Marin’s Hawk Hill UPDATED – Now with geometry

The Hawk Hill is Marin’s new 120mm trail bike, which has been designed with input from Mountain Bike Legend Eric Carter (look out for a video interview on singletrackworld.com soon) – it retails in the UK at £1100, but it’s been carefully designed to be a solid bike in its own right as well as a platform which is readily upgradeable.

So what do you get? A ‘series 3’ 6061 aluminium frame, 120mm of travel in 27.5in wheels and 135mm QR dropouts which can convert to run 142x12mm thruaxle should you so desire. Bounce is handled by X-Fusion. Barney took a look at the new bike at the 417 Project Bike Park in Gloucestershire earlier this week:

Drivetrain is a 42-11T 10 speed cassette, Deore mech, Shimano hydraulic brakes – it’s all budget stuff, but it’s good solid kit. A RockShox Recon fork up front also provides 120mm of travel. There’s no dropper, but there’s internal routing for if you want to put one in there.

Geometry-wise it follows the modern maxim of ‘longer, lower, slacker’ – here’s a geometry chart (click to embiggen):

The folks at Marin are rather chuffed that they’ve got Schwalbe Hans Dampf tyres on 27mm internal width rims at this price point, too.

Earlier this week, I chatted to Matt Cipes about the bike:

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Paligap’s Jamie Edwards was at the launch, and caught this snap of Eric Carter (EC to – well, pretty much everyone) railing the black run at the 417 bike park:

Tidy. We’ll be getting one in to test, so watch this space.

More details about Marin bikes (but not the Hawk Hill *just* yet, it seems) can be found here.