Eurobike 2012: Salsa and Surly

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While the industry cousins of Surly and Salsa don’t like to be talked about in the same sentence, it makes sense to group them together here as both brands are imported by those fine fellows at Ison Distribution. Let’s start with Surly then:

The venerable Karate Monkey must be ten years old now and one of the earliest production 29ers. In honour of that, it gets a nice paint job in spangly blue.

Still burly, now blue

 

Complicated enough? There's a Rohloff, Avid cable disc and some BOB trailer nuts in that lot.

 

29in rubber is getting big!

 

He's pointing at that bike. The new Surly Krampus, featuring 29 x 3in tyres for a whole lot of 29in freeride rigid fun. Or something like that.

 

Surly is good at making tyres to suit its bikes. Or more the other way round.

 

 

OK, so it's a leeeetle tight in there...

 

'Bass boat green' apparently

 

It's a Surly. Of course you can run it as a singlespeed.

 

The rules say that you must press the squidgy bits. No one can resist!

 

Big and bigger. Here's the 4.8in Bud tyre.

 

The production 48NRTH winter boot. With real Monster Fur lining

 

 

Here's the Salsa Mukluk in a very slimming orange colour.

 

 

Here's a Salsa Horsethief 2. Check the new Singletrack for our own take on the Horsethief.

It seems that there’s been a splintering of fat bike niches. They’re not just being used for epic 300 mile winter races, there are now two hour and six hour snow (and sand) races going on, so Salsa has developed a super-light, no frills fat racer. The Beargrease has no extra rack bosses, has a custom E13 crank, a tapered alloy fork (720g) and a 3.6lb frame for an all-up weight of 28lbs. It’ll come complete, or as a frameset.

Fast fat racing. It's new.

 

It's even anodised rather than painted for lighter weight

 

Custom, light, but fat fork

 

 

 

Here's the business end of the 45NRTH Husker Du tyre.

 

Must... squidge...

 

Custom super-wide cranks from E13.

 

 

 

45NRTH is also coming out with a range of spiked tyres, with everything from commuters to fat ice boots.

 

They're being touted for snow racers, but we can see these 45NRTH slimline pedals gaining popularity with flat pedal XC riders.

 

The regular thick snow pedal and the thin Helva pedal.

 

 

Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 23 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

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