Fresh Goods

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Fresh Goods, the symbolic start of a weekend of riding freedom and your chance to see all the shiny things that have landed in the office this week.

Transition Covert

Transition say that the Covert is their “quiver killing all mountain bike” which we don’t really understand. However, with 150mm of linkage driven single pivot travel at the rear and 160mm of Fox 36 up front, we reckon it’ll make a superb do-it-all bike with an emphasis on the harder hitting side of riding.

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Neat internal gear cable routing…

ISCG05 mounts and sealed bearings aplenty…

De-rigeur tapered headset and plenty of swoopy hydroforming going on here…

It really is anything but Covert in this colour.

The orange colour it comes in is also the same as Irn Bru, which makes it instantly ace in our book. A white finish is available if you’re a bit boring.

Price: £1,399 frame & shock only

From: Surf Sales

XLC Pro Adjustable seatpost with remote

We really liked the XLC Pro seatpost when we tested it back in Issue 64. With 95mm of travel, trouble free function and a price tag that made the competition seem very steep, our only problem with it was with the lack of remote control. With this latest version that’s been sorted, with a cable operated, bar mounted remote. You can get them in 30.9mm or 31.6mm diameters and the post is 400mm long when fully extended.

Price: £149.95

From: Greyville Enterprises

Cane Creek ZS-49 AngleSet

If you want to tweak the head angle of your bike then there are a few options out there now but the Cane Creek Angleset gives you the option of slackening or steepening your head angle by 0.5°, 1.0° or 1.5° using the supplied cups and precision machined gimbals.

This one is designed to fit a full 1.5″ headtube but you can get variants that will fit tapered headsets and there’s even a 1.125″ version in the pipeline. It’s not cheap for a headset but if the only thing wrong with your bike is it feeling a bit nervous on the steep or fast stuff then it is much better value than having to get a new bike.

Price: £199.99

From: Extra UK

Cole Wheels Aries 920 wheelset

Cole Wheels are an American brand who have a wide range of Taiwanese made wheels, ranging from TT specials to carbon fibre rimmed XC race wheels. They’re being brought into the UK by Evans Cycles and this particular wheelset marries Cole’s high end Dynamic Spoke Alignment system hubs to a more affordable 21mm wide 6061-T6 aluminium rim rather than the carbon of their top end kit.

The Centre-Lock compatible hubs use inserts in the flange that do away with the J-bend of the spoke, which Cole say leads to higher spoke tensions and a stronger wheel. The front hub uses adaptors to change between 15mm and QR and the rear has a three-pawl freehub, which feels nice and clicky as well as being blue.

They seem very good value for money too and they come with everything you might need including QRs, 15mm adaptor and Centrelock to 6-bolt disk mounts.

Price: £299.99

From: Evans Cycles

Scott eRide Grip trail shoe

Scott do a massive range of running shoes – it’s a major part of their business nowadays – and this is their lightweight trail running shoe. Scott say “the midsole design of this minimalistic running shoes promotes a healthier body position and an extremely efficient running form” which will probably be useful as we run like cyclists…

Price: £99ish

From: All good running shops

Fibrax Pro-formance Sealed Derailleur Cable Kit

The best way to ensure trouble free shifting in the slop and rain of the British summer is to make sure you run some decent gear cables with a complete outer casing. Fibrax make all their cables in the UK (in the same quaint and picturesque North Wales town that web-boy Jon comes from as it happens) and their latest development is this kit containing all you need to keep your bike shifting smoothly. There are a pair of inner and outer cables along with clear liners, loads of ferrules, cable ends and some tidy red rubber frame protectors. You can follow Fibrax on Twitter if you’d like to keep up with all things brake and gear related…

Price: £29.99

From: Fibrax

Diverse Dueler Coil  Shock

Diverse is a relatively new brand to these shores but the Dueler PRC offers high and low speed compression adjustment along with rebound and adjustable bottom out pressure. It comes fitted with a Ti spring as standard and they come in a range of strokes and lengths, from 215 x 64mm up to 267 x 90mm. The longer stroke models also come with Progressive Ramp Control adjustment too. Could it be a rival to the big names? We’ll see…

Price: £274.99 for 215 x 64mm

From: Loco Tuning

Jon’s prototype bike design

Sometimes you need to do a bit of blue sky thinking and posit the question: What do we really want to see in the bikes of the future?

Price: Worthless

From: An idiot

That’s not it for this week though, oh no – we’ve got a special Rubbery Edition of Fresh Goods coming up shortly…

 


Comments (18)

    In all seriousness where do you get those trainers from, tried to get some of the older ones but they were special order only…..

    First thing I thought when I looked at that cole hub up there was mud…

    Jon’s prototype? Ace er.. I think

    Is the price of that Dueler real? With a ti coil? WTF?

    There’s a lot of Marin Wolf Ridge going on with that Transistion. As for the Cole wheels, bits of them are blue which means that they’re ace.

    Could someone please douse those Scott shoes and throw a lit match at them? Thanks.

    Shock is amazingly cheap if it does include ti spring. Quiver from archery via snowboarding to mean a collection but you knew that. Not sure how much of covert is new though?

    That Transition is nothing like Irn Bru orange. A faded Barr’s lorry is not a great likeness of the swatch.

    wl – yes, the price is correct. Everybody looks twice at it!

    For a more in-depth review, SDH had one back in march 2010..

    http://www.southerndownhill.com/reviews/components/diverse-dueler-shock-review.html

    ‘In all seriousness where do you get those trainers from?’

    Id say you can get them from the eighties….

    Just packaged up my XLC remote post to return it after the first month. It crept back up when lowered and dropped without warning if I shifted my weight to the nose of the saddle.

    The SDH review is out of date, the I have sorted the rebound rod issue, new decals are also on the way new logo and finish so any customers will get those when they come in.
    It is the price inc. the Ti spring 🙂 Which also comes with a smooth finish this year so does pick up so much dirt

    Isn’t that prototype just a poorly sketched Mongoose?

    Is that chain suck scarring just above the gear cable on the chain stay of that Transition – if it is then that gear cable routing is in a poor possition

    That Covert looks gorgeous, although it’s an odd-looking single pivot – on account of:
    (a) A linkage driven shock on a single pivot bike would surely make it impossible to activate any movement in the suspension (without deforming the tubes), due to the triangulation of the pivot point and the 2 ends of the linkage?
    And;
    (b) the extra pivot on the seat-stay, presumably to get round point (a), above?

    Still, quite fancy a go just to check. A 12-month evaluation should do it…

    “This one is designed to fit a full 1.5″ headtube but you can get variants that will fit tapered headsets and there’s even a 1.125″ version in the pipeline.”

    Why are we supposed to get excited about CC finally doing something Works Components already have on sale, for less than half the price? Any chance you could get behind the better British option instead of hte more expensive, more fashionable, less good American one?

    Oi- why is having a white bike boring???

    I love my Santa Cruz- in white…..

    Pz_Steve – it’s surely a single-pivot because the wheel axel movement is around a single pivot. Everything after the axel, is just about adjusting the stroke of the shock throughout the travel (hence the linkage-driven part).

    Why are we supposed to get excited about CC finally doing something Works Components already have on sale, for less than half the price? Any chance you could get behind the better British option instead of hte more expensive, more fashionable, less good American one?

    If they wanted to get in touch with us, we’d be happy to show off their stuff.

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