French outfit Caminade is teasing a titanium enduro bike called the ChillEasy. It’s an intriguing take on an enduro charger, and although we can foresee the offset coil shock leading to some nasty calf pinches, damn it's pretty, and delightfully quirky.
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Caminade is based in North Catalonia also known Pyrénées Orientales, and the ChillEasy was designed by Geoffrey Busian, the latest addition to the brand's engineering squad.
Busian designed the bike to tackle the Garoutade itinerary, a 60km route that starts near Caminade’s workshop and sees 2,500m of elevation change, as well as handle the Yellow Train DH run with 1,500m of descending and to cut laps of the Les Angles Bike Park.
The frame itself is full titanium, built on a bespoke basis so far, with the brand yet to release any geometry charts. It does tell us the ChillEasy gets a reverse mullet setup with a 29er wheel at the front and a 27.5in hoop at the back, and the frame sees 140mm of rear travel.
The offset rear shock is the most eye-catching feature of the ChillEasy and Caminade says the idea to move the coil to one side was borrowed from motorcycles.
However, running the Ohlins shock off to the side like this introduces a whole new set of forces for tubeset and pivots to contend with, not to mention that titanium isn’t the most rigid or easy to work with frame material either.
To address this problem, Caminade used a 30mm pivot point and a set of crankcase bearing pivots in each triangle, using the bottom bracket as a concentric pivot. The chainstays are also welded to what appears to be a second bottom bracket shell, and Caminade has even stuck a bottle opener to the underside of the tubing.
The ChillEasy sees Super Boost rear hub spacing, which should again help to stiffen things up, but this bloats the bottom bracket width into fat bike territory — measuring 104.5mm wide.
The brand also makes some interesting claims about the suspension kinematics, saying that posting the shock as it has, without a rocker, creates a progressive leverage curve and should have no chain effect.
Given how similar the layout looks to Trek's version of the URT suspension layout used in the nineties we'll take these with a grain of salt until we see some kinematics graphs.
As you’d expect from a bespoke titanium frame, the finishing is ultra clean, with smooth welds and internally routed cables.
Regardless, Caminade is thinking outside the box with the ChillEasy and has come out with a looker. Check out the gallery at the top for the nitty-gritty.