Kona Kula Gold Frame

If you're focused on laying down some heavy trail beats, prepare to shatter all foes on the Kula Gold. Throughout our entire line of Kula's we've lengthened top tubes and incorporated shorter stems and offset seat posts, creating a more balanced position on the bike. With a newly designed, more elaborate hyrdroformed frameset that's stiffer, lighter and faster-available in seven different sizes-this bike fits like a surgical speed glove.

KONA RACE LIGHT 7005

Kona Race Light 7005 is a lighter, more performance oriented fabrication of our 7005 Aluminum tubing. Designed to Kona's racing specifications, the biggest difference is custom butting. The tubing is thicker at weld areas and important parts of the frame, providing great strength and torsional integrity to the ride. We remove wall thickness in other parts of the frameset to lighten up the bike, providing the perfect balance between quickness and stiffness. The emphasis here is on performance rather than durability, for applications where speed is more important than longevity.

SLOPING TOP TUBE

Kona recognized the advantages of sloping top tube frame design right from the original models we made in 1988, designed by inaugural MTB Hall of Fame legend Joe Murray. As a company, we've stayed true to this philosophy, going so far as to pioneer the design in road bikes before the benefits were understood. Today, you'll find sloping top tubes in most high-end road race bicycles. We've since stayed true to all the many positives this design brings to overall bike performance and comfort. First, this design allows the top tube to be lower, providing more room for correct positioning and free body movement, enabling more standover clearance, which is particularly useful on dual suspension bikes that have higher bottom brackets. Riders have a more secure riding position, which is especially beneficial when riding downhill sections. Also, the top tube is longer and more compliant. As the top and down tube become more parallel, there's less triangulation, resulting in more compliancy. So not only is the frame stronger and more responsive, but it absorbs more shock than frames with horizontal top tubes.

COMPACT REAR TRIANGLE

Short chain stays and seat stays provide a perfect balance of stability and power transfer when out of the saddle and pedaling hard. Shorter seat stays also have less deflection during braking and accelerate quicker than longer stays. The shorter rear triangle also helps the bike to negotiate tight twisting sections of trail.

HYDROFORMED TUBING

For 2011, you'll find formed tubing on a great number of our bicycles. Hydroforming uses water specifically, but we also use Superplastic formed tubing, shaped using air, or cold formed tubing. This not only allows a tube to be tuned for compliancy on specific planes but it also improves grain alignment and increases all mechanical properties. Hydroforming is a tube shaping technology that uses super high-pressure liquid to form the shape of a tube and align its grain structure. Quite simply, the technology delivers a sound structure and ride performance like no other tubing in the world. The process results in a seamless, continuous, aligned piece of metal-right down to the fiber structure itself. Hydroforming proves especially advantageous at weld points where it can be flared to increase weld areas, adding strength without adding weight in the form of extra gussets. The result is a strong, flawless frame with great lateral stability, durability and responsiveness. Not to mention, it looks real sharp too.

INTERNAL HEADSET

By having the headset bearing located inside the headtube (what's sometimes called zero stack), rather than the top and bottom, we are able to achieve a wide array of advantages when it comes to front end stiffness a