Well, that was nice. All around us British summertime is getting put back in the box and we’re doing our best to enjoy the residual sunburnt while temperatures return to more normal springtime conditions. There may be time for one last dusty and warm blast this weekend, but seeing as you’re stuck in the office you’ll have to make do with some aspirational Fresh Goods for now…
Ghost AMR Plus Lector 7700
We liked the 120mm travel Ghost AMR Lector lots when we tested it back in Issue 59 and Jon got on well with one as a Long Termer too. As you may guess from the name, the Plus offers more, with 150mm of rear squidge matched to a tapered Fox 32 FIT TALAS up front with 120 or 150mm of bounce. The front triangle is made from carbon fibre with a full 1.5 headtube while the rear end of alloy with a Syntace X-12 142mm through axle holding everything in.
Price: £3,349.99
From: Hotlines
The Fox Float RP23 shock pivots on a needle roller bearing to keep friction down. The shock link is a two piece aluminium item and it uses a 2:1 ratio, which Ghost reckon helps with shock and bearing longevity.
In typical Ghost style, there’s a complete – even down to the hubs – Shimano XT 10spd groupset. Decently wide 710mm bars are from Syncros, as is the stem.
Mmm. Carbony carbon. We think the graphics might be a little bit love or hate though…
The bike comes with a 100mm travel X-Fusion Hilo dropper as standard. It’s got a saddle mounted lever, although there are proper cable guides on the frame for a remote.
Topeak One Up Bike Holder
This is a rather neat solution if you’re a bit short on space for bike and kit. The wall mounted hanger is made from aluminium and has a sturdy rubber coating bar from which to hang your bike wheel. On the other side there are a pair of hooks to hang your smelly riding kit, instead of leaving it on the floor to collect dead mice and fluff.
Price: £34.99
From: Extra UK
Topeak Joe Blow X.O.
This is the extremely shiny and range topping track pump from Topeak. It’s made from CNC machined aluminium which is then buffed up to a blinding finish. They reckon it’s good for 200psi thanks to the braided hose and smooth action, which should get your dual ply super tacky tyres rolling really fast. There’s an analogue pressure gauge with a nice, bright, yellow readout and the screw on valve will do Presta or Schraeder valves with a minimum of faff.
Price: £109.99
From: Extra UK
Shiny, shiny pumps of metal.
Marzocchi 44 Micro Switch Travel Adjust fork
More front pumpers for Issue 73‘s trail fork grouptest. These air sprung forks have 150-120mm of travel adjustable via the nicely clicky and machined top cap adjuster. There’s a coil negative spring to keep them as supple as you’d hope from a Bomber and you also get adjustable compression, lockout threshold and rebound damping. The sparkly white lowers come with a 15mm quick release through axle and although we’ve gone for a 1.125″ plain steerer, a tapered model is also available for a few dollars more.
Price: £679.95
From: Windwave
The travel adjuster helpfully points out which was you should be going when you use it while the compression damping adjuster (below) ranges from fully open to fully locked and has the gold coloured lockout blow-off threshold in the middle.
Deity Components Dirty30 and Blacklabel Bars
The Blacklabel (right, £59.99) bars come in at a staggering 787mm width – that’s 31″ in old money. They are too wide to fit through the office door, which is kind of impressive. Magic numbers are 9° back and 5° upsweep with a 15m rise, and they’re remarkably light for such a long bit of tubing at 295g.
The Dirty30 bars (left, £59.99) are slightly narrower at a still substantial 760mm. Now the pendulum of fashion had swung back to higher rise bars for DH (and after all those bike engineers made their front ends so low, poor darlings) these are on trend at a 25mm rise. They’ve introduced a lighter anodised finish for the black and red models, while the white bars just get a band of paintwork with high polish grip areas.
From: Hotlines
Pro Link Chain Lubes
The Progold Extreme chain lube is one of those newfangled lubricants that bond to the metal, meaning less filth sticks to it and it doesn’t clag up. There are no solids like Teflon, graphite, wax or similar either. We think the chain pictured (remember how chunky 7spd chains were eh?) is beyond saving though.
Price: £9.99 for 4oz Progold Xtreme, £6.50 for 4oz Prolink
From: Extra UK
Deity Components Lean Flange Grips
We like a nice thin grip here at Singletrack, but we also like the security of Lock-On style clamps. Reconciling our two desires has sometimes been troublesome, but Deity’s new grips have a nice thin profile with slightly knurled patternfor loads of feel. They’ve also got a dinky flange that’ll happily clear shifters. The clamps themselves come in purple, black, green or red.
Price: £15.99
From: Hotlines
The Pocket Mountain Bike Trail Guide
Remember those guides to birdwatching or survival that you could bung in your rucksack as a child and then head to the great outdoors to either observe or attempt to murder wildlife, depending on your particular bent? Well, this is kind of the same but for bike riding. Clive Forth of MTBSkills offers a handy sized book full of tips and tricks, from how to fix your bikes to how to pull some sweet tricks…
Price: £9.99 (released April 12th)
From: Bloomsbury
Performance Cycling Book
If you take your training really seriously then this is the book for you. Did you know that ‘pushing’ for that finish line is a waste of time? Well it is, they’ve done the sums and it’s much more draggy than just sitting and pedalling, so there. There’s a plethora of information on mental training (and we don’t mean using beef ribs as a punchbag or carrying a clown up Snowdon) as well as nutrition advice, methodologies and more. It’s mostly aimed at the serious road cyclist, but there’s plenty to pick up if you want to get fitter this summer.
Price: £19.99 (available April 12th)
From: Bloomsbury
QimmiQ Energy Gel
It’s energy gel made from real fruit! It’s also got red beetroot, superfood du jour, in there along with raspberry, apple honey and pink salt from the Himalayas. The sachet is a rather cunning hard-backed item that folds in the middle to facilitate one handed opening and slurping…
Price: £23.99 for thirty 12g sachets
From: QimmiQ
Topeak Drybag for iPhone
If you simply can’t be without your iPhone on a bike ride and want to keep it dry but also handy, this could be the solution. The double ziplocked roll top case has a special ‘Quick Click’ mount to attach it to a stem or bar and you can use the touch screen through the cover.
Price: £19.99
From: Extra UK
Comments (9)
Comments Closed
That Ghost looks very nice 🙂
Suffering from pump lust here, I’m so very sad!
Like the Ghost graphics though.
Isn’t one of the stickers on the marzocchi (close to the travel adjustment lever) peeling off?
Not that you can judge performance of a fork out of stickers falling off anyways.
Shame the Ghost has XT hubs.
I’m guess it’s a large? Have you weighed it?
Ash: The Ghost is a 48cm, or a smidge under 19″ in imperial. They do a 44cm, a 52cm and 56cm frame as well, so I guess you could call it the medium.
I’ve found XT hubs to be really rather long lasting. I think I have a pair that haven’t been serviced for a year or so that are play-free – shame they don’t do them in a 20mm front though.
I’m assuming that energy gel is pronounced kimick, and not with a ‘QU’ sound. Here up North that would mean something very different !!!
I was just sniggering to myself about the gel name too…!
Pretty as the pump is, a gauge that goes up to 200psi in equal increments is **** useless for the usual 0-30psi zone.
Regarding the Topeak iPhone erm , ‘Drybag’.
I suggest –
http://groceries.asda.com/asda-estore/search/searchcontainer.jsp?trailSize=1&searchString=food+bags&domainName=Products&headerVersion=v1&_requestid=63106
Just put your phone in one of any of these stop faffing and get out on your bike and ride!
What is the handlebar the flange griPs are pictured on?
They’d go lovely on an Orange5…