Santa Cruz Stigmata v4 build with hydraulic brake line coupler

How I landed on the Santa Cruz Stigmata

My previous road bike was a 2017 Specialized Roubaix. I loved that bike — big fan of the FutureShock and the SWAT box storage. But it could only fit 32mm tires. I also own a 35 lb Trek hardtail with a coil fork and ~90mm travel, which is fun but outdated and heavy.

I wanted a single, multi-purpose bike: something that felt quick on the road but could be converted to trail mode with a suspension fork and bigger tires. That meant finding a frame that was suspension corrected — i.e. a frame where the rigid fork has a large axle-to-crown measurement similar to suspension forks, so that the bicycle geometry stays consistent when you switch between forks.

At the time of my purchase (winter 2024) there were a few bikes that I was choosing between:

Originally I ordered the Propain Terrel in September when they ran a $1000 off sale. There was a 9 week delivery wait. When 9 weeks came around I reached out for an update and they told me I had to wait an extra 3 months. I decided to bail because I didn’t want to wait and I had read some bad customer support stories on reddit; plus I was frustrated that they hadn’t bothered to reach out as soon as they knew the build was delayed.

After canceling my Propain order, I demoed the Stigmata at the Santa Cruz factory store. The build I tried had the 40mm rock shox rudy fork. I’m glad I drove out there, I realized that (a) the stigmata is sweet (b) I definitely wanted suspension and (c) I wanted more than 40mm of travel.

I have a google sheet for playing with bike geos and suspension changes, and I realized that getting the 50mm fox tapercast fork or 60mm MRP fork wouldn’t change the stigmata’s geo much because of the larger 430mm a2c. The cuttthroat also boasts an impressive a2c but in the end it wasn’t racey enough for my taste so I pulled the trigger on the stigmata.

The market has continued to evolve since I made my purchase, there’s a few more bikes I would consider today…

Suspension

I ended up ordering the MRP Baxter 60mm fork when I saw it on sale. It turns out if you get the high-tire-clearance version, the real travel is closer to 70mm. It’s been excellent on trail rides.

I built the Stigmata using a Zeno hydraulic brake line coupler so I can quickly switch between rigid fork and suspension fork configurations. The swap process takes under 5 minutes and so far I haven’t had to bleed the brakes.

In the future, I might add a rear brake line coupler so I can do a full cockpit swap (flat bar and stem for MTB mode). For now, I just swap forks and wheels.

After my first few road rides I realized I was missing the comfort of the roubaix’s future shock. Running wider tires at low pressure was not enough. So I decided to pickup a 70mm Redshift ShockStop stem. This is actually why I ended up on a size small Stigmata. With the medium, I needed a shorter stem (55mm), and the ShockStop doesn’t perform as well at that length since the bars are closer to the pivot point.

I also have a dropper post cable installed. I haven’t used the dropper (120mm OneUp v3) much locally, but in Tahoe it was 100% worth it — especially on mtn bike trails like Jelly Jack or Big Chief.

I’m interested in trying the 50mm travel Fox Tapercast fork — it’s a half-pound lighter than the MRP Baxter and the shorter travel is probably fine on the tamer trails that we have on the bay area peninsula.

Drivetrain

I’m running SRAM Transmission with a 10–52T cassette and 40T chainring. The range is fantastic, especially in my area where most rides are hilly. That said, I miss the tighter gear spacing of 2x. My cadence has to jump a lot to hold a constant output during shifts.

I might eventually switch to 2x or experiment with SRAM XPLR 13-speed if some third-party 13-speed cassettes come out (Garbaruk? e*thirteen?). It would be cool to use a 10-42t 13 speed cassette for road and then have a 10-48t or 10-50t 13 speed cassette on the gravel wheelset.

Thoughts on Zeno Couplers

• Happy with the coupler performance, especially given that I haven’t had to bleed the brakes since installing them in January and have switched forks approximately 20 times
• Install process was more involved even with the pre-pressed hoses:
  • getting the hose lengths right so the coupler would be where I wanted
  • the initial bleed took more time because you have to fill all 3 parts of the system for a fork swap setup and you can only fill 2 joined parts at a time; I ended up holding a massage gun to the line to try and make sure I got all air out.
• I have occasionally noticed small amount of dot fluid on my handlebars after taking the bike down from sliding bike storage, so there is some leakage and the system will require more bleeding than a non-coupler setup
• a new Zeno coupler model is expected to launch Q4 2025, this might address the “finicky” extra pin

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Parts for dual fork hydraulic coupler setup

• sram force brake caliper
• sram disc brake mounting hardware 5mm flat mount ebay
• etap hrd compression hose nuts ebay
• sram disc brake hose fitting kit stealthamajig amazon
• sram dot disc brake assembly grease ebay
• caliper cable boot amazon
• Zeno Q-Connector Lite Socket Side pre-pressed with 3M hose SRAM DOT (1x)
• Zeno Q-Connector Lite Pin Side pre-pressed with 3M hose SRAM DOT (2x)
• Zeno Q-Connector Fix Pin + Pin keeper spare kit

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