Flippin' Heck

It's pre-InterBike flip book mania.

Fit have one up with their full 2010 range, including 20 complete bikes with not a brakeless model amongst them. Neither is there an embed code but you can check it here.

The next is another big American - Eastern. They are slacking somewhat with just 19 completes (even a few of them are the dreaded mtb's), but they are right up there matching Fit in the unembeddable flip book challenge. You can check theirs here somewhere.

There is just so many bikes, grips, tyres, pedals, shirts and everything else that it just makes your face hurt looking at it all, let alone reading everything. But even at a skim it's interesting looking at just how different the two brands are. Fit's all quality photos and minimal layout while Eastern just piles as much shit as they can in there with photos that look like they've been taken by your mum and graphics laid out by your dad. That's harsh, but my point is that they do things completely differently, yet both sell a shitload of bmx paraphernalia.

This pretty much sums up the difference:


Absolute chaos...


...v.s Absolute clean

And when it comes to the words, I'd say Eastern has crammed about 2000 into the first few pages, including a detailed analysis of how to identify whether you're a "Beginner, Intermediate, Expert, Pro and Team" rider and a very scientific chart to decide upon your TT length. But there is also a dark side to all this information that no kid will ever read:



Since you still didn't read it, you wouldn't have seen that bit that warned of other brands hiding subpar products behind flashy advertising. Is that code for "read on to find flashy products behind subpar advertising?"

Of course for the sake of cleanliness Fit have put there message more simply with some short but thoughtful quotes:



OK, that's enough about that. I've said more or less nothing, so let's move on and pretend it never happened.

Back to flip-mania. Eclat also have a flip book for you to... flip through:

And just so you're sure that Klaus at WeThePeople is not a lazy man, you can flip the Fuse too:

Capitalist Pegs

Don't be fooled by the picture - This is serious mum!

In the last few years pegs, those simple, humble metal tubes have been designed to within an inch of their lives and are now fully fledged tools of capitalism.

You pay more for them than ever (yes, yes, Plegs excluded) and their lifespans are shorter than ever. They've become semi disposable. Of course really they are just keeping up with the state of things. You change your computer every couple of years, you change your phone yearly and you buy new pegs every six month. Hooray for capitalism - everyone wins. People love to have new things and companies love to sell the stuff. Perfect. There are a few down sides but lets not talk about them...

But this new wave of capitalist pegs must be ticking boxes. The amount of new light weight (read: short lifespan) pegs available growing, it seems that most people are willing to pay the money to save the weight.

Not Plegs, I hear you say. Plegs are cheap. Yeah, but even if you divide the dollars spent by the lifespan of the peg?

On that topic: The bitter battle of the Plegs continues to be waged on the SPRFLS site. And George from G-Sport has made a pretty long and interesting reply that's worth reading. He talks a bit about the curse of the colourway - basically to make a dollar in bmx you've got to keep up with demand for endless colour variations.

Plegs are now ticking that box.
In fact they are kind of like the perfect storm of modern bmx parts - they combine 3 of the things that people get really upset about: they're plastic, they're light, and they come in a bunch of candy coloured variations. If they had a low slung top tube and wore tight jeans, people would be burning effigies of them at skateparks all over the world. As they are they just tend to bring out spite and slander from people who have never even ridden them.

Maybe pegs fire people up like this because it's such an obvious change. In the space of 6 or 7 years pegs have gone from being 300g (3/4 lb) lumps of steel that you'd bash on things for years to 100g (3.8oz) pink translucent plastic sleeves that you update to match you hair colour.

It must have hurt G-Sport's sales when just around the time that Plegs were about to drop that 7075 aluminium pegs started poping up. I think it was Tree that started the ball rolling with their Trick Sticks. (?) The aluminium pegs are the same weight as the plastic pegs, but in my experience last a lot longer.


Tree Trick Sticks. Weight: 1.5” dia. = 108g/ 3.9oz each, 1.375” dia = 97g/ 3.5oz each
I think everyone had just always assumed that since you couldn't really grind an aluminium rail, that aluminium pegs would be useless. This is off the Tree website:

These aluminum pegs grind faster than titanium on steel. Just to clear any confusion, aluminum is not inherently a high friction material. Everyone has had there experience of aluminum railing being very slow, but aluminum railing is made of a very soft corrosion resistant grade. Like all metals, the higher quality grades are harder and have a lower friction coefficient. Skateboard trucks have always been made of aluminum.

So aluminium is OK, but what about this one way shit?



One way shit:
Colony One Way: 110 g / 3.88 oz
Fly Alloy: 89 g / 3.1 oz
Eastern Slit: 119 g / 4.2 oz

In my book this is one of the less useful ideas going around.

A peg that shaves some grams by having less material on the top - so in effect rather than being able to rotate your peg 10+ times, you have just one spot to grind on it. That equals one tenth the life - or at best one fifth, if you take into account some extra thickness on the bottom of the peg. So you save a bit of weight and lose a lot of life. And they're expensive. Weirdly enough, Colony came out with the idea and companies just copied them.

So spend some money, take your pick, save some weight, style it up - capitalist pegs. They're all the rage.

Eastern's cockroach tubing

Now this is tech.

This is like engineer pornography - a new type of tubing that'll be going on Eastern's 2010 aftermarket frames and a few of their completes. It's called, wait for it... XHeliX. I don't want to bring you down, but this amazing new word is pronounced, quite simply - Cross Helix.



I could just leave you with this quote I lifted from the comments on Eastern's post for the tubing: Phantom: "I don`t know much of this, but it seems so good", but I'll try and shed a little more light on it.

Of course, it's all about the weight. As you can see there are little ridges that run in opposing spirals down the inside of the tube. So the idea, i guess, is that you can have a thinner walled tube of an equal strength due to the reinforcement provided by ridges. The fact that they spiral along the length of the tube would also give a good torsional strength.

It'll be interesting to find out whether you can also get butted tubes of this design. That is: have a greater wall thickness at the end of the tubes where the welds are. Without butting you'd have less material at the weld point. But Eastern are going to put up some more info later in the week, so...

Just in case you didn't already feel like you're back at school, don't fall asleep yet. Cast your mind back to science class and take a look at the comparison below with the inside surface of an insect's exoskeleton. Pretty much the same principal. If it's good enough for cockroaches, it's good enough for me.

Frames - 5 Lightest

Seems like sub-4 is the new sub-5, which was the new sub-6 ...so on and so forth.

Here's the five lightest frames that I could dig up - all 4 lbs or under of course. I was going to keep it strictly freestyle and strictly production frames, but the KHE Ti is too whacky to leave out.
This thing is ridiculous, I'd say if you made a frame out of plastic it'll probably weigh about 2.2 lbs. KHE say it's a legitimate frame, but it must flex like crazy when you ride it. I used to have a pair of those titanium Eastern bars. They were light, no doubt, but they flexed like mad and snapped pretty quickly. Wonder why Eastern don't make them anymore. Or the Ti Reaper.
If you want it there is a little bit more info on KHEs little experiment

They turned up out of nowhere with super light frames. There was plenty of talk about them and it was all a bit suspicious if you ask me - an unproven company with the lightest frames around? Anyway now the talk is all about these frames snapping when someone so much as looks at one. If you're thinking of buying one of these frames, you might want to read this first.

These things should be a bit more reliable. Premium is made by Haro after all. This is from SPRFLS about the Lowpez Lt:

...so the tubes are double butted and drawn in a special way. then heat treated for 3.5 times longer than normal frames. haro guy said it would shatter before it bent... so you have that to look forward to!”

I think that KHE is totaly and madly obsessed by making extremely light bmx parts and this frame is one of them. Check more on it here.

It feels like this ugly piece of work has been around forever, yet it's still up there matching with all the other feather weights. You've at least got to give Eastern credit for being ahead of their time.