InterBike Incidentals

Just a few Interbike bits and pieces:

Klaus from WTP / Eclat has a vid up on Ride where he talks you through their stuff. You get a look at the Eclat complex seat and post combo that's looking slick in clear with an anodized gold inner sleeve. Vid here (corporate milk warning!). You also get a good look at the fork prototype below that uses investment cast dropouts. :



Demolition have come up with something new in pegs - though I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. Now for the first time the grind friendliness of a plastic sleeve has been combined with the strength of 7075 aluminium. Or is that the softness of plastic combined with the softness of aluminium. Judgement reserved: the proof is in the ledge. You can either squint at the picture below or check this vid.



MacNeil have a 22.2mm pivotal post out. The theory being that everyone runs their seat slammed so why bother with a 1 inch post when you can save weight with a 7/8". Kind of makes sense, but really is it worth it? Jay himself doesn't seem too sure in this vid. Anyway, the rest of the MacNeil range is looking really nice and you can definitely see Harrison's hand in the colourways and textures etc. Apparently there's a couple of new stems. A front and top load of similar design:



Thomas Goring from KHE talks you through some of the Shola stuff in this vid (Milk warning). Including a nice looking new stem that looks to use a similar clamp to the KHE Anchor bar / stem combo and he also goes over one of new KHE Shola street completes that seems to have a very slim set of Shola pedals on the bike that the camera is trying to check out, but Thomas doesn't touch.

Chad DeGroot is Raw!

Does it seem to you that bmx gets more and more fragmented all the time? Lots of little boxes to
Either way, bear with me a second: You’ve got your low top tube trendies v. staunch high tt geometry enforcers. There’s your light weight digi-scale obsessors v. back-in-my-day heavy weight protectors or the roasted brakeless street slackers v. the protein shaking gyro gymnasts.

It’s getting harder and harder to choice the hard and soft goods and piece together a fitting bmx persona for yourself. That is what you're doing isn't it? Anyway it’s almost enough to make you want to put your seat post to a comfortable level, put on a front brake, Chicago your bars and do one-footed, x-up kickturns in your driveway.

My point here is acutually that there is a clear new division emerging. The Raw v. The Colour kids. Raw is definitely the mode preferred at my local park and has even been taken to new levels of rawness with the spray bottle of salt water used to create a very even layer of rust over a frame. Sounds dumb, looks good. Probably not great if you value your warranty, but at least you're hard. Here are some of the contenders in this new sub-sub-cultural divide:

Fly are definitely in the colour camp and their 2010 stuff will allow you to match your pedals to your cables, to your brakes, to your brake pads. You may now view a shitty quality image of said stuff right here.

Failure have a new Jerimiah Smith frame called the Flying Lion that is r-r-r-raw:


More shots here.

Mutiny have a new frame called the Lucky Strike that cleverly combines paint job and decals to mess with your eyes:


Bright. Looks like they've also got some new forks on the way.

The graphics on Colony’s Gnarkill frame are obscenely colourful:



But for the pinnacle of rawness. Chad DeGroot’s “brand” Deco Bmx which kind of looks legitimate, despite his website being the least legitimate company website imaginable – it’s an odd mix of porn (how are those two kids in the background not curious as to what's going down on the mini ramp?), new born babies and general freakiness.



But there is even a selection of bmx parts on show that may just be a product line… or they might be some stickered up things he found in someone’s garden shed. Actually the frame is complete with bullet tipped stays and a logo’d lasercut seat-stay bridge and seems very unlikely to be a hoax.

Upon further examination of this rawness, it appears there is a pair of forks with removable 990 mounts that will do their part to create harmony between the front brake and brakeless sub-sets. Despite this gesture, the level of raw product combined with a website unmatched in bmx for it’s raw female content, you've got to say that Chad DeGroot is raw!

Once Was New Shit

Verde are taking the style points with their 2010 completes. They've put out photos of the full range - on Defgrip of course - and they are looking damn fancy. Fancy good that is. Chrome, fats front and rear, tan-walls, built in pivotals, minimal decals and flangeless grips. No spec yet:



Colony have also put up a couple of preview shots of their two completes for 2010 - The Endeavour and The Decsendent. The Decsendent is built around the low, low slung Hell Stallion frame and will, as a result, make people raise their voices and talk angrily about scooters. Or they may raise their voices in lively debate about whether or not Colony have deliberately used Australian/English spelling for both of their completes so as to confuse their American market. Either way, no spec yet:



United have their four completes and two logos for 2010. They are nice enought to tell you how much hi-ten steel and/or how much CrMo you're getting on your complete, but they have not made it clear which logo they would like you to primarily recognise them by:



And just to keep things confusing, as all the 2010 bikes start appearing Lotek have posted up a 2009 "back to school" range:



They look nice, but there's been talk that the quality of the last batch of Loteks was pretty average, with the soles requiring very little persuasion to separate themselves from the uppers and seek a happier life on their own. But on the other hand, the Lotek team do have a lot of tattoos... so you should probably just buy some anyway. And if you do, you can be safe in the knowledge that there is now a Lotek warranty policy - if your shoes fuck up, you can pay $20 to get another pair - if you live in the US. If you don't, you could always just put your $20 towards a new pair of Orchids.

I don't think I should say too much about the MacNeil 2010 stuff. They've put their "Cruiser" bike and frame right at the top of their product menu and the bitter taste of negativity it's left in my mouth is just going to get all over any other words that come out.



Maybe it's just a personal hang-up and maybe it's just the label "cruiser", but I can only see them are the drunk uncles of bicycles - loud and obnoxious, styleless and bloated. The MacNeil incarnation is actually one of the less lame examples that you'll see. It doesn't, for example, have any flame decals and it will probably never be ridden by Paris Hilton. But really, couldn't they have just done a fixed gear like everyone else?

Last but not least is some Fly prototype spotting. See I notice, that Pijin notices, that Bike Guide notices these things.

Spanish Soap Opera

Darcy Saccucci is an admirer of small bottom brackets. And those undervalued bits of tube have been at the centre of untold amounts of net chatter and drama recently as a result.

Darcy is the product designer at MacNeil and the man responsible for the pivotal seat post - one of the biggest design innovations made by a bmx company. There's actually a nice Brian Tunney interveiw with Darcy on the Dig website where he talks about designing the pivotal and the general ins and outs of being a bmx product designer if you're interested. But either way, he's got credentials.


^^ I've been looking for an excuse to use that drawing ^^

Back to the drama: It all kicked off when Darcy made a blog post a while back titled Spanish BBs are the Shit. He just laid out a few arguments for MacNeil sticking with the Spanish set up over the Mid.

Basically he put it down to saving some grams, about a hundred or so when you include the smaller bearings and bb shell, as well as what I suppose you could call "style issues":

"I think it looks way better. With all of the frame tubing diameters getting smaller in the last couple of years the Mid BB looks a little big and bulky."

I mean, I just don't think anyone else really gives much thought to how their bottom bracket shell looks in proportion to the rest of the frame. But I suppose when you spend hundreds of hours zoomed in modelling all the little CAD details of a bunch of frames it begins to get important. Anyway people went to town on this little piece of MacNeil propaganda. There was a SPRFLS post about it and Darcy got savaged in the comments there as well as on the MacNeil blog. Then Darcy made a retaliation post, then another on SPRFLS etc.

It was like a little bottom bracket soap opera. Those humble little machined pieces of tube that work so hard for so little thanks really got their five minutes in the sun.

And despite some comments from industry types like GSport George and JPR from FBM, and a whole range of anonymous and semi-anonymous people geting opinionated, nothing was really resolved and we still have two bottom bracket sizes. Which, as someone somewhere pointed out, is a damn site fewer than road bikes and similar sub-cultures of bicycle enthusiasts.

Can't really blame Darcy though, he was just towing the company line and all. How much say do designers even get? In my experience they just get orders - mostly to do with "cheaper alternatives". Of course I'm sure that bmx is a selfless industry that prioritises quality product over profits with the good of the brotherhood a in mind.

I run a Spanish and have never really had any problems with it. Mind you I also run a 19mm spindle and in my opinion that's probably a more worthy debate to be having - What's the point of 22mm spindles? Aren't they just a left over from the days where heavier was better? If we stick to a single sized spindle the bb stuff should just work itself out.



People were a little lighter on Darcy for the weight saving stuff. I guess like it or not there is no questions that light weight parts sell.

WeThePeople are even putting out a little adapter kit so that you can run Spanish BBs in their Mid shells to save some weight. Here's what they've got to say about that:

"ah yeah and we're also gonna do a new BB version So we can use a Mid BB shell, Alloy out casing and the Spanish bearings - means you can keep the standard BB, but lighten it up if you prefer or are not so hard on bearings"

Weird. It's all about the bb's.

Same, same - 3 New Frames

Three fresh frames to have a look at. Take your pick.

1. MacNeil: Whitton III - Raw is the new black.



Top Tube - 20.75″, 21″
Rear Triangle - 13.65″
Head-tube angle - 74.5°
Seat-tube angle - 71°
BB height - 11.75″
Stand over height - 8.4
Weight - 4.55 lbs

2. Volume: Rob's Zombie



Top Tube - 20.5" & 21"
Rear Triangle - 13.75"
Head-tube angle - 75°
Seat-tube angle - 71°
BB height - 11.7"
Stand over height - 8"
Weight - 4 lbs. 8 oz

No surprises on either of them, specs are pretty standard. In fact not much difference between the two at all - 0.05" here, 0.4" there. Spanish on the Macneil, Mid on the Volume.

The WTP Warriors is a little more interesting:



It's Max Gaertig and Mike Brennan's new frame. It's not actually out yet and I ain't got the specs, but I can tell you that it comes with 21.3 tt option. And, just like Fly's new forks and their integrated dropouts, the Warriors' dropouts are investment cast. Which looks slick, but in terms of functionality, it moves the welds a little further away from the stress points in the dropouts. If you check the pics you'll see that the welds are much smaller than a regular weld. This is because of the tighter fit you can get between the casting and the seat / chain stays when compared to a regular cnc'd dropout. And a smaller weld = less chance of impurities in the weld = stronger weld = nice.