HARO is back! But how’s the bike?

Haro is back! Get all the details (that I likely forgot) on the new Saguaro hardcore hardtail here at the Haro website: https://harobikes.com/collections/hardtail-mountain-bikes. Huge thanks to Haro for sponsoring this video! As a fan of the brand for over 25 years, it was really an honor to get to ride this bike.

I mention all sorts of component upgrades in the video- here they are- and any purchases from these links will help support my channel. Thanks in advance!

I’m running WTB 2.6 tires, a Vigilante Tough High Grip up front, and a Trailboss Tough Fast Rolling out back: https://jenson.sjv.io/WTB2.6tiresJKW
I’ve got standard CushCore in the rear wheel: https://bit.ly/CushCore2022jkw
I mentioned this DT 54t ratchet too many times in the video, but here’s the link: https://jenson.sjv.io/DTSwiss54tRatchetJKW
The carbon OneUp 35mm rise bars have helped with compliance and comfort: https://jenson.sjv.io/OneUpCarbon35BarsJKW
I would *never* use a longer fork than a manufacturer would recommend, and if I did, I would probably find the air shaft available here: https://www.jensonusa.com/Fox-36-Air-Shaft-Assembly-2021
I’m using the trusty Shimano Saint pedals: https://bit.ly/ShimanoSaintPedals2022JKW

For all you hardtail fanatics, here are all the hardtails available over at my pals Jenson USA: https://jenson.sjv.io/HardtailsJKW

If you’d rather a full squish, check out all the exclusive mountain bike builds only available at Jenson USA here: https://jenson.sjv.io/ExclusiveCompleteBuildsJKW.

Head to http://www.DrinkLMNT.com/Jeff to get your free sample pack with any purchase.

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Did you know I post a new riding tutorial every month? These are ONLY posted to my Patreon page, so join now to see these rad videos! Here’s the full list of my riding tutorials posted through October 2023:

How To: Airtime Bike Control https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-air-time-92051562
Riding Techniques for your Feets: https://www.patreon.com/posts/ridings-for-your-89999826
How to Ride in Summer Time Dust: https://www.patreon.com/posts/trust-me-its-88585343
Corners are jumps, change my mind: https://www.patreon.com/posts/corners-are-my-86987274
4 (and ½) Summer Riding tips: https://www.patreon.com/posts/4-5-summer-tips-85207251
How to Hit New Jumps: https://www.patreon.com/posts/hitting-new-and-83883299
Berm line choice: https://www.patreon.com/posts/line-choices-for-82322348
How to ride like a pro (and not a squid): https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-ride-like-80864886
How to MANUAL: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-manual-my-79363708
Wet weather riding tips: https://www.patreon.com/posts/wet-weather-tips-78055037
How to ride ROUGH corners: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-ride-76582910
50 tips to be a better mountain biker: https://www.patreon.com/posts/50-tips-to-be-75352100
How to land jumps: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-land-74063598
How to ride steep trails: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-ride-72705363
How to sprint without pedaling: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-sprint-71580461
How to ride flat corners: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-ride-flat-68552084
How to jump found gaps: https://www.patreon.com/posts/67255256
How to LEAN in corners: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-lean-in-63176556
How to Ride Light on the Bike: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-ride-on-61941975
Riding technique differences between hardtails and full suspension: https://www.patreon.com/posts/60435182
How to rut track: https://www.patreon.com/posts/59366938
5 tips to make flat trails more fun: https://www.patreon.com/posts/58058983
Different bikes, different riding techniques: https://www.patreon.com/posts/46925782
How to ride FLAT PEDALS through the ROCKS: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-ride-flat-45662347
How to ride wet roots and steep chutes: https://www.patreon.com/posts/44507851
How to ride with style: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-ride-with-43349450
How to jump for height vs distance: https://www.patreon.com/posts/42202183
How to manual: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-manual-37684861
Manual a berm: https://www.patreon.com/posts/35496772
How to ride in Sedona: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34436065
Switchbacks: https://www.patreon.com/posts/3-ways-to-33345804
Nosewheelie: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32742504
Bump jump: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31881231
Trials basics for trail riders: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31145344
Tight berms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/30389457
Aggressive braking: https://www.patreon.com/posts/29579507
Confidence for mountain biking: https://www.patreon.com/posts/28817411
Cornering: https://www.patreon.com/posts/27981205

00:00 Chapters
2:42 What it is
4:22 Part swaps
6:21 First impressions
7:27 Moto road trip
9:49 The BIG problem…
10:38 The solution!
12:07 Second first ride
13:43 Pumptrack?
14:58 The bike review

Today’s new bike day but this isn’t just any new bike there’s a bit of a story behind this one let’s grab It so if you’ve seen any of my videos here on YouTube you probably know that I’ve got a bit of a BMX background well so does this company right here harro Haro bikes was founded in 19 78 by the father of freestyle Bob harro you’ve probably heard of Matt Hoffman Dave Mera

Rick molero they were all sponsored by harrow in the late 80s and early ’90s and that’s cool and all but I didn’t really know about Haro until they sponsored a local guy Ryan Nyquist in 1997 I grew up riding BMX bikes right around the Northern California area so

When Nyquist got on to harro I immediately took notice of the company and you couldn’t avoid harro back then cuz Mera Nyquist were all over the place crushing X Games if you’re mountain biker you’re probably familiar with gregman AR Eric Porter Mick Hannah cam zinc all these guys rode for har bikes

During the mid 2000s since then though Haro hasn’t really done a whole lot with the high-end mountain bike scene but that’s all changing I’ve also got more of a personal connection to harro than just that right there so I met my friend Doss at the local dirt jumps in Northern

California in the late 90s and then when I was working at Ibis Doss and I would do weekly group rides together and we Road tripped all over California going to mountain bike races I caught up with Doss a few months ago and he mentioned hey I’m actually the guy behind the

Scenes at har bikes and we could have some really cool stuff coming up he was mentioning that they had a new hard tail coming out and he thought it’d be really cool to sponsor a video on my channel so without further Ado let’s take a look at the new Haro Saguaro so yes I’m honored to say this video is sponsored by Hara ooh this is a cool looking color all right this bike right here is a media sample so it’s not got finished every little Last Detail and whatnot but it’s a very good example of what the production bikes are going to be like hopefully it comes out look at

That all right we’ll get there eventually oh it has the transmission thingy I’ve never played with one of those sometimes things show up in the ways you never expect they will all right let’s put this thing together Smo wow after more than 3 months of riding the Saguaro I feel like I’ve got

A pretty good handle on what the bike is and on what it isn’t I even had the pleasant surprise that would really change my overall experience with the bike but you have to keep watching to find out what exactly Happened I would definitely called the Saguaro modern aggressive hard tail intended for today’s trails and Enduro style Riding now I grew up riding only hard tales and for the first seven years of my mountain bike journey I never actually rode a full suspension bike I always assume those were just rolling junk shows primarily built for software Engineers down in Silicon Valley but as

A child I was quite the cocky little and I do apologize for myself Saro uses a 140 mm travel fork and supports a relaxed 64 1/ 12° head tube angle the frame uses size specific chain stay lengths with all but the large an XL having their own rear center lengths the small as a mullet but medium through XL roll on trusty 29in Wheels the C tube

Angle is steep at 76 1/ 12° but before we get all Texas Instruments with these numbers let’s be more clear the general bike feel is something ready to descend gnarlier Trails yet still quick and Nimble Feeling in fact it’s light enough to still laugh at your skinny arm buddy trying to lift his budget full squish onto the roof rack at the trail head just like that same buddy this thing is no racer but it’s certainly here for a good time since this bike is built to be

Pretty stout I’m going to go ahead and swap on my two six tires and I want to go ride this thing in some rockier places where the two six tires are going to help I’ve also ridden these tires quite a bit lately and I’m feeling them

So let’s make a quick little tire swap we might check on our freehub and see if we need to uh go to oh we can go to more engagement we’re halfway through the swap already I am not an old sage of a bicycle mechanic more of a kitten as I’m

Ever curious about how my bikes might ride best for me oh there we go okay in the never ending quest to try all the things I took both my time and many Liberties and set the agaro up to best fit my own taste I immediately swapped off the

Single ply stock tires for my mega heavy duty 2.6 size tires I am particularly fond of these big tires for hard tail applications they provide a great amount of float in the rough plus you don’t have any kind of unpredictable rebound for jumpier scenarios I have a lot of

Experience with WTB tough casing tires and I’m happy to Lug the 1300 G carcasses uphill in order to then descend at 22 PSI I know they will respond exactly how I need them to with traction beneath me rather than applied to my Skeleton I knew I’d have this bike for a while so I took the time to swap the 36 too DT Swiss star ratchet over to the 54 tooth not a mandatory upgrade but a fun one and you can flant your upgraded engagement over all the commoners you’ll

See unable to ride with merely 36 Poe I may be kidding here but it’s nice to know that no pointless detail is spared I did battle slightly with the stock bars I really wanted something taller with more sweep and ideally more compliance I went with some oneup 35mm

Carbon bars and a very stubby 35 mm length stem otherwise the bike had a very high-end build with trp Slate Pro bre brakes a saram AXS transmission drivetrain and DT Swiss XM 1700 Wheels this thing is solid very beefy all the adjustments made Let’s go see how it does in the trails Q me jump on and wheel you away H short back end I like that this switch back up here is a little bit of a local challenge see if the saguaro’s got

It kind of big had to get fancy but it made it first ride on the Haro just do a little bit of a Shakedown Loop see how everything feels oy that is a long bike whoa holy cow this thing is pey y this bike is fun it definitely likes

To jump that short back end but man I got to do some work on my own end with the handlebar positioning fitment let’s get wild let’s go try out the har Saguaro on a Ridgetop let’s do this my biggest priority is to spend as

Much time as I can not on my rear wheel but on trails that challenge my technical ability but also have some sort of unknown Adventure aspect to them if that just means not really knowing where I’m at well I’ll own that just before the snow started to fall I made a

Trip up to the Cascades to try out a very remote Trail seldom ridden by bicycles I’m seeing a lot of hunters since first day of GE season tomorrow Nice I’d seen videos of this Trail but once I did find it on a map the entire process of avoiding hunting season a long winding Forest Sur Road and golden large trees were punctuated by Perfect dirt in a gorgeous day these types of rides are what most keep

Me out of the house for extended periods of time that forc me to arrive to family functions somewhat late all sweaty and still in bike shoes these are the types of trails I tell my kiddo all about in an effort to try to get her to join me on these

Trails one day and these are the kind of rides the siguo is built for on the ride home I had a brief encounter with an elk then had to Ford a river in the dark to eventually make it over 150 rainy miles home now that was a day

Maybe it’ll go through maybe it won’t I don’t know I might actually look at this before I just send it blind right at nightfall it’s going to be slippery yeah I think I just got to stand up and hit the gas hard I see there’s a big rock over there I don’t

Want to yeah there’s a big snag on the left I got to watch out For oh my feet are soaked so I sunk into a hole and I had my traction control wheel slip at level three but I couldn’t move I got stuck so I bumped it down to level one and got out okay now hopefully this goes where I need to

Go it’s important to me that if I discuss a bike here on my channel that I’d be fully transparent about it well unfortunately that first Saguaro that arrived quite simply just fell off I knew it was a media sample and that a bunch of details were not yet

Sorted out but the bike was so long I was fully struggling to ride with all that weight on the front wheel I really couldn’t Bunny Hop let alone corner it might work trying to maneuver through rough bits of Trail was an absolute struggle despite being told the

Bike I have is a size medium I finally received the geometry chart and with my trusty tape measure found out that first bike was actually a size large measured the wheelbase and I communicated with Haro this wheelbase is really long it’s longer than my size medium and duro bikes and we looked at

Some of the geometry and sizing charts and notied that the bike I’ve been riding is actually a size large I’m only 5’8 I fit a medium so Haro went ahead and shipped me a size medium frame let’s crack it open see what we got here

Turns out I was riding a size large and even worse it was made at a different Factory than where the production bike was actually going to be built this verified medium showed up in the mail was way easier to build up with an obvious Improvement in overall build

Quality the tubing was more compliant the cable fittings were much better than earlier versions I will say I’m not a huge fan of internal cable routing when not absolutely necessary he I might even opine this is one of the internet’s worst contributions to our sport but that’s still a huge Improvement

Overheads cable routing and harro is smart to also avoid silly headset cables nice cool I didn’t even notice this bike has undertop tube mounts for your tool your uh Tire plug kit whatnot let’s build this thing up swap down from large to proper size [Applause] medium fall colors looking pretty good this is

The most fall we’ve had in years we had a little cold snap early got the color turning man this thing climbs better easier to get through the switchbacks I can already feel how much better this thing rides than the last bike the whole bike is way more compliant

Smoother go way more comfortable the geometry is so much better too oh man just going to that size medium ah the large worked but man medium is what I should be riding let’s do the rock roll on the old Saro oh we’re good it flies cool cool it jumps way better than I

Expected there we go over the years I’ve generally found that when choosing a frame size on a hard tail air on the side of smaller for this kind of bike more maneuverability is more important than it is on a full suspension God shorter wheelbase feels so much

Better with the bike much more figured out I did my best to take it to a whole bunch more places to really try it out I have to admit I’m a bit self-conscious about riding a harro in a video that includes any kind of jumps or pump tracks Haro sponsors some of the

World’s very best BMX riders I don’t even belong in the same sentence paragraph or even book as those people but I will say that a heart tail does this stuff way better than any kind of a full suspension and if you’re testing a bike why not test it on all the

Things while an actual pump track bike Rolling On 26-in Wheels be far better Hammer from the pump track nail an aggressive hard tail will still pound that pump track plenty with the added ability of being able to do a lot more than just endless circles that was so bad

Let’s check in one more time on the versatility of this bike oh that’s right you can also take it out on Epic Backcountry cross country rides and when things get sideways it’ll generally save your bacon I always enjoy riding a hard tail but it’s really fun when I’ve got enough

Time on it to actually feel like the bike is responding to my every little input just as I wanted to one of the very best parts of riding a hard tail is that it makes easier Trails somewhat more challenging it also encourages riding in a slightly slower Pace when descending they aren’t really

Slow but they’ll be slower than a full suspension the same hard tail then rewards you with a feeling you’re on a fancy SL Type e MTB on the climbs sort of being so light and so efficient if you do spend time on any kind of a heavy

Enduro bike it’s quite fun to hop back onto the little aluminum hard till it’s like cheap EPO without the stress of drug testing or any kind of a heavy conscience quite the opposite when you are shredding on a hard tail it’s best practice to hop and skip over

Bumps the shorter back end of the har means it’s easy to get the bike up and into a bunny hop the size medium is a ton easier to jump than the large and you can see that I’m constantly manipulating this bike over every single obstacle I come

Over the rear 29in wheel is forgiving when it comes to line Choice providing more traction and rollover than the mullet my other main hard tail and wow going to that kush cor is absolutely worth it on the hard tail between the Kush cor the 2.6 tires ran at low

Pressure and the carbon oneup bars the har treated me well better than I ever expected for an aluminum hardil it might be an ever so slightly firmer ride than the Santa Cruz chameleon but it’s also a way beefier bike designed for much more aggressive to send for my kind of

Rotting style and where I live I do think the Haro is better suited for my uses I had the most fun on the Haro and either blue or single black rated Trails yes the bike can do some double black stuff but it’s still a hard tail you’ve

Got less margin for error and when you’re a middle-aged dad that’s something you got to keep in mind it sweet spot is on the type of trails that are often most prevalent stuff that’s not crazy but it’s still Technical and is always a lot of fun now at the end of

More than 3 months of riding the Saguaro I’ve really fallen in love with this thing it’s not a slow bike and it still keeps so much fun on the table the easy wheelies are as you all know a personal favorite that’s due and no small part to

The 2.6 rear tire and that 29in rear wheel the size medium wheelbase is spoton for all of this short enough to be nimble and fun but long enough to be confidence inspiring and stable and the color in real life I really like the look of this thing it’s kind of like a

Lavender that is somewhat subdued but still stands out compared to traditional mountain bike colors instead of those bright bikes that scream look at me it’s more of Simply uttering hey there I’m slightly different but not too weird you don’t have to stare I wonder how hard it would be to

Gap that I’ve done it you have just a big pull big it’s not that long as we’re riding down the trail went over this roller and was like oh look there’s another jump but it looks like you could almost Gap both of them and then Logan

Said he’s done this gap before and said maybe you could do it on the Haro Saguaro so why not a trail challenge let’s see if the hard tail can carry enough speed through the Switchback before this and then get enough boost to the Bunny Hop to make it to Backside

It’s hard to tell on video but this is actually a roller to a little tabletop or you know a 15 foot long double if you guys think the Haro Saguaro can make this double scroll on down hit the Subscribe button if you don’t think the

Siguo can do it scroll on down hit the Subscribe button all right let’s go do It it looked easy hold on a har Saro it’s so cheesy but yeah it wasn’t too bad that’s cool I’m so glad that Rhymes if this for my personal bike I’d probably upgrade to a mechanical drivetrain and to my personal favorite brakes but neither of those changes would be in a huge hot hurry those are just personal preferences the stock transex dropper seat post has been fine

Now I do have a big hop in the DT Swiss rear wheel but they still ride just Fine It’s hard to say for certain how this Aluminum Bike compares to a steel one the light overall weight is really nice and while it’s likely a tad former ride the bike’s willingness to get airborne and over obstacles is an extremely valid trait I’d say the difference between the

Two frame materials is less noticeable the difference between running a Kush cor versus a traditional Tire setup and for what it’s worth my cromag stylus rides similar to the suguaro if not a bit harsher both bikes are certainly heavy duty and for more compliance while seated it’d be best to look for a

Different genre of entirely ideally something that uses a slacker seat angle but I’ll leave that for retirement age as for now I like the extra fun factor of these more aggressive RS try again try try try again it’s okay look at this muddy guy what look what he’s

Doing for you guys look at I’m actually pretty comfortable right now your face you have so many new freckles I really appreciated the fox 36 grip 2 Fork on the Saguaro and I did experiment with some longer travel set settings however I don’t know what the frame is officially rated for so you’re

On your own if you do want to go longer travel huge thanks to Haro for sponsoring this video I really hope they let me hold on to this bike for a bit longer is I’m absolutely still enjoying it I didn’t know that’d be the case at first but that was a very pleasant

Surprise to find out that first bike had absolutely nothing to do with this one you see here also big thanks to both Riley and Logan for filming and for riding this bike all over Washington BC while putting this together if you guys did enjoy this video I’d love to ask for

Your kind subscription it’s free and it’ll probably help me out and let me know in the comments if you’re also a hardtale connoisseur thanks so much for watching everyone remember peace and wheelies