If you’ve been keeping a close eye on Pivot’s frame evolution over the past year, the design of the revamped Switchblade won’t come as a surprise—it sports the same swoop-less lines and vertical shock placement as the Mach 4 SL, which came out last May. But those changes merely scratch the surface of those made to Pivot’s bread-and-butter mid-travel 29er, as it underwent its first redesign since it gained the Pivot name in 2016 (the Switchblade moniker started its life much earlier with Titus Cycles, the previous brand of Pivot’s founder Chris Cocalis), and quickly becoming the brand’s best-selling bike.

Pivot’s engineers have been scheming a new Switchblade for two years, and along with the frame changes, settled on modernized geometry, a boost in rear travel from 135 millimeters to 142 and a geometry flipchip borrowed from Pivot’s long-travel Firebird 29. Pivot had already done a running fork spec change last year to the 160-millimeter Fox 36 FIT4, and the new version gets an upgrade to Fox’s 44-millimeter offset 36 Grip2 Factory or Performance fork.

The Switchblade still lives up to the multi-faceted undertones of its name—it is compatible with either a coil or an air shock (though all builds come stock with Fox’s DPX2), can be fully integrated with Fox Live Valve (for an extra $1,900), and the adjustability afforded by the flipchip allows it to be built with 29-inch or 27.5+ wheels, or set-up as a 29/27.5 combo. It still uses the Super Boost Plus rear spacing that Pivot first championed on a trail-bike application with the 2016 Switchblade, and the frame can now fit 29×2.6-inch rear tire.

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