Spotted at Bike Festival Garda – Part Three

Here’s Dave’s last update from the 2015 Bike Festival Garda…

In the last report let’s start with Italian company Axevo who had this pretty sweet Pinion geared and belt driven XC 29er drawing a lot of attention from the mainly marathon focussed crowds.

Inside the booth was the impressive looking Response Free Ranger 11 – 42 cassette which offers a nice wide gear range for those riders who want the luxury of the new 11 speed offerings, while sticking with their 10 speed set ups.

The cassette is constructed with 3 alloy sprockets 42-36-32, and a cromoly 28-24-21-18-15-13 with a steel 11t .

The cassette weighs in at a claimed 258g and with fairly open machining on the bigger sprockets should offer pretty good mud clearance.

Need moar gears? Help is on hand with this 45t expander cog which should allow you to winch up anything vaguely vertical.

Ritchey has a triple butted Ritchey Logic II tubed fat bike on offer in the form of the Commando. 135mm front and 170mm rear spacing, rack mounts and room for 4″ tyres gives all the right options for the modern adventure biker. Retail is $999.95, UK pricing to be confirmed.

SRAM believe strongly in the ‘Power of Bicycles’ and had this Buffalo bike on display to publicise World Bicycle Relief.

It can be easy to forget amongst all the hype of this year’s latest product that the bike can have such a profound effect on someone’s life, so it was good to see such a basic life changing tool take centre of the stage on their display.

We thought this might be the last surviving GT STS, but of course there’s a Facebook Owners Club. Who didn’t lust after one of these carbon and aluminium beauties when they first came out back when 80mm of travel was downhill spec.

ESIgrips  display reflected the popularity of the Bike Festival with the various Euro nations. No Red, White and Blue due to the dearth of UK visitors.

Weighing in around the 1500g mark are DT Swiss’ new OPM forks. OPM stands for One Piece Magnesium as sees a move away from their ttrademark carbon lowers.

The forks are available in 27.5 and 29er flavours and two models O.L and ODL. OL stands for Open Lock, whilst ODL gets a Drive on the fly damping.

The forks get new wiper seals thanks to SKF.  Travel comes in 100 -130mm options for 29er and 100 – 150mm for 27.5.

Tucked away on the E*Thirteen booth on a very natty stealth Nomad we spotted the new prototype  TRSr carbon cranks, which looked to be aimed at the enduro and all mountain markets.

Although we could get no confirmed weight, we’re told they should give Race Face SixC’s a run for their money and we’re guessing pricing will be in that ballpark too.

The cranks will be direct mount ring only. No further details were available  but we’re guessing on a Eurobike official launch

And lastly there’s always something suitably weird and whacky if you search hard enough and this year’s show didn’t disappoint. Want to hike up mountains but hate the long descent down the fireroad? You’ll be needing the Mountain Skyver then. It’s like a bike but with all the good bits removed to make it just big enough to be uncomfortable in your rucksack…

That’s it, we ‘re done.

See all our coverage here: http://singletrackworld.com/tag/bike-festival-garda/

Dave Anderson

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