Americana

Pics of FBMs full range of 2010 completes are up. Specless as yet, but looking mighty fine. And... some of them even have stoppers.



Here’s a video check of two of the 2010 fit completes. Specs are at the end.



Odyssey are now doing their Vermont sprocket in 25 tooth. That’s not exactly big news, but I’ve always thought that was a fine looking piece of sprocket – maybe doesn’t translate as well to 25t, but what d'ya do?



On the Light v.s Heavy, Old v.s New front, In the Gnar have weighed in with some sensible words on the new T-1 GB frame. This is very un-American of me, but since I’m not American… I think it’d be cool to see T1 move more of their production offshore so they could put out a bit of post-weld heat treated trickery with a T1 flavour. But you see Australian manufacturing died years ago so we don’t get patriotic about that shit.

Salty Females

There was just a little unfinished business from my WeThePros post the other day about the 2010 WeThePeople completes.

Klaus, who takes care of design for the WTP, Eclat, Salt and Fuse brands and obviously has plenty of more important things to do than email me, was good enough to clear things up. The spec on the Trust and the Zodiac included an "engineered polymer bb". That's actually a machined PVC cone spacer on the cranks, that apparantly works perfectly and has the added bonus of being a touch lighter than aluminium. And then there was the "sealed bearing / polymer bearing" on the rear hub of the Envy, which turns out to be a pretty much a Salt version of the Eclat Teck Cassette hub that uses both a sealed bearing and a polymer bushing.


Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to identify the polymer bushing

Just as a little bonus round, here's some pics of some of the 2010 Salt components that comes on their completes, but are also available aftermarket. They're new and improved for 2010, designed in-house by WeThePeople and are one of the things that really lift their completes above those that use generic catalogue parts:


The Salt 9t cassette is depressed. He trys his best and by normal standards does really well, but it's hard living in the shadow of an older and more talented brother


Let's face it, not everyone gets to have a first rate female. Some are just lucky to have one


Designing your own rubber is officially putting in work




And finally, here is the man that has played a big hand in bringing all this bmx style to your screens. Don't blame me it's Tunney's fault:

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.

We Have a Winner

Hold on a fucking minute! I hadn't seen this thing, and if I'm not mistaken, it's the gold medalist in the 2009 Most Expensive Bmx Part by Weight final. And that's with not a bit of titanium in sight, nor even an invisible titanium coating!

The 16 tooth St Martin's English sprocket weighs just 15 grams and will set you back about US$40. That's an impressive $2.67 per gram. When you consider that it's 4mm thick and 7075-t6 aluminium, 15 grams is nothing and it really makes you wonder "how did they do it, where has all the weight gone?" ....oh, I see.

Anyway... the podium is as follows:

St Martin's English Sprocket: $2.67 / g
BlueSix Titanium Brake Bolts: $1.75 / g
Kink Ceramic Headset: $1.67 / g

Well done. Very impressive. Now the first person to run them all on one bike wins.

WeThePros

It's a cut-throat business the re-posting of bmx product news. It's the quick and the dead. You snooze, you lose. Post something up 12 hours after it drops and you're nothing. Nothing!

The WeThePeople 2010 completes have already been levitating in cyberspace for days, but now there is this nicely re-packaged official release that allows me to keep my dignity:



What can you say other than that WeThePeople are the rulers of completes. Even the most salty of critics would struggle to come up with legitimate complaints about the above flip-book and bikes in it. Maybe it isn't exactly your flavour, but the package as a whole is pro. The bikes, the spec, the artwork, the photos, the info, the presentation. Pro.

They've broken the range up into series, which start with "Novice", and then in true marketer-speak jump straight to "Expert" and then mangage to find 3 more levels above that. So it's: Novice, Expert, Pro, Master and Elite.

They also give a pretty good rundown of what you actually get from the frames at each different level. For example if you buy a Novice Series bike you know that at least your down tube is Chromoly. On an Expert Series you get CrMo downtube and chainstays, on a Masters you can the top tube to the CrMo list, until you work your way up the range to full heat treated CrMo of the Envy. On top of that you can check the spec tables at the back of the book to see at which stage the bars step up from hi-tensile to CrMo, or whether the dropouts on your forks are heat-treated or not.

It seems like a pretty obvious thing to do - to give people all the information so they can make the choice of what they want to buy for their money, but it just doesn't usually get laid out like that - in fact the more suspicious conspiracy theorists amongst you might even believe that manufacturers were trying to hide exactly what their completes are made of. (?)



So there is a lot of information about the bikes. That's good. But there is also some nice details: Some integrated pivotal posts that you can lop off if you're not into them, plenty of integrated seat clamps of course, bikes with front and rear specific rims, seat / post combos, removable brake mounts, 8.2" rise bars and female front hubs. Plus loads of nice eclat spec, especially at the top end.

A couple of interesting details are the "Salt Mid sized BB sealed bearing (polymer bb)" on the Zodiac and the polymer bearing in the "Salt Cassette 9t sealed bearing / polymer bearing" on the Envy. What's going on here? I don't know, I'm going to bed, so I'll just leave you to speculate on that with some firey and informed banter in the comments. Ha..... ha.... ha.

Some Things:

Federal's design guy, Chris Harrison has answered some questions on the Dig site where he's outlined his long term plan to get out of the bmx industry and make some real money. The short term plan is simpler: "I think I’ll most likely just work in the mornings, ride in the afternoon, do more work after that and then have the evenings for chilling." Sounds pretty good to me. Check the rest here.

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Steve Buddendeck and Cory Muth are apparently the guys behind that clean website and two bike range at Verde and are in on Duo together with Chris Doyle. Now they're doing wheels as well under the name of Cinema Wheel Co. They were having trouble finding rims that they thought fitted the Verde image so they decided to do their own. I suppose by doing stuff under a bunch of different names you open up the possibility for brands in direct competition with your own line of completes to still spec your grips or rims on their bikes. Not stupid. But you wonder how many names they'll end up operating under ...maybe they just like designing logos.



Mark Noble on does some really interesting industry articles and interview over on the ESPN blog. If you have any kind of interest in bmx product design and you haven't been over there, you're missing out. He did a great two part interview with the guy behind Fly Bikes - David Quesada and now David has answered a few more straight forward questions on FAT FAVs.

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And then there is this. Last, but definitely not least. Though I myself fall into the "started riding after '98" category, this is gold:

Edit: Seems like the vid was just too damn controversial and has been liquidated by the fun police. If you missed it, just imagine yourself a very upset Hitler slagging off just about every bmx company around. Hopefully it makes a reappearance somewhere.

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Or do you just like dogs? Maybe you should cheer yourself up from all this negativity with some happy little canine pics and download some dog vector graphics. I don't know, just an idea.

Impure Animals

There has been a Russ Bengtson sighting!

You might have heard of Russ, he runs a little site called SPRFLS. I always assumed he was some kind of bmx troll with a permanent half scowl, half snigger expression - turns out he's just a regular guy. Ben Ward snapped a pic in Odyssey's offices and has posted it up on his blog. There is a distinct absence of a scowl on Russ' face and, in fact, he has kind an optomistic look about him. Must have seen some nice stuff on Ody's drawing boards.

He obviously hadn't been surfing the Impurity Bike Co's website, cause the scowl would have been in full effect.



Impurity is a new company that is half based in Australia and half in Singapore and has a self-stated dedication to lightweight bmx components.

They've got a post-weld heat treated frame called the WTF! V2. (The V1 kind of snuck under the radar) It's light. Not the lightest going around, but pretty close at 1.8 kgs (4 lbs) and it's got a steep head, a short back end so it's ticking the whats-hot-right-now boxes. I don't know if riding like "a mouse on crack" is hot or not, but that's how they've described it. It might be accurate, but it's an unfortunate description in that crack smoking mice tend to be unpredictable, un-nervingly twitchy and prone to snapping without warning. Personally I prefer frames that ride like sloths on smack, but I'm gen-X and we're pretty much irrelevant anyway.



It's not an easy thing to start up a bike company and I imagine that it's even harder to build a name, build confidence and make a dollar. I haven't done it, but these guys have started, so good luck to them. And I suppose you never know, in 20 years time they might be the next Odyssey.

But for now they’re unknown brand, with an unknown product and their website is their only shot at building confidence. And lets face it, when you’re flogging light weight variants on products that could potentially split your face open, confidence is kind of important. I don’t mean to be a prick, but outside of their logo and header, their website ain’t cutting it.

But, on to the actual bits…

They’ve got a stem called the Ridiculite, which does exactly what it says on the box and weighs in at a160 grams or 5.6 oz. Just to put that in perspective, the next lightest freestyle stem that I can think of is Colony’s Official stem that is 245 grams or 8.64oz. So how do you drop a further 3 oz off what everyone else has managed so far? I think the pics the Ridiculite speak for themselves:

They’ve got some plain, no-nonsense bars and again they’ve gone in heavy with the drug references and come up with the name Twist ‘em Bars. Sounds like another unfortunate tag to me, but… you know… gen-X.

On top of that they’ve got a bunch of Ti nuts and bolts, a couple of pairs of forks, a beefy Ti peg concept and some fruity descriptions on their About Us page. So don’t just sit there like a tortoise on acid… hit them up.

And a shout out to Jimmy from Eject for the heads up on Impurity