Significant Other Ded Reckin Review: Free Thy Eye – Paul Kalifatidi

The Significant Other Ded Reckin is a titanium and steel full suspension short travel trail bike made by Ashley King. It is designed, fabricated, finished, and assembled in Denver, Colorado, by the small team at Significant Other Bicycles – Ashley just opened the second pre-order for these bikes today, so we’re launching this review to coincide. Paul has been ripping the Ded Reckin prototype around Bellingham, WA, for the last few months. Follow along for his review and extensive photo gallery.

Significant Other Ded Reckin Overview

I have never ridden a mountain bike that so perfectly matched my riding style as this one. This bike is special. You can tell a lot of attention, skill, and determination went into this bike. Ashley and the team behind Significant Other knocked it out of the park with the Ded Reckin. It’s short on travel and big on presence. It has 120mm of rear travel, a 130 mm fork, and 14 eyeballs.

While gushing about Ashley, the brain behind the eyeballs of Significant Other, would be easy, this article is mostly going to be about the bike she built. For that, please read Travis’s interview with Ashley about designing her line of full suspension bikes and Petor’s story on her background and the brand.

Behind the name: Significant Other

I want to quickly touch on the name Significant Other, as I think it is important. Ashley decided on this name as it summed up her experience learning to build bikes, but also her experience on a bike. While learning to weld frames, she had this underlying feeling that she didn’t belong in the industry. She felt “othered.” And yet, that is how each and every single one of us feels. We all live our own experience, and to ourselves, we are the other to everybody else. Bikes have the potential to be unique to us and to carry us through stories, landscapes, and life. The name Significant Other is two-fold; it is the relationship Ashley wants with her bikes and the way she wants them to exist outside of the underlying landscape of the bike industry.

I hope that reading this review and looking at these images frees your eye from the status quo. And with that, let’s drop some gears, slam the post, and descend into this review of the Significant Other Ded Reckin.

Ded Reckin Quick Hits

• Made and Cerakoted in Denver, Colorado
• Grade 9 titanium front triangle
• 316L stainless and 4130 steel rear triangle
• 120mm rear travel, 190x45mm Standard, Inline, Air
• Upper shock mounting hardware: M8x16mm
• Lower shock mounting hardware: M8x30mm
• Designed for 130mm forks
• Clearance for up to 29″ x 2.5″ tires
• 148x12mm rear spacing (UDH)
• 44mm headtube – ZS44 Top/EC44 Bottom headset
• 73mm threaded BB shell
• 30.9mm ø seat post, internal dropper post routing
• Chainring Clearance: 36T

My Riding Profile

I am 5’10” and weigh ~170 pounds when dressed to ride. All of these photos feature a 200mm Bike Yoke Revive dropper post with my 750 mm saddle height. I live in Bellingham, Washington, and primarily ride hand-built trails with a moderate amount of chunk, the type of trails that make up the majority of our primary trail system. My local climbs are almost all fire road and moderately chunky singletrack.

My preference is for trails where flow must be picked out of the roots and rocks as opposed to being handed to you through extensive grooming and removed trail features. That said, the occasional guilty pleasure of a machine-built or hand-shaped roller coaster of a trail is fun. I am not the most talented at taming gravity, and consider myself more of the wheels-on-the-ground type of rider. Gap jumps and big air are not my forte; I much prefer finding freedom in natural trail undulations, where precision and timing make the small bits of airtime more memorable. I can get bikes slightly sideways and make shapes enough that they come through in photos. This bike made it easy.

Frame Details

The front triangle of the Ded Reckin is made of titanium, while the rear triangle is made of steel. The result: a wonderfully compliant frame. I’ll get into how that affects the ride later in the article. The chainstay yoke is 3d printed steel, and the main pivot cluster is printed titanium. For the new pre-order, Ashley is giving riders the option of choosing to have the rocker frame parts machined in Colorado by Prosise Metal Works (costs more) or overseas (costs less). That is an admirable decision that balances domestic manufacturing and puts the bike into a price point that more people can afford. The linkage pivot is laser-cut titanium. Please note that these photos don’t perfectly resemble the production bike’s design, which has been altered to be compatible with more shocks.

As pictured (with bottle cage and pedals, no bottle), this bike weighed 32 pounds and 10 oz. While that is a far cry from an ultralight XC bike, I think it would be fairly simple to lose a lot of the weight. A carbon crankset, a lighter set of wheels, a lighter fork, and XC tires would easily shed pounds from the bike, but it would also likely detract from the descending prowess. If you live somewhere flatter and prioritize the pedaling capability of a bike, perhaps consider building this bike up that way. If you live somewhere like Bellingham, where descents are somewhat more of the focus, the mini enduro build I tested would be great.

Frame Finish

I loved the black Cerakote finish on this frame. It is understated yet still beautiful, quirky, and unique. Eyeballs abound on the seattube, toptube, headtube badge, and even the loam shelf of the chainstay yoke. There are 14 on this bike. Yet, rather shockingly, this bike still slides under the radar. I like that. Nothing is that shiny, and the bike doesn’t pop from a mile away. Even the limited edition iridescent Cane Creek Helm is somewhat subtle and only shows it’s stunning finish when viewed from the right angle with the right light.

Ashley uses Cerakote for the finish work. This thin ceramic coating is quite durable but will also patina nicely compared to paint. Anodizing is cool, but there is a bit more control in the Cerakote process. The frames are raw titanium with black Cerakote details… stealthy, discrete, and subtle. Just lots of eyeballs.

Geometry

The frame I reviewed was the DR-45 (Dead Reckin, 45cm reach). All of the mountain bikes I have owned or ridden have had reaches between 450 and 475mm. The shorter side of that range feels more playful and nimble, the longer side of that range feels more stable and speed-capable. I have kind of settled on 460 being the perfect number. If I could customize the front triangle of a Ded Reckin, that would be the only change I would make. 450mm of reach felt small, but only when moving between bikes. Size charts tend to put me in a size large or medium-large, but I have found I prefer smaller-fitting mountain bikes.

Luckily, Ashley recently changed some of the ways riders can spec their bike and specify mildly-custom geo. I would have hesitated to choose the DR-47 geometry as I loved the 440mm chainstay length of DR-45. I loved how this bike wheelied. No, I can’t manual. You’ll have to read Travis’s reviews to see manuals.

What kind of bike is it?

This geometry is firmly and confidently in the short travel trail category of bikes. While I don’t like lumping bikes into categories (see: free thy eye), I recognize that consumers tend to start there in their search. So yes, this bike is “downcountry” in that it is more confident on the descent than an XC bike yet somewhat light on the travel numbers for what the industry is now calling a “trail” bike.

I did not swap the low-rise bars that Ashley sent with the bike to something with a taller stack, as I wanted to embrace her decision-making and see how it fared for me. Ashley lives in the Colorado Front Range, where trails are more pedal-focused than descent-focused. Though I live in Bellingham, where the vast majority of mountain bike riders are gravity obsessed, I like a more all-around bike and ride. Though the cockpit was significantly lower than other bikes I had recently ridden, I like how it paired with this bike. Could I have put a taller handlebar on it? Sure, but then I don’t think it would feel like the shorter travel bike that I really like. More on that in the descending portion of the article.

Suspension Design

The Ded Reckin uses a linkage-driven single-pivot design that is altered with a flex stay. That’s kind of a mouthful, and what does it mean? Single pivot suspension platforms are very simple: the rear triangle pivots around a single point. There are minimal bearings and not many other components to fabricate or maintain. This is why they are common on bikes from small builders. They are also great for those wanting more ground-hugging bike behavior, but they don’t necessarily pedal as well as something with a more complex suspension design, as you see on most of the big brands. By adding a linkage and flexible stay design, Ashley was able to get the suspension feel and frame design that she was after.

The flexstay design coaxes the suspension towards the sag point around 25-30%. It pushes the bike towards that point when unweighted and resists pushing further into the travel when under compression. This alters the leverage curve to make for a supportive pedaling platform that still remains supple to small bumps. The brake mount is just as much a part of the suspension as the shock, and its coaxial design helps separate the effect of braking from the suspension’s performance. Overall, the kinematics are tuned for pedaling support with a healthy amount of anti-squat and a more playful and energetic feel that comes from the flexstay design. The linkage-driven vertical shock layout also opens up the front triangle for big bottles or frame bags. Travis Engle is our resident suspension guru, and I highly recommend this Shock Value article that explains suspension kinematics.

Suspension Setup

A note about my preference when it comes to bikes: I like bikes that pedal well with minimal suspension movement and pedal bob. I don’t treat climbs as a necessary evil for getting to the top; I treat them as an equal part in the riding experience. Frankly, I probably spend more time sessioning features on climbs than on descents. This doesn’t mean that I want every bike to feel like a hardtail or XC bike, it just means that I don’t want to wallow through travel while hammering up a climb while listening to German EDM. Ya feel?

On the first few rides with this bike, I ran about 30% sag. I think I was actually running a bit more. I did feel like the bike wallowed a bit with that much preload, particularly the rear. My roommate took a spin on it and had the same thoughts. It ate through travel more than I wanted it to, but extra compression damping made things feel a bit harsh. I added pressure to both the fork and shock, and was pleasantly surprised at how much of a difference that made…