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2006 Marin Bikes
I must admit that I don’t know a whole lot about Marin bikes. An old girlfriend had one in the early 1990s but the company pretty much disappeared from my area and my frame of reference shortly after that.
In the past couple of years, I’ve seen a few Marin downhill bikes at local bike parks but, again, they never made much of an impression on me. I’m sure it’s partly because I don’t see them over and over again, and partly because the company’s distribution channel up here in Western Canada isn’t the same as it is elsewhere.
Rambling aside, I was intrigued enough by a recent photo of the Marin Quad XLT from Expocycle 2005 to do a little digging on the company’s interesting-looking suspension design. I checked out the 2006 Marin bikes but wasn’t really able to get a good ‘feel’ for the way the Quad-Link equipped bikes worked.
So when BikeMagic posted an article about the 2006 Marin bike lineup, I was keen to read about their initial impressions. Judging from the writeup, the 2006 bikes look like versatile machines. From the 7″ Quad-Link Quake to 4″-6″ Tara to the company’s hardtails, Marin looks to have a competitive lineup on the board for the upcoming year.
Update (14 October 2005): Bike Magazine has a good writeup from the Interbike show about the 2006 Marin Quake series. The piece features good information about the frame design and the pedalling characteristics of the Quad-Link suspension platform.