Mountain Biking - Inside the Pros' Bikes

I was looking at the specs for Julien Absalon's Bianchi in the most recent MBA magazine. I noticed that they have "Structual Foam Injection is used in the frame to increase rigidity."

Has anyone done this? and if so can you really feel a difference?

Never heard of that before. Interesting concept though.

I've seen this done on a car. I wouldn't want it with an aluminum frame. Mine beats me up enough as it is.

I wonder if something could be injected into the frame to absorb some of the shock

You know how fabien Barell uses a stock Stab Priom, the one he used in the world Championship wasn't stock. The lower shock mount was ina different position, this made for different angles and a more ramped up feeling. This then made the engineers grind part of the swingarm tto stop it hitting the seat tube and the parallelogram link was different.

I think this topic came up before but i cannot seem to find it. I remeber reading the idea of filling the frame with the harding foam that you could pickup at Home Depot.

If a bit of injected foam can strengthen a frame at all then I have serious questions as to the strength of the tubeset, and wouldn't ride that bike myself. I doubt that foam adds any structural integrity to a frame. It also doesn't absorb shock. I would tend to believe that it may be effective in damping high frequency vibration though... My .02 FWIW