It’s a feeling some of us have experienced and the rest of us hope we never will... the feeling you get when you first see that tiny, hair-line crack near the neck of your frame. Bike cancer some might say, it will creep along and eventually result in the death of your frame and you purchasing a new frame (never cheap) and dealing with swapping your bike over to the new frame (never fun). As stunters push the limits of their machines, this disease is spreading and Aaron Twite of Static Moto Design set out to do something about it.

Static Moto Design launched their full frame replacement in early 2010. A beautiful piece of engineering with sturdy, triangulated construction and Ducati-style tubular steel, it was a pipe-dream for many stunters with a price point of $2,000. To address the price issue and bring the frame to the people Aaron conceived a half-frame. This method addressed the weakest points of the frame with a steel replacement and utilizes the pre-existing stock back half to cut costs.

The outcome is a fairly priced $1,000 half-frame replacement to address the cursed frame cancer. I found a hairline crack shortly before Nashville XDL and knew something must be done, before it turned into a "Boyd Situation." The options were:

  • Buy a frame off eBay for ~$600-800 and cross fingers it lasts a while before rinsing and repeating.

OR

  • Pick up a Static Moto Designframe and never worry about a crack again.

I opted for the Static Moto Design frame and since the half-frame is a brand new creation, we headed down to Atlanta for a personal frame swap session with Aaron Twite himself. As the video shows, the swap was fairly painless, with only two issues cropping up:

  1. Spanning the pieces that mount to the back half of the frame.
  2. Shimming my GPR to make it mount properly.

I've only rode with the frame for a solid week now, but I'm already a huge fan. Most notably, the performance gain when it comes to endos is amazing. It took me a couple of days to adjust to, but it really makes your pickups that much faster and you're brake input that much more direct when rolling. The only real problem I've encountered since riding it is that since it came with no steering stops, the frame is slowly impressing in on one of my fork tubes. I'm sure they were omitted due to the fact that the placement of the stops depends on what lower triple you run. Personally, I am just going to wrap some rubber hose around that part of the frame to act as a stop, but being that Aaron is very open to customizing these frames, it is possible that he will add steering stops to work with whatever lower triple you want.

While I sought out a Static Moto Design frame after I cracked my stock frame, I only wish I could have picked one up before I cracked it. I could have easily sold my stock frame + title for $800 and picked up a great-looking, solid new frame that truly performs better for stunting for only $200! If you're interested or have any more questions regarding these replacement frames, contact Aaron Twite on his website http://www.staticmoto.com/.

In a month or so, I'll be posting a more detailed review of the frame's performance after I really get some time on it!