Could this one change make my 300mm BOOSTMONSTER bike even better?!

In today's video I am making a big change to my outrageous 300mm boost monster bike that I probably should have done earlier. You see I've always had this 10.5 inch by 3.5 inch stroke shock on the rear giving me about 280mm of travel when it's in that 9 inch position because the bike is originally supposed to have that smaller 9.5 inch shock in here. Now one of the problems I've had with this setup is I felt the rear suspension was too linear that I could still bottom out too easily and there aren't really any stiffer coils available for these longer shocks. Plus it did feel like the head tube was a little steeper than I preferred. Apparently it was around a 64.5 degree head tube angle or according to my phone's angle meter 64.2. When you're this high up you really notice that steeper head tube angle. So what I actually want to try today is putting back the original smaller shock back on here. That means it's now slacker on the head tube angle so even in the steep head angle position it's now slackened out to about 62.5 degrees with the super monster. And I also don't recall having bottom out problems with that original shock so I'm hoping this can improve the ride. These old bikes do have some nice adjustability between 8 and 9 inch travel option and also a steep and a slack option. I did try the shock in both positions to see how it affected the head tube angle. This is the slack head angle so let's uh that actually looks very slack 60.2 degrees. So now let's move it back into the steep position so you can see it is now in the lower holes which pushes the bottom bracket up higher which steepens the head tube angle. So this according to my angle meter app on my phone is showing about 62.4 degrees. So I'm riding today with my friend Dimitro he's got a specialized demo 9 with a super monster and now our bikes are very very much the same. So if we look here looking at the head tube angle they look almost identical. Both super monster 300 millimeter fork two different frame designs but they're both the same nine inches of rear travel. Only difference is he's got 24 inch wheels old school guzzlati tires three inch wide 24 inch. I got my 26 inch wheels here. So I'm excited to ride this bike with the slacker head tube angle. Will I like this setup more or will it be too slack for this super long fork? I don't want to cause unwanted stress on the frame or the fork with it being too slack. Oh that is completely different okay Oh my goodness good stuff missing a few uh guys I need new tires yeah All right boys let's uh let's go try out boogie man Sick so yeah first time ever trying out a slacker head angle on this bike. See I was kind of afraid to try a slacker head angle for the longest time. I was just recommended to never go slacker than 64 just because of how long this fork is. But I don't know Dimitro was whoa Dimitro was always doing it so now I'm going for it. So for this video I'm filming with the Insta360 Ace Pro 2 here just attached to the chin of my full face helmet as you can see. So I just zap strapped a J mount hook here on the chin of my helmet. That's basically how I film pretty much all my POV videos. But this video is sponsored by Insta360 so I want to give a big thanks to them and I want to show off the capabilities of the Ace Pro 2 in this video particularly low light and audio capabilities. So for this video as we ride mount seymour we're going to ride into the sunset and it's going to get really dark so as the video goes on you're going to really see how strong this camera handles the lower light scenarios. I also want you guys to pay attention to how the audio sounds coming from this camera with a special wind screen that they added on here which is a very smart addition by the way you can get really good wind reduced audio straight out of the camera. So we're just doing 4k 30 frames HDR is turned off stabilization is standard. For this particular video I chose to shoot in flat mode but I always make sure jitter blur reduction is on and it ensures a faster shutter speed so that your footage does not look like mush. Sharpness is always set to low. White balance honestly I kind of switch back and forth between auto and sometimes I set it to 5200 Kelvin. I also find negative 0.3 EV comp is generally the best one to go for. But I want to mention the audio settings for this camera. So we've got wind reduction, voice enhancement and stereo. So I pretty much always keep it on wind reduction mode but stereo mode can also work really well if there's no wind. Now as the video goes on I'm going to be switching to the pure video mode because that's what works really well in low light scenarios. So I'm going to let you know at what point I turn that on. I always have my affiliate code in the description of every video so if you want to get this camera make sure you order through my link and it'll help out the channel. Some more skinnies coming up. Optional though but let's do this. So on one hand yeah I was always kind of wanting this bike to feel more slack so now it is. Crap almost. Oh shoot I know I can do this. I got this I got this. See I got it even though I yeah nice There we go you totally got it. Nice. Okay rolling out of that it feels hilarious. That thing is funny. Oh a bit muddier here. Wow it's so wet. Nicely actually. It's wild. Got a canoe ride. I love these things. That was working pretty well. And the conditions are definitely wetter than I prefer with this big bike. Man this is freaking wet. But we got this. We totally got this. Oh yeah and this part's easier. Nice. Crap. Oh that's okay. You're doing it. Heck yeah. Nice. Mitro's getting these better. Nice. So slippery. Yeah even this cedar wood with the natural grain is like pretty greasy. Compression or rebound? Rebound. Slowing down the rebound. I definitely needed that. I could tell it was like unstable. Let's make our way to the jumps. Boogie Nights. Okay let's try some of the jumps here. Boogie Nights. Crap I'm like bottoming out the rear every time I drop. So I realized I didn't have enough air pressure in the canister on the rear shock. That's why I was bottoming out. So after this lap I filled it up more and then it was perfectly fine the rest of the day. Nice. That was chill. Whoa. So the one downside with the slacker head angle is it does make the reach a little bit shorter. Which is definitely not what I want. The two jumps I cleared felt really good. Yeah I definitely got to keep my rebound on one of those slower settings. It's in the middle right now so that's definitely going to help. Here in manual 550-200 white balance 4k 60 frames slot mode. Riding severed d here was okay on this bike. It was a bit jank, a bit loose. Not really ideal for this tall and short bike. Hard to say how much the slacker head tube angle was helping for this stuff. Some parts lower down were definitely more fun. But lower down riding empress was actually very nice on this bike. All right this is jank. Oh yeah I remember this skinny line. Crap I don't know about this. We got it. We got it. We got the whole thing. Oh that's sick. In the wet. That's pretty cool. There we go. Got this. Dimitro. Now that's the hardest part. Oh come on Dimitro. You got it. You got this. Oh no bro. Oh almost. That's what I said. I need a new tire. Yeah oh man. Good effort. That was sick though. Yeah your tires don't seem too full at all like. It's just too hard right now rubber and it's not connected. Well not just this but just all the rocks. I'm just feeling like squirmy and squirrely and like. Yeah same. In a rock you're just like dancing every time. Yeah. You can control it. Pretty much and my back tire will kind of drift out. Yeah. Whoa okay. Got it really steep there. Sick. Whoa. Okay whenever the back tire slides out that is nice. I love it. I love this. I love this. So good. So good. So honestly it's a bit hard to say right now how much I'm enjoying the slacker head tube angle. I kind of sort of forget. Like I think slacker head tube angle is definitely good but the conditions are just really slippery on all any of the rocks and roots so it's maybe a little hard to to really measure all this. All right so unfortunately I did not record me riding Empress even though I really wish I did because it felt so good. I accidentally stopped recording and then resumed recording after the trail. All right sick. So I really felt quite confident that time on Empress. I was surprised. So maybe that was some of that slack head tube angle plus I slowed down the rebound all the way so I actually feel like it's a good combination of those things. It's a slower janky trail and to be honest I have found that those more old school slow techy trails are better on the old school bikes. Once you start riding faster and faster it's just it's not as good for the old school geometry. But yeah if you're doing slow stuff it's like you know what you can ride old school bikes pretty well on those. I'm good to go up. I can go up. Though Dimitro would not join us for the last lap he did drive us up which is pretty awesome and this is where I change the camera into pure video mode. Pure video mode negative 0.7 4k 60 frames. Let's race the sun down. Let's do it. Okay trying out incline again here. That was pretty sick. That was pretty sick. Yeah that was fun. That was good. I like it. All right lower incline. This part's loose. By the way I'm always doing the action view which is the widest field of view. In pure video mode I like to keep it on standard. Flat mode does not exist in pure video mode and when it comes to the ev comp yeah I'll generally do negative 1 ev comp or negative 0.7. I really feel like yeah the slack head angle was working great on that honestly. Crap. So it's really getting dark here as you can see. So we're just kind of racing our way down here trying to make sure we still got light out but the camera still performs quite well considering how dark it's getting. Ah forget it. I'm feeling pretty good actually. So yeah the sun is setting in like 10 minutes. So I got my pure video mode on the Ace Pro 2 so at least the footage will be usable. So this time we're gonna do the actual technical boogeyman exit instead of the jump line like we did last run. Boogeyman. Do you know if you've ridden this this part before? No. No? It's kind of the gnarliest part of boogeyman and there's just like you can just follow my line it's kind of the basic one with the boost monster. I don't believe I've ever ridden with this bike at all in all the last like couple years which is a shame because this is pretty sick. Okay we're gonna go this way. This is kind of the main way that I know. That's just what we're gonna do. Oh sh**. Oh okay crap. Crap the rock was a little slick. Shoot. Yeah but there are other routes. Dude I slipped. Even like some of these lines look super fun too. Like look at this. Oh that looks awesome. Okay let's go from here. Sick. Nice. Ah that felt good. Empress. Here we go. Honestly I kind of am thinking of just doing this one line here. Man it's kind of greasy though. Shoot. Let's do it. Let's finish on empress here. Let's do it. Just want to do this line. Alright. I did it. That's so sick. Okay we're going inside. Oh that's way too awkward. Shoot. Inside is a little goof. Goofy but see this is like super sick. Honestly like I could handle that so well. That was like so good on this bike. Okay that was a sick ride. Feeling good on the bike. Slick head tube angle was pretty nice. I always knew it would feel better with that generally but now I just need a longer reach. But my fear honestly though is like is that too slack because if I start hitting big drops with the slacker head angle like I don't know there's just a lot more leverage on this fork. I don't want to start bending things and cracking head tubes but this is a good experience. Well that was actually a lot of fun and you know what I'm going to be riding this bike a little bit more now just because of the different geometry. Shout out to insta360 for sponsoring the video. Check out the affiliate links in the description. If you want to watch another sick video on my boost monster check this one out right here.