WHAT IS IT?
Santa Cruz are quite clear on the placing of the new longer travel Tallboy’s, “think of this as a big wheel alternative to our Blur LT – versatile enough to handle daily duty as a do–it–all bike, but burly enough to run hard in the big ugly stuff.” Coming in both aluminium and carbon versions the latter Tallboy LTc is said to have all the features of the LT but is also “stiffer, stronger, and really, really 
effing light.” We mostly ran the carbon bike for this feature, weighing in around 29lb with pedals fitted. Being pretty much f–ked I didn’t fancy pulling the heavier LT around a six hour loop.
By day three I was up and running, heading into new territory on a fresh amount of 29 travel. The LTc comes with Fox Kashima 
shock and fork, the former is custom tuned for the second generation VPP suspension design. Joe Graney, one of the men behind the design of this and many other Santa Cruz bikes, said they had to work a fair bit on the tune due to different frequencies found on 29 bikes.
She’s reinforced, with a view to it likely to be getting a smashing from speed; 
it has a spread of leather on the downtube and chainstay for soundproofing and abuse. Not shy of the wider rubber, the 2.25 Maxxis Ardents proved faultless with not one puncture between the team of riders all week.
The bottom link is now cutaway aluminium in which are housed the grease nipples, but the top link is carbon, as are the brake mounts. The build is certainly svelte; well it would have to be at 5.3lb. There’s an ISCG 05 mount, front derailleurs will rely on a clamp system rather than the ugly integrated frame fixing, and the bottom bracket remains threaded. Fair lines for the cables, the headset comes pretty low too at 110mm on the XL, but that said I needed a low bar with no spacers.
Wheel stability is aided by way of 142/12mm rear through axle, and size matters, you’re looking at small, medium and large or as translated into Santa Cruz speak – medium, large and X large! Interesting that I’ve been riding a medium Intense Tracer 29 (elsewhere in this issue) but the Tallboy in XL. It is what it is.
