| Model: |
Turner Five Spot |
| Category: |
All Mountain |
| Suspension: |
5 inches front; 5 inches rear. |
| Ideal for: |
The Five Spot lives for trails that are steep, fast, and technical, like El Pollo Elastico, Bob's Trail and Shawn's Trail. |
| Over all performance: |
This is a bike that likes to fly -- literally. It jumps very well and really comes into it's own when the landscape begins to blur. In a sense, the Five Spot is the exact opposite of the last bike we reviewed, the Giant Reign. While the six-inch travel Reign is essentially a very deep trail bike, the five-inch travel Five Spot is essentially a very compact big hit bike. The Five Spot climbs and accelerates well, but it is not as nimble in slow-speed, highly technical moves as the Titus Switchblade. The trade-off is that the Five Spot is very stable and sweet when the trail turns fast and steep. |
| Front end: |
The Marzocchi Z1 Bomber is one of the premier five inch travel forks on the market, and has been for half a decade. It features the super-smooth coil and oil bath feel that Marzocchi is famous for, along with Marzocchi's ECC adjustable travel / head tube angle feature, which you activate by flicking a lever on the top of the left fork leg and coming out of the saddle and bouncing once. |
| Rear end: |
Along with Horst Leitner, David Turner helped design the classic four-bar rear end with the Horst-link that Specialized now owns the patent on. It's not surprising, therefore, that Turner's own bikes feature the Horst-link four-bar design, or that he knows how to make it sing. When paired with the Romic coil-over shock, the performance of the Five Spot's rear end is as good as anything money can buy in the year 2005. |
| Brakes: |
The Hayes HFX-9 hydraulic disc brakes are excellent self-adjusting dual piston stoppers. |
| (The devil is in the) Details: |
Although it's certainly not a knock on the Five Spot, there was one aspect of our review bike that's too funny not to mention. Our Five Spot came equipped with a Kooka Crankcase bash guard, which features a saw tooth pattern around the edge. The Kooka looks sick, but one of our Usual Suspects bike testers (who likes to ride in baggy, full length pants) found that the saw teeth grabbed his pant leg and pulled his pants down while he was pedalling, causing him to moon the rider behind him. Too bad we didn't get a photo of THAT! |
| Durability: |
This is a very strongly built and durable bike. We've heard from several 200-plus pound riders who have hammered their Five Spots, and we've never heard of anyone breaking a Five Spot. |
| Geometry and sizing: |
The Five Spot's 69 degree head tube angle is exceptionally slack for a five-inch travel bike (half a degree slacker than the Giant Reign and one and a quarter degrees slacker than the Titus Switchblade, both of which have more travel). The Five Spot's bottom bracket is a highish 13 1/4 inches, which is sweet for Galbraith. Sizing is full and honest. |
| Weight: |
32 pounds as pictured. |
| Video: |
Check out this video of the Five Spot in action on lower Bob's Trail. |
| Reviewed: |
February 2005 |
