• Manitou Nixon Platinum forks
• £670
• Raw Experience
• 00800 4321 3350

Manitou’s Nixon range looked like a real ground-breaker when it came out – 145mm of travel, 4lb-ish weight, cunning “Infinite Travel” adjustment feature, all just the ticket for all these new-fangled long-travel “trail bikes” doing the rounds. Nearing the end of the Nixon’s first year, how’s the reality?

This is the top-of-the-range Nixon Platinum, in its through-axle incarnation. Call us paranoid, but there’s something about nearly-6in-travel forks with QR axles that doesn’t sit well with us. You can have a Nixon with ordinary dropouts if you like, though. Manitou’s Hex-Lock system uses an axle with hexagonal ends to interlock with the fork legs. We’re not sure if that actually improves stiffness to any noticeable degree, but it does make fitting the wheel a bit more fiddly. Also not helping in that regard are the completely flat inner faces of the dropouts – the front hub doesn’t stop up against anything when its in the right place, so unless you turn the bike upside down you end up needing three hands. Once the axle’s in place, four pinch bolts keep it there. They go into threaded inserts, which are a nice touch, preventing the possibility of stripping threads in the actual fork lowers.

The rest of the chassis is suitably stout. You get 32mm aluminium stanchions, Manitou’s trademark reverse brake arch (which we still seem to be calling a brake arch even though there’s no brake anywhere near it), forged aluminium crown and aluminium steerer. While we’re mentioning brakes in passing, this is a disc-only fork, with a 74mm post-mount fitting. You’ll need to fiddle around with caliper brackets and possibly rotor sizes if you’re swapping from an IS mount, so factor such things into your budget.

Inside you’ve got SPV damping in the right-hand leg and and air spring in the left one. We haven’t been too convinced by some of the SPV forks we’ve tried, but this one’s been pretty nice. Small-bump sensitivity wasn’t exactly class-leading, but it was entirely satisfactory, especially when the fork was mounted on a bike with a 5th Element platform shock that exhibited similar characteristics – being balanced is at least half the battle…

In keeping with Manitou tradition, all the adjusters are funny colours. The rebound dial at the bottom of the right-hand leg is blue, while the red bit at the top of the leg is the bottom-out resistance adjuster. There’s an air valve for the SPV chamber at the top of that leg too, while the air valve for the main spring lives at the bottom of the left leg. At the top of the left leg things get interesting. A little rotating turret carries a cable that runs to a bar-mounted lever that looks like it may be part of a saxophone but is in fact the Infinite Travel system. This is a pretty cunning device. There’s two air chambers in the fork – press the lever and push down on the fork and air bleeds from one to the other. Release the lever and the fork stays wherever its put. Up to a point, anyway – you’ll always retain some travel. Push the lever, bottom it right out and release and it’ll drift up a little. To re-extend the fork you need to unweight the front wheel while holding the lever down, and then release the lever with the wheel still unweighted. The easiest way to do this is to just stop and pick the front up, but the slickest way is to wheelie and let go of the lever before putting the front wheel back down. With practice you can do just enough of a wheelie, getting the bars to just the right height so that they don’t actually drop again once the fork’s fully extended.

It’s a neat feature, and we found ourselves using it a lot – it’s a boon on big, slackish bikes on steep climbs. It has its downsides, though. It’s very easy to make the fork as short as it’ll go, but trickier to just shorten it a little bit. Run it super-short and you’ll find yourself with a very low BB, a pain on rutted or rocky climbs. And if you’re a muppet like us you’ll regularly set off down the other side of the hill with 6in at the back, 3 at the front, no BB clearance and track-bike frame geometry. Still, you soon learn from that mistake. We do know of people who’ve had reliability issues with the IT system. Ours has been trouble-free, but we’re not going to pretend that they all are.

While we’re discussing travel, let’s talk mm and inches. While Manitou likes to call this a 6in-travel fork, it isn’t. Even the claimed 145mm of travel is only 5.7in, and 2005 Nixons don’t actually have that much. Early tyre-clearance issues led to a recall and the fitment of what Manitou rather disingenuously describes as a “Tire Clearance Upgrade”. That’s essentially a spacer that reduces the travel of the fork so that big tyres stay well clear of the fork crown. Let all the air out (or let some of it out and ride off some stuff) and you’ll only see something like 137mm of travel. Now, that’s only 8mm less than claimed, but it was already 5mm shy of a “bike industry six inches”. Rather than a usefully low-profile nearly-six-inch fork, you’re getting a not particularly low-profile a-bit-more-than-five-inch fork, which is enough of a difference to make it feel a bit overwhelmed in front of a well-sorted six-inch back end.

As far as it goes, though, it’s fine. We’re pretty happy with the damping, we liked the IT system once we’d got the hang of it, Manitou seems to have its sealing and lubrication fairly well sorted these days. The chassis is stout, and the weight (2.1kg/4.6lb for the through-axle model) is entirely acceptable for what it is.

The SRP is a frankly ludicrous £670, but we don’t think anyone’s actually paid that much for them, and they’re generally on sale for considerably less. Considerably less than seven hundred quid is still quite a lot, though…

Positives: Stout chassis, good looks, good range of adjustment, IT useful, respectable weight

Negatives: Not as much travel as it claims, or needs, to have; not the plushest on the small stuff; high price.

Verdict

Plenty of people are reluctant to buy products in their first year of existence, and the Nixon is a good example of the sense of that approach. On paper it’s a fine bit of kit, and in real life it’s fundamentally sound. But the 2005 incarnation suffers from having not enough travel and an occasionally-flaky travel adjust system. Structurally it’s perfectly good, and we like to think that the 2006 model will have full travel. It’s certainly got revised damping for improved small-bump sensitivity, which will also be welcome. Maybe it’ll be cheaper, too…

Performance: 3/5
Value: 3/5
Overall: 3/5