The New Mojo HD5

The Mojo HD is proof that descend­ing prowess doesn’t have to lim­it climb­ing capa­bil­i­ty. When we unveiled the updat­ed HD4 in 2017, it prompt­ly went on to bag the over­all EWS team win while still main­tain­ing that unboth­ered, cloud-like, Ibis climba­bil­i­ty. It brought rac­er requests to frame design: slack­er, more tire clear­ance, increased reach, and more room for longer droppers.

And with the new HD5, rather than just lis­ten to EWS team requests, we’re mov­ing one step fur­ther. We observed rac­ers’ set­up pref­er­ences and we’ve also revis­it­ed our under­stand­ing of ver­ti­cal trav­el, aug­ment­ing grav­i­ty and enhanc­ing climb­ing. Descend­ing bet­ter and climb­ing bet­ter? Yes, con­tra­dic­to­ry as that may seem, it’s more than achievable.

First, we took a cou­ple cues from the Ripmo’s play­book, notably with geom­e­try and the Ripmo’s trav­el pair­ing. The HD5 moves a full 2 degrees steep­er in its seat-tube angle, from 74 to 76, but keeps the same top-tube length. This means you gain more reach (17mm on the Large, 12mm on the Medi­um), a bet­ter climb­ing posi­tion, but not unnec­es­sar­i­ly long or unwieldy front end. The bonus is that even though things still have a famil­iar posi­tion­ing feel, you gain a longer over­all wheel­base for added stability.

One thing we learned with the Rip­mo is that over fork­ing actu­al­ly cre­ates an even feel­ing to sus­pen­sion. This at first seemed odd, but in look­ing clos­er, it makes sense. Fork trav­el moves on the axis of the head­tube angle. So while you may use all 170mm of the HD5’s fork, you’re actu­al­ly only trav­el­ing 153mm ver­ti­cal­ly, which exact­ly match­es the HD5’s rear trav­el. This is what gives the HD5 an even, con­fi­dent feel with a 170mm fork and 153mm of rear travel.

The HD5 is also our first plat­form to receive our new Trac­tion Tune sus­pen­sion. Our cus­tom tuned front and rear sus­pen­sion fea­ture extra light high speed com­pres­sion and rebound damp­ing to deliv­er unpar­al­leled trac­tion. This com­bi­na­tion allows the wheels to react quick­ly to ter­rain, so your bike can absorb and track over bumps like a tro­phy truck blast­ing through high speed whoops.

Next, we took a look at rac­ers’ stack heights. Many run a moun­tain of spac­ers beneath their stems. So, we’ve increased stack heights across frame sizes to bet­ter match han­dle­bar heights to head-tube lengths; slam your stem or throw in a spac­er or two, it’s where it should be from the start.

At the same time, we slack­ened the head-tube angle by increas­ing fork trav­el; the HD5 is designed around a 170mm fork. This decreas­es the head tube to 64.2 degrees from 64.9 on the HD4 (which was designed around a 160 fork).

Also bor­row­ing from the Rip­mo are the IGUS her­met­i­cal­ly sealed bush­ings on the low­er link and cle­vis in place of the HD4’s car­tridge bear­ings. In areas of high load and min­i­mal rota­tion, bush­ings are sub­stan­tial­ly more durable and since the Rip­mo con­tin­ues to be trou­ble free and but­tery smooth, the HD5 also shares our life­time war­ran­ty on sus­pen­sion bushings.

We went with a reduced-off­set fork to give a steadi­ness at speed that suits the HD5’s grav­i­ty-ori­ent­ed nature. To also suit that, we increased drop­per capa­bil­i­ty fur­ther; Medi­ums now fit 175mm posts and Smalls fit 150s.

Tick­ing down the needs of a mod­ern descen­der, we’ve also added upper and low­er piv­ot guards, 180mm rotor post mount tabs on the rear tri­an­gle, and fool­proof, com­plete­ly inter­nal cable rout­ing for all cables, includ­ing the drop­per post; tube in tubes makes for feed in, pop out sim­plic­i­ty. Despite dra­mat­ic improve­ments and increased stiff­ness, frame weight remains unchanged.

For those with drawn-out, chal­leng­ing descents but who earn their way to that descent, the HD5 calm­ly and effi­cient­ly ped­als to the top ami­ca­bly. And, true to its ori­gins and inten­tions, it devours its way down.

Check out the details on the Mojo HD5 here.