Overview HB.160 • 2019

The HB.160 was our first offering in the bike world. Built from the ground up, it utilises our proven engineering knowledge to create a bike that is unique, distinctive and is Hope.

This bike is as much at home slung on your back, scaling a Lake District peak as it is on the local trail centre for a Sunday morning blast with your mates.

We created this bike to be able to tackle the type of riding we love – technical Switchbacks of Lakeland epics, muddy steeps of the Tweed Valley or the slatey single tracks of Coed-y-Brenin, our bike can tackle them all. It will even thrive on that week in the Alps you’ve been planning for years but never got around to doing.

With 160mm of travel and a pedal efficient linkage, it inspires you to make the most of any trail you point it down. And the best bit? It’s been designed and handmade with passion at our factory in Barnoldswick, UK by our dedicated team of carbon technicians and CNC machinists.

FEATURES

RRP FROM £6299.99

SPECIFICATIONS

2019 sees the introduction of some fresh changes to the HB.160. We’ve kept some of the unique feature’s customers have come to love and applied some of the feedback received from our dealers to implement an updated spec. Not only that, we’ve chosen some logical upgrade packages to allow customers to further customise their HB.160.

The 2019 model sees a full SRAM XO1 Eagle groupset introduced, along with a full Factory Fox set up for suspension and dropper seat post. Along with Maxxis High roller 2 tyres, the HB continues to have a full range of Hope components including brakes and handlebars.

GEOMETRY

We purposely remained rather conservative on the frame geometry rather than jumping in the longer, slacker trend. We wanted a lively, manoeuvrable and comfortable bike making the ride fun and able to steer around tight switchbacks rather than a planted and straight-line warrior. Despite what we can often read on marketing leaflets, suspension design is all a question of compromise.
With this Horst link 4 bar linkage suspension, we believe we have made the right compromises, the suspension is optimised for the bikes intended  use, an aggressive riding style and pedalling efficiency.
The very progressive linkage  leverage ratio makes the bike suitable  to use either an air shock or coil shock.

REAR HUB

We produced a uniquely spaced rear end to achieve a dishless wheel build.  Moving the drive-side chainstay out has altered the chainline to give more clearance around the bottom bracket (this was pre boost, but realistically has achieved the same thing). Additionally we brought the non-driveside chainstay in to create  a narrower 130mm dropout width rear end and moved  the rotor/caliper as close as possible to the spokes.
The hub is fitted with a 17mm thru axle and 25mm location spacers for maximum stiffness.

REAR BRAKE

The radially mounted brake only needs spacers to change disc size. This makes for simple disc size changes as opposed to the current post mount which varies in position with different disc sizes. 
As our brake designer comments “It is really frustrating to model things perfectly on the screen, have CNC machines capable to hold very tight tolerances, to then fit a caliper and some randomly dimensioned brake mount. When you go away from the standard 160 postmount dimension depending which manufacturer spec you go for, the caliper ends up in a different position because there is no set standard.”
Radial mounted calipers aren’t new and have been used on motorbikes for decades, our old Mono6-Ti caliper used this type of mount.

BOTTOM BRACKET 

Designed around a 30mm axle as standard so no compromise. Unusual for the bike industry one designer worked on the frame, bottom bracket and the cranks so a perfect solution was  used to give long bearing life as well as frame/pivot stiffness.

TECH 35 W

With the trend moving towards wider tyres and lower pressures traditional rims are not able to offer tyre stability in fast cornering. With this in mind we have spent the last few years working on a wider rim profile - The Tech 35w is, as the name suggests a 35mm internal width rim. This additional width is achieved without significant weight penalty over the current Tech Enduro through optimisation of the rim profile. The wider rim offers significantly more support to tyre sidewalls allowing pressures to be dropped to 15-20psi and so increasing tyre contact area and traction. Tubeless compatibility has not been compromised with the wider design and will still be as easy as on other rims in the Tech range and offers a reduced risk of burping

CARBON HANDLE BARS

For many years it’s been our dream to produce handlebars. We initially looked at producing aluminium bars and went through a long design and testing process, but realised the only way to produce them in aluminium would be to use Far East manufacturing. Not really the Hope way!
We then began looking at carbon fibre production and quickly realised that this method could enable handlebar manufacture to remain in Barnoldswick. With the development of the HB.160 frame giving vital carbon production experience a new facility was built at our Barnoldswick site.
Key design features in our Hope handlebar include larger diameters around the bends to significantly increase the strength of the profile, combined with an optimised laminate that has been designed to increase strength in high stress areas and remove material where it’s not required to reduce weight. The results of which  is a bar that has been tuned  
via rider and testing feedback to enhance performance.