is, uh, not very common
knowledge.
Like, we tend to use the samesize chain rings if it's a
mullet or a full 29er, butthere's a basically a half a
shift difference between thosetwo wheels.

Okay , yeah, and that's just because
you don't have as far away thethe, the wheels closer.
So there's a.
I know there's calculationswhen you're doing gear inches
and they take into account thesize of the wheel, which I don't
know how it works, so I'm notgoing to claim like I do, but I
know that when you go from 29.
So when 29ers came out, therewas a 29 group that came out and
they were, I think, the first36s.

(44:11):
Uh, 11, 36.
Oh yeah, do you remember that?

I do yeah and that was for the 29ers
so it was buried in the yeah,yeah, the dark corners of my
brain.
That's the, the, that's the oldknowledge that I keep stored
for some reason I don't know,but uh, but yeah, okay.

So uh, two different cassettes
sizes, yeah, depending.

And then the nine is the big news on the
cassette having a 945, so youcan do a short cage derailleur
with no compromise to your totalgear range okay, but you do
need to match the derailleur tothe cassette.
You do, yeah okay, short cagederailleur 945.

Long cage derailleur 1050 you're
doing a lot of OE.
I mean you basically deal withthe OEs.
Have you seen the OEs adoptthat more or?

so, uh, with the uh outgoing components,
with a 10, 45 cassette, becauseyou were making a sacrifice in
gear range.
Um, basically, the uh bikebrands are not comfortable with
putting a bike on the salesfloor of a bike shop.

That's asking a customer to make that
kind of choice to give it'sscary for a customer, because
more gears is better than lessgears, you know so um, but, uh,
but this was really so appealing.

The 945 cassette that uh, um, you know
it's quieter too because thedoor derailleur cage is shorter
and you're getting like it'slighter.
Uh, your chain is shorter.
Uh, that has a big effect onthe noise of the drivetrain as
well.
Just being able to run ashorter chain and six lengths of
the chain weighs more than youthink it does, and when you're
in your small car going fast andthat thing's what's bouncing up

(45:34):
and down, it makes a noticeabledifference.
So that we had some OEMcustomers that were saying you
know what I'm going to do it,I'm going to do 100% the 945
spec.
Weird.
Now, this podcast should becoming out in a time where
you've got bikes on your salesfloor now.
And you will see that they areall the 10 51 spec.

(45:54):
Okay, that's what we expect,because OEM customers know, like
, how the bike business worksand they know that if you are
trying to mass produce stuff andbring stuff to market, that
some spec is going to be likethe golden spec, that's going to
get prioritized and it's lessrisk if you just do the long
cage trailer and the 10 51cassette for the first run of

(46:15):
bikes that you do.
Okay, so, um, it'll be mostly,uh, 10 51s long cage derailleurs
in the beginning, but when weget to 2026, then I expect that
to start to change.

And and that's something as a shop
we can kind of tote as like hey,the racer setup is this other
way.
So for the fast guys, the guysthat that want that little edge,
we, that's a, that's a, thenext level.
They can beat that guy thatbought the stock bike with their
custom bike.

So yeah, for sure, yeah, so okay, uh,
all right, keep going.

What I'm loving, this, what else?

the uh, I mean the story behind the
derailleur, and maybe I can talkabout how the engineer, um,
like what their pathway was.
Um, that, uh, we, um, I guess,yeah, where it started was, uh,
um, taking a pile of brokenderailleurs from your typical

(47:11):
Enduro World Series race at thetime, like it just turned into a
World Cup recently, yeah, andmaybe we could break 20 or 30
rear derailleurs at an EnduroWorld Series race, especially if
it was a rocky, rough terrainlike finale leaguerie.

Yeah .

And uh.
So, uh, um, every one of thosebroken derailleurs goes back to
Japan for study.
And it's actually easier tostudy derailleurs that have been
broken at a race becausethey're typically pretty new,
because the racer is going to beswitching stuff out, um and uh.
So there's not a lot ofdistracting other marks on there
that the engineer can see.

(47:50):
The derailleur got hit here andit broke here and you can get
that direct correlation impacthere, broken here, and so there
are several places around thederailleur where there are just
simple little tweaks that youcan make to the design to make
it so that it either doesn't gethit there or that it doesn't
break if it does get hit there.
So what they found was that themost common part of the

(48:11):
derailleur to get hit was theleading edge of the stabilizer
unit, where the clutch, yeah,lives, yeah that that, uh, it
kind of sticks out a bit andit's fully squared off, so, like
it's front facing surface arealike it's the easiest thing.
This is if you're looking at itfrom the rocks point of view.
That's the thing that the rocksees.
It's like this big old targetsticking out there.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Hi (48:30):
Awful in a wind tunnel.

So then the other part of it is that, if
it's also the most fragile partof the derailer, or it's the
part of the derailer that if itgets hit there, it's the most
likely to cause a failure, soI'll I'll try not to spend an
hour and a half on this topic,because I certainly could.

(48:56):
Basically, yeah, if you have acomplicated stabilizer mechanism
inside of there, then youeither have to have a really
thin hollow housing or the waythat we've done it is that the
front part of the parallelogramon a derailleur it's called the
P-body, it's what the pulleycage attaches to.

Yeah .

That we make that thing like a flat
plate.
So when you see the bigstabilizer unit on the
derailleur, that's just aplastic cover for the whole
thing.
The structural part of it iscoming off of this parallelogram
.
That's nice and robust, butit's thinning down to a plate
and so that plate just shearsoff from how it attaches to the
parallelogram.

(49:30):
And yeah, I'm sure you've seensome broken ones that break
exactly there, like behind theclutch or to the left of it.
So the idea was to make that Pbody both as strong as possible
and as narrow as possible, andit turned into let's slim down
that leading edge of that P-bodyand basically turn it into a

(49:51):
wedge.
So the wall of that P-body canbe a lot thicker than it could
be before.
And because it's a wedge, thenwe're already starting down the
path of having rocks push thederailleur out of the way
instead of taking that forcehead on.
So the other big challenge thatthey had to work out at the
same time is where are we goingto put the battery in this thing
?
And we were really limited onwhere we could put it because of

(50:12):
patents.
But the parallelogram kind ofopened up and presented this
opportunity that if you followthat wedge shape of the P body
of the derailleur and have theparallelogram follow that shape
as well, then you end up with abig opening on the inside.

It was the perfect place to put
the battery so yourparallelograms got taller, I
guess, um so like uh it's kindof bigger in every direction
really.

So, uh, uh.
But it follows that wedge, likethe whole derailleur looks like
a wedge and really the idea isthat, uh, a rock will start
pushing the p-body out of theway and then slide across the
parallelogram and just benudging the derailleur out of
the way.

The entire time.
Okay, and the derailleur canstill rotate back too.

Yeah, which is a key part of it.
I think we said that duringthat whole process.
It's naturally going to want torotate backwards a little bit,
so we call that the B axle, thebracket axle, where the
derailleur mounts to thederailleur hanger.
So, uh, preserving freerotation around that point was a

(51:16):
key part of the derailleurdesign.
Um and uh, yeah, so we got ourwedge shape, we got our battery
inside.
Uh, so the way that the batterymounts is uh, there's a little
uh like trap door that comes offthe bottom of the parallelogram
.
Um and uh, it's got a anotherwedge that sits in a track.
So you pop the derail, thebattery, up inside the um, the

(51:36):
trailers parallelogram and thenthat wedge slides into the track
to push the battery up towardsthe terminals.
So it's great that the uh, um,uh, the terminals are facing
down.
Yeah and uh, they've got a verysmall round seal around those
terminals and the battery ispressed up against that seal as
you close that little trap door,so you get a lot more water

(51:58):
tight yeah, so no water pooling,everything's facing in the
right direction and we've got asmall round seal and if you want
to make the best seal that youcan, you want it to be as small
as possible, a little surfacearea possible, and you want it
to be round with no corners.
Square is weird, so it's yeah,it's harder to make the seal
effective if you do it that wayand the battery.

So the battery is removable.
Do you charge it on the bike oroff the bike?

charge it off the bike.
There's a little like chargingreceptacle okay all right what's
the life um about 200 miles.
Um the battery off the top ofmy head I could open my laptop
is 310 milliamp hours.
So this has been my go-tolittle jab is that we didn't do
a 53 tooth cog, we didn't do a310 milliamp hour battery versus

(52:44):
somebody who may have a 300.

Somebody might have a 300.
Okay, okay, gotcha, gotcha,that's fine.
You know I love it, you knowit's awesome.
So shift time, compared to likethe road, because that has a
much bigger battery I feel likeyou could go six months on a
road bike without charging.
Do you think it's like averagerider is going to be like a week

(53:07):
or four rides, or?

I mean it would vary a lot depending on
how much you're doing.
Like, if you're doing a 24 hoursolo race, then be prepared to
switch your battery at somepoint.

So okay, so that's a great.
That's a great metric, becausethat's harder, that's easier for
me to like relate to her milesright, yeah, but 200 miles at
Honeybee is different than 200miles at 50 year and so.
But the 24 hours?
So that would be a great metricIf you're.
Can you do a full 24 with onecharge?
So you're saying you may needto switch.

I'm sure I could yeah.
Well, if you're riding solo, Iguess.

Yeah , like I only do one lap and
then drink a lot, you'll be fine, yeah, so um, but a solo rider,
who's doing like 11 laps theyyeah, yeah, I mean, you're not
going to do the whole thing withone light battery?
Yeah, yeah, Okay, All right, sothat that helps.
That helps people understand,you know so any other nuances on
the derailleur.

Uh a ton .

Yeah.

So, uh, yeah, there's some cool stuff.
Uh, oh, right, I talked aboutsmart, simple solutions.
So let's talk about a couple ofother places where, uh, the
derailers, uh, or the engineers,found that if the rock hits it
here, that it'll cause a failure.
So one of them, for sure, is arock direct impact to that
parallelogram, especially on thebottom, that, like it, can
cause something to bend and uh,um, that's uh, yeah, basically a

(54:25):
shortcoming of our currentdesign is that if that
parallelogram takes a directimpact, it's easy for it to
twist something in thederailleur so that it looks
totally fine, but it shifts likeit's got a bent derailleur
hanger.
And you replace the derailleurhanger and it still shifts like
it's got a bent derailleurhanger.

(54:47):
So the solution was to putlittle plastic bumpers on them
and they're like bumpers off oflike a 1980s volvo and so yeah,
and if people look for picturesof the derailleur, like you'll
be able to pull them out, likethey're not going to get called
out, they're not that glamorous.
The battery door is actuallyone of the bumpers okay, um and
uh, but then behind it, on theother parallelogram, there's
still just a little plasticbumper.
So those bumpers are totallyreplaceable if you crack them,

(55:08):
but it just, it like spreads outthe load when you take that
impact.
So it's that sharp, singularimpact that can cause harm.
Um and so spreading it out andmaking the little bumpers
replaceable, like that actuallyis more useful than being able
to replace the parallelogram isjust like, yeah, put a bumper on
there and the replacementpart's super cheap.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(55:28):
And then along those lines oflike also being cost-effective,
smart solutions is that thepulley wheels are solid.
They don't have any holes inthem, so impossible for sticks
to get inside and jam things up.
The other place where a stickcan get inside, the drive train,
is like it just kind of fallsinside the loop of the chain and
then the lower pulley wheellike tracks that thing in.

(55:48):
So the pulley cage just extendsout past the teeth of the lower
pulley so that it can't do that.
Okay, interesting Nice.

Yeah , so you still have the simple,
smart, simple, still offset onthe lower pulley.

Yeah, so it looked bent Yep.

The first one we got, we returned.
Yeah, and like yeah, and it waslike this thing's bent out of
the box and we called them upand and then we found out it's
not.

It's not yeah, it's supposed to be like.
Luckily, that's pretty commonfrom everybody, right yeah?

They're starting to figure it out, and
that was mainly a one by move,because super wide range.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah , but uh and then.
Um, now what's the differencebetween?
Are you calling them SG and SGS?

GS and SGS Okay.

All right, gs and G.
Okay, all right.
Um, what's the difference onthe body versus the cage?
Is there any difference?

You know , I uh, I don't actually know
the answer to that questiontoday.

Okay .

And uh, so, yeah, maybe, um, somebody
can find out on their own if youcan swap them.
The app like knows if it's along cage or a short cage.
Um, and I can tell you thatwith the, the product that's on
the market now, the, um, the pbody, is taking a different path
.
So, um, it's, uh, it's designedto kind of follow the, the

(57:07):
shape of the cassette, so it'smoving in a different way.
There is a chance that it'sinterchangeable, but I'm not
sure if, uh, if we were able topull that off or not.

Okay , now um also mechanic question
what are the adjustments?
Do you have a high, low limitsand B tension?

We still got regular old B tension and
high and low limit screws Um, weactually could.
Um, because derailleur hangerslike we could rely on the UDH if
we wanted to, that those haveall got the exact same
dimensions and as soon as thathappens you can get rid of limit
screws.
That you know exactly how thisthing is going to interface and
where the cassette is going tosit.
Like it's all keyed up againstthat UDH, but super easy to gain

(57:46):
backwards compatibility toolder bikes that don't have a
UDH if we keep the limit screwsin there.

So that's right as well.
Yeah, that's pretty awesome,cause there's the other brand
has made it so that if you havean older bike, you're out, you
know you can't do anything,whereas this sounds like this If
I have an older bike that Iabsolutely love that's not UDH,
I can still run the new.

XTR, and for sure.
We don't want to go down a roadof making it in compromises to
a product in order to dosomething cool like that.
Like if they're able to make abetter product and have to give
up backwards compatibility.
Like we can all recognize that95% of the rear derailleurs that
I sell are sold on completebikes.
Like that's just how it works.

So , and it's just a phasing out
eventually, of stuff.

So and I mean a lot of those like you
might get bummed that you can'tput the new transmission
derailleur on your bike, but youwould not be bummed if you got
yourself a new bike.

Yeah , that's true.

It's true.
There are going to be otherbetter things about it, yeah.

So new cranks as well.

There is a new crank, yeah, and so it.
One of them gets heavier, oneof them stays about the same.
There's a cross country and anEnduro spec one, but the Enduro
one really is an Enduro speccrank and we kind of didn't do
that in the last generation.
And, um, any keen observerswould have seen that, uh, um, in
the 2024 racing season, richieRoot started using XT cranks, um

(59:07):
, just because he kind of hadsome scares with XTR cranks,
like he never had a failure.
But you hit those things hardenough, and what we had done in
the past was basically thelightest aluminum crank that we
could, and so we made the armsin two pieces and then bonded
them back together.
What we had been famous for fordecades before that was a

(59:29):
proprietary, secret process.
That's a hollow forged processyeah, the original hollow tech.
So you're starting with a solidpiece of aluminum and you're
forging it and ending up with ahollow cavity inside, and not
like by hollowing it outafterwards or putting something
in there or drilling holes downthe middle of it?

Yeah .

It's just just from forging it, just
hitting it from the outside, andyou end up with a hollow cavity
on the inside, and so thatmakes a very strong and light
crank.
And we thought that we hadpushed that technology as far as
we could, which is why itcapped out at XT for the
previous generation.
But we were able to make it abit lighter and we're
comfortable with putting the XTRlogo back on that hollow forged

(01:00:11):
crank arm and it's just at thatpoint.
It's something that youabsolutely never have to worry
about, Like you're never goingto break uh, a hollow tech crank
arm and uh, so, to make theEnduro crank like, uh, a, the
arms, yeah, get more durable.
But we paired it with an Endurospecific spindle.
So the XTR crank um, as thefuture groups come out, we'll

(01:00:35):
see.
In comparing it with stuffthat's on the market right now,
Um, we can see clearly that thestrongest crank we make is the
Saint, but that only fits ondownhill bikes really, and uh,
um, but then the XTR Endurocrank is going to be the next
one.
Behind it it's almost like aSaint spindle.
It's not quite to that level ofa Saint spindle, but, um, that
makes for a very robust crankand um, it really is, the Richie
roots back, Like we kind ofmade it for him, Like it's to

(01:00:55):
his you didn't name it that, butthat's the unofficial name yeah
.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Hig (01:00:59):
Same um chain ring interface.

Nick Murdick (Shimano) (01:01:02):
Uh, it basically.
Yeah, the chain rings um canfit from previous generation to
this one.
It's the same spline interface,it's the same lock ring, but
we're moving from uh, uh well,we're moving to a dedicated 55
millimeter chain line to kind ofto fit on modern bikes.

Yeah , so just for people that may
not know this, on XT cranks, ifyou buy a certain width crank
and then all the chain rings arethe same offset.

Yeah, is that correct?
We've always done yeah.

Only .
Is that correct?
We've always done yeah, Onlyone offset for now Chain rings.
Is that now changing to whereyou're?
You're going to have likebasically one spindle length and
then maybe change the offset ofchain rings on the chain line
of the bike.

So, uh, yeah, the cranks that have a
that are the outgoing cranks.
Now the way that we gotdifferent chain lines was that
we did a longer spindle and thenwe just put spacers between the
crank and the frame and so wecould do a 55 or 56.5, which is
like a super boost chain line.
Yeah, everything is gettingunified to 55 millimeter chain
line and there will be nospacers and no different spindle

(01:02:04):
lengths, it's just 55 chainline all the time.
So with the outgoing cranks, ifyou didn't have any spacers,
you'd have a 52 millimeter chainline.
So now that we got no spacersin a 55 millimeter chain line,
it means that the chain ring isoffset three millimeters.
Okay, so you could.
There's some amount ofinterchangeability with the
chain rings, like if you hadlots of spare chain rings for

(01:02:25):
your current XTR crank and youwanted to use it on the new one.
Just keep in mind that yourchain line is going to go back
to 52, like you had on yourprevious crank.
Okay, that's, and that'll workon some bikes.
I need a white board to anydifference in the lengths of the
cranks.

Josh "Magellan" Anderson (01:02:40):
Oh, that's the big news.

We are uh introducing 160 millimeter uh
length option, thank god, yeahit.
Uh, the trend for sure is goingshorter and shorter and so, um,
we, uh, we kind of wanted likeI don't know, right now the
standard spec is either 170 or165, even depending on who you
talk to, right, but uh, wewanted to make sure that people,

(01:03:03):
that the like the bulk of themarket wasn't riding our extreme
spec.
So if the shortest one we madewas 165, then there was nothing
that a shorter rider could couldhop onto and get like their
version of that benefit.
So the 160 was really important, kind of just for that.
And if the trend keeps goingand everybody ends up on 160s,
which already it's got a lot ofpeople's attentions, like man
especially, I mean, yeah, I saidI've got a transition patrol

(01:03:26):
and riding it in uh, arizonathat mullet with a low bottom
bracket pedal strike monster.

Josh "Magellan" Anderso (01:03:35):
There's one component on my bike that's
not Shimano and it's the cranks, because yeah, you had to go
shorter, cause I had to goshorter and I didn't have an
option with you guys yeah, sowhat length do you run?
155 or 160 depending on thebike.

Okay yeah.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgi (01:03:45):
So when you guys went to this
decision on 160 and you caught Icall it a trend and stuff like
that, are you getting like racerinput on this or are you
looking more at like theconsumer demand side, like is
that decision coming from?
Like racers are starting toadopt shorter crank lengths and
seeing a benefit that one inparticular?

I feel like we saw um more consumer
yeah, we could, uh, I mean wecan say from a business point of
view, through the aftermarketchannel.
But that means that we'regetting it from going into bike
shops or talking to ridersdirectly at events and uh, or
just seeing what people arecobbling together Like the
amateur enduro racers in NorthAmerica, like that's where a lot

(01:04:26):
of the good info comes from.
Like uh, I mean, there is a?
Um handful of North Americanamateur enduro racers that are
currently running our short cagederailleur with the 1051
cassette, and so we see it andwe're like those don't go
together.
And they're like I need theshort cage derailleur and I
can't give up any range, man.
And then it's like, oh okay, soif we can give you the short

(01:04:47):
cage derailleur and you don'thave to sacrifice range, then
you'd be happy.
Sweet, yeah, um.
So, yeah, those guys that swungby um, those North American EWS
races a couple of years ago,that we're running that, like we
turned it into a product foryou yeah, not just you, but yeah
, like that's where sometimes,that's where you see stuff
earliest, and well, that's kindof true innovation right.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgin (01:05:06):
I love looking at Enduro bikes
just to figure out where to puttubes on my bike.
You know, cause they strap themall over the place, like to
like.
Tool and tube management onenduro bikes is awesome, you
know, trying to get themstrapped under your cage or
under the bike or at the back.
You know, under the seat, overthe top tube.
You know, all over the place.
So let's move to the brakes yeahso we think so big big thing on

(01:05:28):
the cranks.
Uh, dedicated spindle chainrings could be cross compatible,
but for the part the new ringswill have an offset.

It's a good idea to stick with the
right ring for the right crank.
But go into your bike shop andthey'll be able to tell you, big
news is the 160.

That hasn't been around 160.

And then you also may run Still 24
millimeter Yep.

No change to the.

If you run the short cage and the 945,
you can take four teeth off thefront, so if you're at 32, you
can go down to 20.

Yeah , if you want the racer setup,
you go 945.

I think there's a lot of appeal for that
short cage derailleur actually,because it's lighter, so it's a
good cross-country setup and weget some driving efficiency
back from our derailleur designactually.
So, um, they, uh, oh yeah, theconclusion of that whole thing
that that, uh, uh, in order forthat wedge shape of the P body
to work, we needed ourstabilizer unit at the front of
the derailleur.
Uh, to get really, really slim.
Okay, and uh, there was a realsimple answer there that was

(01:06:26):
just to put two thin springsinside of there.
So it's a spring that's asstrong as a clutch was.
Okay, so it's dead simple insideof there, and there are some
kind of down the road benefitsthat we get from that as well.
So we can think about yourshifting will be better.
Also, your driving efficiencywill be better if your chain is

(01:06:46):
wrapped around the gear morecompletely or if it's engaged
with more teeth.
Yeah, and so we need to becareful to not think about just
a static situation where thebike is in the repair stand.
Think about it when you'reriding down a rough trail that
your chain's bouncing around andyour chain is, uh, unwrapping
from the bottom of your cog inthe back, and so you're losing

(01:07:08):
driving efficiency on bumpyterrain and we can get some of
that driving efficiency back byhaving a spring inside the
derailleur that's stronger, soit's wrapping the chain tighter
around your cogs, keeping itmore engaged and increasing your
driving driving efficiency andnow a mechanic question is there
a switch to turn it on and off?
you don't need one um, becauseit's a spring instead of a of a

(01:07:30):
clutch, like we needed the onoff switch with the clutch,
because a clutch lets the pulleycage kind of jerk forward and
then it's hard to move in onedirection and easy to move in
the other direction.
And uh, and if it's just aspring, even if it's stronger,
like it wasn't the strength ofit, it was the jerkiness and the
uh yeah, so it's the spring, isnice and smooth, so it's very

(01:07:50):
easy to get a wheel in and outthe.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Higg (01:07:52):
the other thing about the clutch is
we would service them and makesure that they get serviced and
not rusty and things like that,so that's not needed anymore.

Yeah.
So that for me, coming fromlike a career as a as a bike
mechanic, first in a shop andthen a race mechanic with
Shimano driving the race truckaround the country.
That was a hard thing for me tolet go of was that I really
liked having serviceable partson the on the derailleur, that I
could take that clutch apartand clean it and grease it and

(01:08:20):
keep it running Absolutelybeautiful year in and year out
for many, many years.
Job security, exactly Well, thereality of the situation,
though, is that you service thembecause you have to service
them, and what happens?
Like that last ride before it'scome in for service, like it
was pretty bad, like the?
Um, the shifts could be superrough, um the?

(01:08:42):
Uh, the pulley cage might notspring back, so your chain might
end up drooping.
You could be dropping the chainin the front, um, you could be
dealing with noise from thederailleur because the clutch
isn't working right, and in somecases, right it'll seize up
completely, and then you justcan't shift gears.
And then about the on-offswitch I've this is kind of
turned into my hobby that I cancome to a festival like this and

(01:09:03):
I can just count the clutchesthat are in the off position.
So true, and nobody noticed, andso you just went out for a ride
and you didn't have astabilizer on your bike at all.
Yeah, and so getting rid of itprobably really does, uh,
overall, improve the ridingsituation across the board for
um any mountain biker, likehaving no service interval but

(01:09:26):
also no degradation ofperformance okay um, and a
system that never needs to beturned off, but you can never
forget to turn it back on now um.

The main reason for that switch,
though, was not so that youcould turn it off.

It was just so you could pull the wheel
out, just so you get the wheelin.

Yeah , and so not as big issue, cause
you're dealing with a strongspring, so it still moves.
It's not locking like theclutch, kind of way it breaks
free nice and smooth.

So the force to get it to move is the
same, but because it doesn'tjerk forward, it doesn't mess
you up when you're trying tolike get the wheel lined up with
the dropouts.

Can we move to the brakes now?
Oh my God.

Look, we could do five hours of this I
mean, if I, if we got to the endof this?
And I didn't talk, I justwanted to know cause.

Dane "Suspension Guru" H (01:10:03):
that's the question I'm going to get.
Is there a clutch?
You know things like thatquestion on the brakes.

Uh, I got it.

Okay, I got it I got it, got it.
Any change to the hydraulicfluid?
Still mineral?
Uh, there is a change to thehydraulic.

You went dot didn't you, uh no I've
been.

I've been teaching well as a race
mechanic and then as aninstructor for shimano for many
years.
I taught a lot of break clinicsand the.
The way I would break it downis that uh, um dot fluid is an
easy system to get into becauseit's kind of an established
industry standard.
That uh, it dictates what yourseals are going to be made of
and what your fluid is going tobe, and you know what your
performance level is going to be.

(01:10:48):
Like Um and mineral oil systemsare of the next level that it
takes a lot more engineering togo out and find your own fluid
and maybe engineer your ownseals.
Like you're really stillshopping for a lot of this stuff
, but you're choosing it on yourown, your fluid characteristics
and your caliper sealcharacteristics, which are just

(01:11:08):
as important as the seal, andthat really is the point to
drive home, I think too.
So it's a new uh, low viscosity, high performance fluid and
what's different about it isthat it performs uh with very
little change in uh across thebroad range of temperatures that
we ride bikes in.
So, um, yeah, it was uh in thethirties today out here at the

(01:11:31):
Sedona Mountain.

Bike Festival.
It'll be 120.

Yeah exactly so.
This new fluid will workexactly the same in all of those
conditions, and so really whatthat helps to improve is bite
point.
Consistency is that if our sealis rebounding at different
speeds and our fluid is flowingat different rates as the system
is heating up or cooling down,or just as the weather is
changing, then the brake feelsdifferent.

(01:11:55):
So if we can make those thingsperform more consistently, then
we'll get a better, moreconsistent um feel out of our
some more consistent across theentire range of temperatures
that you'd ride your bike inbackwards compatible.
Absolutely none.
It would be uh especially inArizona it would.
It would be lethal.
We'll say that so so we have so.

So there's something on the break
that like screams that caliperseal.

Yeah, so we need.
If we're going to have a lowviscosity fluid that moves
quicker, we need a seal, that atthe caliper.
So the quick break clinic hereis that there has to be a return
spring that pushes the fluidback up to the lever after you
let go.
Okay, and it's not that springthat's in between the brake pads
, that's just to keep them fromrattling around and you could

(01:12:43):
ride without that spring inbetween your brake pads.
The real spring in the systemis the seal at the caliper.
So it's, uh, it's some peoplecall it a square edge seal, like
it flexes outward and then itreturns to its normal position,
and so when it does that, that'swhat's pushing the fluid back
up to the brake lever.
So we've got those.
Things are rubber seals.
They've got like a reboundspeed to them, um and uh, and so

(01:13:08):
the that rebound speed isreally crucial and right now the
seals that that we use they'reas good as we could get for like
the long time, yeah, but uh,the new one is more consistent,
like it's got a more consistentrebound speed.
So what will happen if you usethe new fluid in old brakes is
that on a hot day, those, uh,those caliper seals will rebound

(01:13:29):
really quickly and the fluidwill return to your brake lever
so quickly that it'll overshootthe mark.
And if you pull the um thebrake lever like if you're
pulling the brake lever and thenyou let go and then you pull
again the lever will just cometo the bar because there won't
be any fluid in the well, therewon't be enough fluid in the
line.
It'll all be up in thereservoir.

Wow, wow.
Absolutely Not backwardcompatible.
Okay, we've got very littletime.
You guys have an appointment.

I'm looking at your time here.

Just one final.
I want to make sure, cause youtalked about the different way
the levers pull and it's andit's my understanding is it's
back in up.

Uh, so the like, the main pivot point
for the brake lever gets fivemillimeters closer to the bar.
And so if we can just imagine,like where your finger rests on
the brake lever towards the tip,when you pull it, it's not
going in a straight line, it'sfollowing an arc that's rotating
around that pivot point for thebrake lever, got it?
So you're riding with yourelbows out, your fingers are
kind of pointed in, they're notreaching straight out from the

(01:14:25):
bar and pulling straight back.

Right.

So you want to be on the top of the arc
of that brake lever, pullingdown.

I'm making lots of finger gestures.
It looks really good.
We're all doing it together, sohopefully you're doing it at
home.

Like imagine your hands on handlebars
and like but ride elbows outand like, your fingers are
pointing in a little bit.
So you want that pivot point ofthe brake lever to be nice and
close to the handlebar, so thatyou're on the top of that arc,
so that the brake lever is kindof moving outward or, at the
very worst, straight back at theend of the so you're not saying
that the reach is longer orshorter, right, because it's
just where.

It's just where the pivot point is.
It's just where the pivot pointis Awesome, yeah.

And then so that was a one of our skunk
riders came up with that ideathat I want the like, and we
kind of had learned that before.
We've done a radial mastercylinder before, where the pivot
point was really far out, andthe benefit of doing that is
that you're pulling on the brakelever and the master cylinder
is also coming in towards thehandlebar and it's a very
efficient system.
But your pivot point has to bereally far from the handlebar in

(01:15:23):
order to do that.
So we scrapped it after justthat 970 generation.

Dane "Suspension Guru" Higgin (01:15:27):
I remember that I actually liked
those brakes.
They did great.
Yeah, all right.

Anything else you guys got to go with,
anything else that you want tohighlight on the break,
specifically, so the other thingis that the lever blades are
upswept a little bit because theengineer got that kind of
assignment that figure out howto put the pivot point closer to
the bar.
And then they also realizedthat like your hands aren't
parallel with the earth, likeyou've got angles to your body,
and so the lever blades need tobe upswept a little bit to come

(01:15:53):
out.

That totally makes sense.

It's a subtle difference, Like you
don't really notice it when yougo for a test ride, but once you
get used to it and you go back,you're like my levers are all
bent down.

Now the pivots aren't tilted, it's
it's just the levers.
It's like a kink in the leveryeah, almost like it crashed
which we have to fix.

Don't, don't, don't return.
So when you get the first onein the box, don't call customer
service and be like these arebent.
Well, Nick, we reallyappreciate it.
Thanks for coming and spendingsome time with us man, my
pleasure Do you have any finalthoughts?
Uh well, one final question,yeah, just trickle down.
When can we expect?

XT .

SLX Dior.
When is this tech going totrickle down?

Yeah, I'm not going to make you wait
that long at all.

Josh "Magellan" Anderso (01:16:35):
Awesome , okay, that's good, that's
cagey and good.

Any final thoughts for our listeners
?
Man, yeah, I hope people likeit.
It's been a long like I knoweverything that's wrong with the
group and there's been a lot ofblood, sweat and tears and
yelling that went into thedevelopment of this group.
And uh, um, yeah, if anybodysees me in an event, how about
that?
Then?
Uh, I'll, I'll always give youthe full, honest story, like I'm
not a pitch man for a Shimano,like I work in product

(01:17:04):
development and I'm a bikemechanic and I'm a shy, I told
you.

You did you did you, absolutely did
Well, thank you so much.
I really appreciate you coming,man.
I also want to thank you fortaking your time and doing this
right with quality, and I'm veryconfident, just like I said,
it's going to be durable, it'sgoing to be good price.

I'm stoked.
It's just going to work.
Man, I'm stoked.
Yeah, I think people have beenwaiting and they're sal use XTR.

(01:17:44):
I'm probably going to buy it.
Yeah, all right, thanks a lot,man.

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103 - Deep Dive: New XTR M9200 Di2 Wireless Groupset with Nick Murdick (Shimano’s MTB Product Manager).

Episode Transcript

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}103 - Deep Dive: New XTR M9200 Di2 Wireless Groupset with Nick Murdick (Shimano’s MTB Product Manager).