I had tested out a GT Sanction at Crankworx last year and I was told I could get one that fall/winter. Unfortunately they weren’t available so I got the ForceX instead. It had less travel than the Sanction, but still had 27.5″ wheels. I had been riding a Transition Covert for a couple months that my brother and I shared that I traded for my Commencal DH bike, but it was nice to have my own bike that I could customize the way I wanted. I wrote a quick review of it with my first impressions after my first ride. This was the first bike I had owned with a dropper post and after using it, I couldn’t go back to using a quick release.
When I built it up, I immediately swapped out the Deore brakes for the Shimano Saint from my Commencal. About half way through 2015, I upgraded the fork from a Fox 34 Performance to a 2016 Fox 36 Factory. This made a huge difference and I could push the bike harder and make more adjustments to the suspension to make it more comfortable for me. I found that the 34 wasn’t stiff enough and it would flex a bit when I hit the front brake hard or hit square edges. It also didn’t have any compression adjustments so I had to do that just with air pressure. I generally like to use a lot of low speed compression to keep the bike from diving during braking or steeper sections of trail. I didn’t have that adjustment on the 34, but on the 36 I do.
The bike doesn’t pedal as well as the Transition Covert did, but it descends better and that’s what I’m really concerned about. I haven’t been able to think of many things about the build that are annoying, other than the cable routing. All the cables are routed underneath the downtube and are held on by brackets that screw into the frame. It looks good from above, but if you look at the bike upside down it looks messy and it difficult to change out brakes or derailleur/dropper post cable housing because of all the brackets and how perfectly everything needs to be lined up. The chain slap was quite loud but that was easily fixed with some rubber tape on the top and bottom of the chain stay.
It being my first trail bike, I was super excited to get to explore Mt. Fromme, which I haven’t been able to do because you can’t shuttle and pushing my DH bike up the fire road wasn’t really worth it when I could go shuttle Seymour or Cypress. It opened up a whole other mountain and type of riding to me. I also raced my first Enduro race, the NSMBA Halloween Fiver on Fromme on this bike and it performed really well!