With a revised frame construction, the new Orange Four is light, fast and a bundle of fun. Short-travel trail bike with 130mm travel front, 120mm rear.

Need to know

• Short-travel trail bike with 130mm travel front, 120mm rear.
• Boost dropout spacing front and rear.
• 1x specific: no front mech mount or cable guides.
• Finally gets ISCG 05 tabs.

Orange Four RS

In the Orange range there are four Fours, if that makes sense: the S, Pro, RS and Factory. All use the same folded, sheet aluminium frame, with different build kits, and range in price from £2,800 to £5,300. The two cheaper models get RockShox suspension forks, while the top boys are Fox equipped. Rear travel is 120mm, and up front it stretches to 130mm.

The frame features Boost dropout spacing and, to take advantage of this, the RS model has the latest 110mm-wide Hope Pro 4 hubs.

Renthal’s 35mm bar is a top-drawer piece of componentry

The groupset is a bit of a mix of SRAM drivetrain parts, but the bike is fitted with top-quality components, including Renthal’s latest 35mm handlebar, stem, and Ultra Tacky grips, a KS Lev Integra dropper post and Maxxis High Roller II tyres.

The only hiccup we experienced was the dropper sticking down several times during testing. If you don’t like the KS post, there’s an £80 upgrade option to a RockShox Reverb available at the point of ordering. In fact, upgrades are available for most of the components, so you can pretty much pick and choose your own spec.

Sticky KS dropper can be upgraded to a Reverb

Along with the changes to the frame tubing and construction (see below) Orange has moved the main pivot position further up and back on the Four. This makes space under the swingarm for a proper chain device, but it also changes the suspension characteristics.

The suspension is slightly more progressive, which means it has a better small-bump ride, but without the bike falling through the travel or bottoming out too harshly. And true enough, the first thing I noticed about the Four RS was that it felt a lot more propped up when sprinting hard into a flat section of trail.

The Four may be short on travel, but it’s big on fun factor. I bottomed out the suspension a ton of times trying to see how far I could push this bike, but even then it never felt like I was totally out of control. Like the Orange Five, the Four feels stable and sure-footed, but it’s more efficient, so covers ground with a lot more urgency. If you regularly undertake longer rides with a bit of tech thrown in, Four is definitely the magic number.

Orange’s Four RS is most at home on forays into techsville

Frame construction

To reduce frame weight, Orange is using thinner 1.2mm and 1.4mm thick aluminium in the Four’s construction. Obviously there was never a Four made from the standard 1.6mm aluminium (used in the construction of the original Five), so the weight saving is purely hypothetical, but Orange has carried out this tubing upgrade on the Segment and new Five, so knows it reduces frame weight by over 400g. The downside of using thinner material is it’s inherently more flexile, so to increase stiffness, Orange has developed a new profile — a sort of extra fold — in the tube wall to add strength and rigidity.