The Trek Fuel EXe is a lightweight Trail electric mountain bike. Designed primarily for trail riding. Straight out of the box it rides sharp and agile. But .... What happens if we alter the stock build somewhat ?
Meet the Trek Fuel EXe RR Edition
I really like to mess around with bikes and have been ultra curious to see just what you can do with the stock Fuel EXe. Here, we have some quick and dirty experiments to see what's possible and what works.
Fitted with a massive Öhlins RXF38 Fork and Öhlins TTX coil really sets the bike apart from standard. It's like they were both made just for this bike !
This is the brand new coil from Öhlins with refinements over previous generations and it's now got more adjustment between the clickers.
Ohlins TTX22 m.2 Shock, 205x65 provides 152mm rear wheel travel
I've also swapped out the cockpit and changed to some skinnier than stock tires - Maxxis DHRII 2.4's for the front and rear with Double Down and MaxxGrip out the front.
We're not just talking about aesthetics, this Öhlins RXF38 m.2 fork is 170 mm in travel, that's 20mm more than the stock 150. Though the change to a 170mm fork probably voids the warranty.
It's a 38mm stanchion fork so it's really beefy out the front. At 63.5 degrees, It's raked it out and raised the front a bit.
With the Öhlins TTX m.2 I've over stroked the rear as well. That means is the dimensions of the shock are the same between the eyes, so it's not changed the rear in terms of any kind of layout, but it now compresses further. So you now get 152mm rear wheel travel up from 140mm.
The changes added some weight to the bike, it now comes in at 19.28 KG, compared to the stock bike's 18.5KG.
The bottom bracket height hasn't changed significantly either because I've gone for 2.4 tires. From my experience you can run the Maxis DHR2s on the front and the rear and it works pretty well.
Ok, so it looks sweet, but I'm really interested to see how it handles with the high front.
First Ride
Definitely feels way slacker, it's way more stable I just smash through roots ! With an approximate 63.5 head angle it really feels like an enduro bike !
It rips, it's amazing what a little travel change can do. Amazing as it may feel downhill, overall it feels compromised and I struggled to get front end grip, you really have to aggressively move over the front to even out the weight distribution in order to stop the front feeling like it was washing out on the berms.
First thing was to try and stop it squatting down at the back in order to try and balance it out a little, so I put the compression all the way to number three on the Öhlins coil. My weight is a bit rearward biased and the front kind of wants to run a bit high, plus I'm running loads of Stack on this bar (38mm rise bars) and stem. The second adjustment was to set the flip chip to High which brought the head angle back to around 64.5 degrees. This is super easy to change and you could do it on the trail if you wanted to.
In that setup, BB height is around 343mm
Second Ride
Back on board and its almost back to its stock geometry, just with longer travel and the 2.4 tires meant that the bottom bracket Isn't so high.
Just those little differences on the setup of the bike made a considerable difference on the handling. I find that with most longer travel bikes the manufacturers have obviously done a lot of work and the geometry's always pretty sound, though there's always room to Tinker around. I'm all for that with bikes, I like to Tinker, I like to mess around and try and find these optimum settings because out the box they're kind of like a one size fits all, but you can tailor them to a certain extent.
I'm well outside of the scope of what this e-bike is designed for. Trek didn't intend for people to put 170 forks on and over stroke it, but just because they didn't design it doesn't mean you can't experiment.
I've got to say it feels so good. This is the best it's felt like out of all the configurations I've ridden. Whilst the bottom bracket might be slightly higher, when you're sagged into that travel it's around about the same but you've got a massive 38 Fork & coil on it and the bike looks sick.
Despite the extra travel and slight increase in weight, it still has that different feel to it, still has that lightweight bike feel even though it's 19 kilos.
That's still a good five or six kilos lighter than many full fats even the lighter weight full fat bikes are still around 23kg's. I always use this as a way of explaining it to people, just imagine strapping four litres of water to your frame and think how different your bike would feel with all of that weight strapped to it.
TQ HPR50 Motor, compact and quiet
For me, with this bike, I leave it in Turbo all the time so my rides are generally about 1.5 - 2 hours which is fine solo. I'm not sure if I was riding with a group of people on full power bikes I could keep up, especially for the longer rides, but for a 1.5 - 2 hour blast you've got a massively massively capable Enduro bike
So, what have I found with this little experiment ? Well first off the bike is quite flexible in its ability to take slightly longer travel - though I did mention at the beginning the 170mm fork will void the warranty !
Trek say that 160 is absolutely fine, so if you just want to slacken it out a little bit and run a longer Fork you can just change the front fork or you could even change the air spring in the lyric that it comes with to give you a bit more front travel and slacken it out by about 0.5 degrees.
One thing that's certain, is if Trek bought out a Slash 'e' that would be pretty amazing. This basically is getting close to that but there's a lot of faffing around and you'd be voiding warranties, so that's not really recommended at all. But, if there were at a 170/160 19 Kg Slasher, then I'm sure there would be a fair bit of interest.
Meet the Trek Fuel EXe RR Edition
I really like to mess around with bikes and have been ultra curious to see just what you can do with the stock Fuel EXe. Here, we have some quick and dirty experiments to see what's possible and what works.
Fitted with a massive Öhlins RXF38 Fork and Öhlins TTX coil really sets the bike apart from standard. It's like they were both made just for this bike !
This is the brand new coil from Öhlins with refinements over previous generations and it's now got more adjustment between the clickers.
Ohlins TTX22 m.2 Shock, 205x65 provides 152mm rear wheel travel
I've also swapped out the cockpit and changed to some skinnier than stock tires - Maxxis DHRII 2.4's for the front and rear with Double Down and MaxxGrip out the front.
We're not just talking about aesthetics, this Öhlins RXF38 m.2 fork is 170 mm in travel, that's 20mm more than the stock 150. Though the change to a 170mm fork probably voids the warranty.
It's a 38mm stanchion fork so it's really beefy out the front. At 63.5 degrees, It's raked it out and raised the front a bit.
With the Öhlins TTX m.2 I've over stroked the rear as well. That means is the dimensions of the shock are the same between the eyes, so it's not changed the rear in terms of any kind of layout, but it now compresses further. So you now get 152mm rear wheel travel up from 140mm.
The changes added some weight to the bike, it now comes in at 19.28 KG, compared to the stock bike's 18.5KG.
The bottom bracket height hasn't changed significantly either because I've gone for 2.4 tires. From my experience you can run the Maxis DHR2s on the front and the rear and it works pretty well.
Ok, so it looks sweet, but I'm really interested to see how it handles with the high front.
First Ride
Definitely feels way slacker, it's way more stable I just smash through roots ! With an approximate 63.5 head angle it really feels like an enduro bike !
It rips, it's amazing what a little travel change can do. Amazing as it may feel downhill, overall it feels compromised and I struggled to get front end grip, you really have to aggressively move over the front to even out the weight distribution in order to stop the front feeling like it was washing out on the berms.
First thing was to try and stop it squatting down at the back in order to try and balance it out a little, so I put the compression all the way to number three on the Öhlins coil. My weight is a bit rearward biased and the front kind of wants to run a bit high, plus I'm running loads of Stack on this bar (38mm rise bars) and stem. The second adjustment was to set the flip chip to High which brought the head angle back to around 64.5 degrees. This is super easy to change and you could do it on the trail if you wanted to.
In that setup, BB height is around 343mm
Second Ride
Back on board and its almost back to its stock geometry, just with longer travel and the 2.4 tires meant that the bottom bracket Isn't so high.
Just those little differences on the setup of the bike made a considerable difference on the handling. I find that with most longer travel bikes the manufacturers have obviously done a lot of work and the geometry's always pretty sound, though there's always room to Tinker around. I'm all for that with bikes, I like to Tinker, I like to mess around and try and find these optimum settings because out the box they're kind of like a one size fits all, but you can tailor them to a certain extent.
I'm well outside of the scope of what this e-bike is designed for. Trek didn't intend for people to put 170 forks on and over stroke it, but just because they didn't design it doesn't mean you can't experiment.
I've got to say it feels so good. This is the best it's felt like out of all the configurations I've ridden. Whilst the bottom bracket might be slightly higher, when you're sagged into that travel it's around about the same but you've got a massive 38 Fork & coil on it and the bike looks sick.
Despite the extra travel and slight increase in weight, it still has that different feel to it, still has that lightweight bike feel even though it's 19 kilos.
That's still a good five or six kilos lighter than many full fats even the lighter weight full fat bikes are still around 23kg's. I always use this as a way of explaining it to people, just imagine strapping four litres of water to your frame and think how different your bike would feel with all of that weight strapped to it.
TQ HPR50 Motor, compact and quiet
For me, with this bike, I leave it in Turbo all the time so my rides are generally about 1.5 - 2 hours which is fine solo. I'm not sure if I was riding with a group of people on full power bikes I could keep up, especially for the longer rides, but for a 1.5 - 2 hour blast you've got a massively massively capable Enduro bike
So, what have I found with this little experiment ? Well first off the bike is quite flexible in its ability to take slightly longer travel - though I did mention at the beginning the 170mm fork will void the warranty !
Trek say that 160 is absolutely fine, so if you just want to slacken it out a little bit and run a longer Fork you can just change the front fork or you could even change the air spring in the lyric that it comes with to give you a bit more front travel and slacken it out by about 0.5 degrees.
One thing that's certain, is if Trek bought out a Slash 'e' that would be pretty amazing. This basically is getting close to that but there's a lot of faffing around and you'd be voiding warranties, so that's not really recommended at all. But, if there were at a 170/160 19 Kg Slasher, then I'm sure there would be a fair bit of interest.
