It’s been a busy week at Singletrack Towers. The beautiful spring weather has turned a bit moist with the arrival of the April showers but we’ve had our minds taken off that with plenty of nice things for us to test arriving. It’s two whole pages of Fresh Goods…
Sim Mainey Limited Edition Print
Our designer Sim is a talented boy. He took this shot while he was getting the covershot for the Singletrack Magazine tenth anniversary issue. Blue sky, low sun, frozen moorland trails and seemingly frozen contrails. It doesn’t get much better than this round these parts.
Printed on heavyweight Hahnemuhle photorag by the good people at theprintspace.co.uk, this is as good as it gets for print quality with colour that just glows with crisp detail.
The print is 41 x 28.5cm of which 36 x 23.5cm is printed, giving a pleasing 2.5cm white border to set the photo off. He’s only doing 15 prints, so you’re unlikely to see these hanging on anyone else’s wall..
Price: £55
From: Sim
Continental GP4000s road tyres
Yeah yeah, it’s road rubber, but this is the super grippy but low rolling resistance Black Chili version of the classic GP4000 road tyre. They use a Vectran lining, which is said to offer more resistance to cuts than Aramid, be five times as strong as steel and weigh less than a nylon double breaker. You can get 23 or 25mm widths. They’re absolutely rubbish on wet roots and deep mud though.
Price: £40
From: Cambrian Tyres
Fox Float RP23 Boost Valve
Mark has been needing a shock to finish off a bike build for quite a while now. The lovely Tim from Mojo Suspension came to our rescue and sent over this Boost Valved air shock for us. It’s got a high volume air can, medium rebound and compression tunes so there should be no hint of it wallowing like a hippo in the mud pool of the midstroke.
Price: £349
From: Mojo Suspension
Avid Elixir Brake pads
We’ve had a care package from Gary at SRAM, with a load of sintered and organic brake pads to fit their Elixir brakes. the silver coloured ones are the Organic compound with an aluminium back plate which bed in quickly and offer maximum power. The copper coloured pads use a marginally heavier steel backing plate and longer lasting sintered compound.
Price: Sintered/steel: £20.99 Organic/alloy: £26.99
From: Fisher Outdoor
SRAM PC1091 10spd chain
These are what we’ve been needing to get our SRAM groupsets on the go – some 10spd chains. The PC1091 is the X9 level chain and uses hollow pins to keep the weight low and strength high. They come with the super thin 10spd version of the Powerlink tool-less connecting link, the Powerlock.
Price: £59.99
From: Fisher Outdoor
The Cycling Bible
Written by a former Independent on Sunday Sports Active section deputy editor, this book aims to be the most complete guide to cycling, with in depth sections on everything from safe riding on the roads to basic repairs and cycling etiquette. It’s illustrated throughout in full colour, with sections on touring, kit and mountain biking and aims to cover everything the novice might need to know while offering something for experts too.
Price: £24.99
From: Any good bookshops
“This is the seagull – now I’m a teapot – ooooh, sailor!”
Mae ei feic yn crap T shirt
If you’ve headed down to a Welsh trail centre and done your best to offend locals by mis-pronouncing everything, asking which bit of England you’re currently in and inquiring about the possibility of buying a holiday home but you still found it hard to get a reaction, then this is the T shirt for you. Express your view on the quality of someone else’s bike in their native tongue – perfect for apres ride drinky-poos in Port Talbot or Bala. Also useful if you really are Welsh…
Price: £14.99
From: Charlie the Bikemonger
CTBM stickers
Woo! Stickers! We’re liking the ‘every time you change gear God kills a kitten’. They’ve brought back good memories of the ‘gears are for f**king c**t w**kers’ stickers that did the rounds years back.
From: Charlie the Bikemonger
Birzman Toolbox with 40 piece toolkit
This is part of Birzman’s travel tool range – it’s a lovely tough plastic toolbox with two trays and as well as the frankly awesome sand filled deadblow hammer it’s filled with…
Long Arm Ball Point Hex Key Set
Cable cutters
Screwdriver set 5pcs
Combination Wrench Set 8pcs
Specialist 4pcs Wrench Set (MTB)
These look remarkably like Klingon weapons though…
Dragonfly Chain Rivet Extractor
Matt’s usually quite immune to tool-lust but this chain tool made him rather happy…
Tyre levers
Magic Oil
1/2″ Drive Socket set
Socket driven 8, 10mm hex keys with a range of BB and cassette tools.
Clam disk brake gap measurer
Designed to make setting disk brakes up easy peasy…
Price: £365.99
From: Birzman UK
Go to the next page for some winching and plummeting bikes plus a bike made by Chris King…
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21 years of mountain biking and my lust for CNC machined parts like that Giant stem has not diminished one iota. mmmmmm
‘every time you change gear God kills a kitten’
Good I don’t like bloody cats.
Yeah, that stem is very nice.
That Cielo bike – it’s a shame they didn’t move the logo on the seat tube up an inch or two so it’s not obscured by the front mech clamp…
Nice looking frame though…
Lovely Cielo – the first frame i’ve seen that looks ‘alright’ with Paragon sliders – in general they seem to make the seat stays sit at a funny angle, but maybe that’s just me…
mighty fine use of swear filter avoidance in the CTBM part 😉
The only swear filter we have for the front page is for the word ‘stoked’… 😉
Like that T-shirt!
I’d only ridden a road bike for a year, but I swear when I fitted a set of those Contis I noticed the difference immediately (compared to some Ultremo Rs), proper rapid and no cuts/slices in the tread yet, perfect for the weekend warrior I reckon.
Curiously mae ei feic yn crap is also the noise made by a public schoolboy asking to go to the toilet.
nice use of ‘Daily Mash’ T-shirt.
🙂
road tyres, roadie book?
when are you gonna change the name to
tarmactrackworld
Ah its all good, 2 wheels is 2 wheels.
Come on my Welsh is crap. What does the t-shirt actually say?
The Cielos are actually made by Jay Sycip – lovely things they are too.
+1 for the Giant Stem – are they going to be available to buy or are they OEM only?
The brake disc alignment tool – brilliant – where can i get one?
Has anyone EVER bought a Birzman tool?
Presumably giving ST a free set has just bumped the price up even more.
All GP4000 folding black tyres have the Black Chilli compound. Aside from the different graphics on the sidewall, the GP4000s is nothing special…
@robbo:
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate_t?hl=en&client=ubuntu&hs=j0G&channel=cs&q=mae+ei+feic+yn+crap&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sl=en&tl=cy&sa=X&ei=dtOWTYuiMsbJhAfR15HlCA&ved=0CBkQrgYwAA#
🙂
When are Giant going to move the rocker pivot mount so that you can drop the saddle properly and sort out the drive-side chain stay so that a chain device isn’t dangling so low like an accident waiting to happen?
I love my old Reign but I wish Giant would ride their bikes to get feed back on what is really annoying about their design an fix it. They’ve had 7 years to do so!
Rant over.
ace.
That public school boy comment is effin hilarious. And no doubt true.
Review the fancy smoked oysters. It’s the food of champions and cost me £3.65.
Seriously those smoked oily fellows on a (dirty) hand torn chance of fresh bread is awesome. Lob them in an omelette, best served with a big view and tied legs.
I’m a big fan of CtBM but;
every time you change gear God kills a kitten come from the internet meme c.2005 “every time you mast**bate God kills a kitten” ( http://tinyurl.com/44bgbxk ), “My drinking club has a cycling problem” is from theose nobbers the hash house harriers (a drinking club with a running problem … http://tinyurl.com/3dd4mud ) and “this bike kills fascists” is from a Gogol Bordelo T-shirt which read “this moustache kills fascists” under a picture of the singers face sporting a rather magnificent mo ( http://tinyurl.com/3kws2ev ).
just sayin, but ta for making me think of it, I’ve been trying to get one of those t-shirts for a while and now I see they’re back in stock!
I think you’ll find that “this machine kills fascists” dates back far earlier than Gogol Bordelo and other spinoffs of the motif. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Guthrie.
I hope that particular sticker is still at the office when I get there on Monday, it would look great on my bike.
I stand corrected in the shadow of woody guthrie’s guitar
My ss sports a ctbm sticker aswell. More gonads than gears, although in my case it may not be true!
That slayer looks weeeeell nice! It would also appear to be sporting a link on the chainstay (are we allowed to use the ‘H’ word?).
They also forgot to remove the pie plate 🙂
freegan bikefascist…. almost but not quite right…
god kills a kitten is stolen from a “Everytime you Jump Red lights…. ” sign is Toronto.
Drinking club is stolen from Let my people go surfing… a great book… RE a fishing club.
http://www.patagonia.com/eu/enGB/product/let-my-people-go-surfing-paperback-book?p=BK501-0-000
GoGo Bordello, me, and Joe Strummer stole “This Machine…” from Woody Guthrie who had it on his guitar.
How does a “Powerlink tool-less connecting link, the Powerlock” work?
buzz, it works and is to all intents and purposes just like a powerlink, but it costs more money for less material. 😉
Charlie and I are both burglars, but I claim prior art http://www.flickr.com/photos/steverile/4676278398/
Stoked and railed.
I don’t know what I’m doing T-shirt – where from?
Andy