The Downhiller's XC Bike | Unraveling the 2024 Santa Cruz Tallboy 5

Hello and welcome to James the

bike

guy where today we have the opportunity to take a look at the

2024

Santa Cruz Tallboy SE. This is the carbon SEL version and the S version which is the most popular form it comes in specified this

bike

. and it's sold here in the US, so in this video we're going to look at the features and designs of the

tallboy

C, the V5 version in front of us and then find out exactly how much it weighs if this sort of thing is interesting to us. stay and let's review this bike together talking about the tall boy from Santa Cruz, this is the V5 version and what Santa Cruz proclaims as the downhill XC bike and there is a good reason for that because in the V5 version that came out last year and I have A full, in-depth video of all the changes on that bike I'll link right above.

They've added some aggressive geometry to this bike but they still keep the handling agile and quick while at the same time being very efficient when pedaling and indeed jumping. In history, the Santa Cruz tall booy was Santa Cruz's answer to the trail bike and offers a place somewhere between its blurry image, which is its XC racing bike, a bike truly designed for those epic off-road rides. long distance or crushing efforts on -it all, I may have had more suspension travel than someone else. who wanted to extend their rides from what you would use a blur and that's where this tall boy really fits in very well and in the fifth generation this is a mature bike that knows what it wants as far as being a great all around trail bike .

Bike for very long days in the saddle, but also a geometry that will allow it to come to life and tear itself apart in some complicated sections. Now this new geometry feature features a head tube angle of 65.7D high and 65.5D low with a C tube angle. At a super steep 76.7 high and 76.4 low, all that It is done because the rear end that operates a VPP suspension design has a high and low position that you can set at its lower length. Now there is something really interesting in the Holy Cross. The VPP suspension is that it uses two counter-rotating links, so that as this link rotates forward, the other one rotates in the other downward direction and that allows the pivot point to essentially float almost in an S-shaped curve, so with this Santa Cruz high booy we are able to design a suspension curve with more support in the first sections of the travel and then a more progressive suspension curve later on, so that from the top you will have a very quick response to the suspension, but then, when you are deeper.

Deep into the ride and you need the bike to take you out of what it let you in, the suspension will be there to handle it and speaking of suspension, the bike has 130mm of front suspension through this rock shock. 34 performance on the S versions and then on the rear, that VPP suspension has 120mm of total travel through the Fox Float rear shock, now that suspension is really designed around that perfect balance we talked about before of efficiency and al The slack head tube and steep seat tube allow you to get to the top of a really fun descent, but you still feel like you can take down that same descent and Santa Cruz turns the tall boy into two versions in the C that is in front of us here. which is the less expensive version of carbon and then they have a cc which has the exact same geometry and design as this frame but with a different carbon layup to allow it to be lighter and a little more efficient but which is really cool is that Santa Cruz will have I even tell you that you will not feel a difference in the ride quality between a c and a cc, it is more the weight and the finishing details.

Now, speaking of finishing details, one of my favorites is the Santa Cruz glove box. Now, this takes off, of course, the cardboard. That's on, it can be removed, but it houses the Santa Cruz glove box opening and inside the glove box is an internal storage frame. You have a couple of bags coming out. First you have this one, it's a neoprene style bag and then. you have a second one that's going to lift up from the bottom, you don't have to use them, you can use whatever else you want, but now we can actually see the quality of the carbon on the inside, that's especially nice because in many cases, if If you ever look at the inside of a carbon frame, you'll often notice that it's not perfectly smooth or finished as well as what you see on the outside.

SATA Cruz uses a carbon EPS process, which means there is a negative interior to the frame. of expanded polystyrene which then allows them to mold everything together to get this really smooth finish on the inside of the frame and they can even put in these ports for internal cable routing and if you see these two ridges on the side of the unit and then on the other What you're actually seeing are the ports for the wiring, so when the wiring goes down through the frame, it's in a captured tube, which means it's very easy to run cable routing that you know you no longer have. .

That thing about having internal cable routing, you get all the benefits of having it but none of the drawbacks, it's a great system and to put everything back in you can just slide the bags into place and then the glove box will slide back on this latch. it's there nice and safe, mostly waterproof, but if you're going all out it's probably worth draining your bike like you would in any other situation now, this being this s level build means it's one for above the base build, the r build, but it's pretty far down in the overall Santa Cruz lineup, but that means you'll get good quality parts to get rolling and plenty of places to upgrade if you want, of course.

Cruz is partnering with Berg Tech on all of their bikes. Now, you have full Berg Tech cockpit grips, everything feels super good on this bike. I really especially love the grips and then some SRAM G2 brakes as well as a dropper post rock shock. The dropper posts are specific to the size of this bike. being extra large means it has a super long dropper post and then the drivetrain that runs on this bike is a lunar Ram GX 1x 12 drivetrain so the lunar rear end fits up to a 52 rear cassette however you will see which comes with the 500% range rear cassette from 10 to 52, so while you can go up to 52 if you want, it comes with the 50 rear cassette which I think is appropriate for this style of bike of course in Up front is a Ram GX crankset. going through a threaded bottom bracket leads to all these dtswiss 370 hubs with the Ln ratchet upgrade and some Raceface AR 30 offset rims, now something a lot of people probably don't know is that Santa Cruz bonds their wheels and hubs all together in their assembly plant which is in California, so this wheelset is assembled there on a few machines and custom built exactly for this application.

Not many bikes you get from a major manufacturer like Santa Cruz come with custom wheels for builds. well, anyway, let's take a look at all the features and designs of this Santa Cruz

tallboy

V5 and we will find out exactly how much it weighs, the actual build weight of the Santa Cruz tall boy V5 CS, which will arrive and will weigh 32.6. pound