To Be Honest, We Didn’t Expect This Top Enduro Manufacturer To Make Such Nice Clothing

Nukeproof launched a new range of Horizon Wheels last month and used last week’s Bike Connection Winter event in Italy to showcase its new clothing range that’s due out this spring. I must admit that I was braced for yet-another neon pyjama party display of bright colours and geometric shapes. What we got to see though, was a selection of neutral colours, greys and earth tones that won’t offend anyone. Even the women’s range, usually a place of purple flowers and peach stripes was subtle and rugged-looking.

Over at the men’s rail, there are some great looking shorts. Again, with a price of £60, they feature some subtle styling and a whole load of features. Having ridden the shorts for a couple of rides, I’ve been impressed so far.

There are some more technical and fuller featured downhill/enduro racing shorts and we love one of the little features. There’s a clip-on goggle pouch for putting your goggles in between runs or on transition stages. The designers found that the goggles swung around too much for comfort and so there’s a little pop-stud on the short leg for popping the bottom of the pouch to so it doesn’t swing. Clever!

 

There is a fancier jersey line to match the more expensive £90 Nirvana shorts, and the £70 jersey has some neat features, like the use of more rugged sleeve material (with laser-cut holes for ventilation) to allow you to shrug off those trail kisses with bushes, walls and trees that didn’t get out of the way. The jersey body, meanwhile is left cool and ventilated. Expect to see more of this kind of stuff.

And when’s it all coming out? By the end of April, reckons Nukeproof, which will coincide with the first hot week of the summer, right?

 

After launching a whole bike brand, components such as pedals and handlebars, it wasn’t surprising to see Nukeproof launch its own branded wheelsets. After all, anyone who was around in ‘those’ heady days of the early 1990s will tell you of the legendary carbon and alloy hubs that paved the way for Nukeproof to become a mountain bike household name (even if few of us ever actually could afford those rarified hubs…)

Luckily, these days, the entry price of owning a pair of Nukeproof wheels is a lot lower than those days, with complete wheels coming in at around £340 a pair – probably what a pair of bare hubs might have cost you in 1993. There are many variations of wheels available, coming in black or copper hubs, in both of those newfangled wheelsizes and in both straight pull and ‘normal’ J-bend spokes. Here’s a link to the page (where I see they’re already on sale…)

 

In addition to having cool colours and coming in all of the Boost and pre-Boost sizes (100/110, 142, 148 and 150 to be precise), the wheels use locking nipples and are stressed and trued three times at the factory, so shouldn’t get you any odd noises out of the box. Talking of the box, Nukeproof supplies eight spare spokes and nipples with a set of wheels (what kind of careless riders do they think we are?) and a pair of tubeless valves. The rims come pre-fitted with tubeless tape (or rather, those natty smoked clear shrink-to-fit rim strips that won’t come undone after a while). Rims are Nukeproof Horizon alloy jobs with 29mm internal width, which seems a good middle ground these days. And they’re out now…

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