Marin is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year with some interesting machines that evoke old colour schemes and classic materials – and one of these birthday bikes is the Four Corners Elite.
Contemporary steel chassis
The first point of interest is the tubing. While it can’t match carbon or alloy in terms of strength to weight, steel is still a great option for hardworking bikes where comfort rather than stiffness is a priority. That said, the Columbus Thron tubeset Marin has opted for is a bang-up-to-date set of pipes, with external shaping and varying wall thicknesses that depend on the stresses each segment has to handle.
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SRAM’s hydraulic lever hoods provide a useful handhold
Marin has also added a full suite of modern features. These include not just internal control routing, but threaded holes for P-clips if you’d rather keep the cabling and brake hoses external for ease of servicing – the best of both worlds.
To maintain the stiffness of the steel frame, fixtures have been brazed on rather than welded, which means the gold-coloured filler is still visible on the unpainted frame. It’s not particularly neat, and the test team were divided on whether it looked good in a raw way or just untidy, though there was much more approval for the seatstay bridge and the custom-cast, thin-walled dropouts.
Cross-discipline capabilities
You can read more at BikeRadar.com
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