Fresh Goods Friday 406

Fresh GoodsNews

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da-dum, da-dum, Da Dum, DA DUM, DA DUM! DAAA DUMMM!
That’s the sound of the weekend approaching. Hurtling down the trail like a stampede of surprisingly small deer. And boy is it welcome! Ignoring that everyone’s hot and bothered, or that things are on fire, or that all the roads are full of holidaying families and caravans making their way to sell-out our favourite campsites, it’s the weekend! And the magazine – issue 120 has gone to the printers! Now we get to ride bikes for fun, drink beer in beer gardens for fun and stay in bed for (OK, let’s leave that there).

But nothing stops the Fresh Goods Friday train! (OK, Eurobike did, but only because there were too many fun things to see there…) And we have a typically bumper crop of fine goods, fresh gear and the usual standard of dodgy modelling from our press-ganged FGF ‘volunteers’.

Whether you’re counting the minutes down until your holibobs, looking forward to a weekend shift of worthy work, sharpening your semi-slicks or just about to dive into a vat of iced cider, we have approximately 14 minutes of distraction lined up for you, so put the phone in a drawer, pull up a cuppa and let’s get on with Fresh Goods Friday!

Alpkit Presta Day Pack

  • Price: £50.00
  • From: Alpkit
That’s a sizeable bag. Room for all of the food!

Alpkit has recently (re)launched a big range of bags, from ‘fast and light’ to ‘I need to carry a full cheese board on every adventure’. This is the Presta 20L size, which should be good for those winter adventures where you need loads of layers, spare gloves and, of course, a cheese board.

Alpkit Woodsmoke [Women’s] Mountain Shirt

  • Price: £59.00
  • From: Alpkit
Can you feel the smoky breeze? CAN YOU?

This is Alpkit’s rufty-tufty adventure shirt, made from ThermoTech polyester with hollow core fibres which according to Alpkit “trap more air to give you more insulation, it has a higher warmth-to-weight ratio than normal Polyester, making it an ideal mid layer.” It obviously comes in a classic lumberjack check, for more ruggedness and it looks fab.

ION Universal Utility Bag

It’s not how it looks, honest!

While it looks a little like Amanda has stolen all of Hannah’s clothes and put them in a bag, it was apparently nothing like that and she can explain it, honest…

ION’s big bag for stuff…

Looking a little like an IKEA bag with a zip (for twenty quid…) this ION gear bag will take all of your manky kit and keep it safe (and from touching all of your nice civilian clothing) until you can get it to a washing machine. There are two zipped pockets to keep your remaining dry socks in too.

ION Universal Shoe Bag

Remove feet before placing shoes in the bag.

A handy old shoe bag from ION. Enough room for a pair of shoes and probably even a pair of pedals if you pack it right. Saves manky shoe juice getting everywhere and also stops you arriving at the ride with just one shoe.

Race Face Turbine R Dropper Lever

Race Face
For happy thumbs?

Operating in the puzzling world of dropper posts that don’t come with levers in the box, this Race Face dropper lever is beautifully designed for under-bar use and meant for RF’s newly redesigned (and very Fox Transfer-like) Turbine dropper.

e*thirteen 12 speed kit

This is what you get in the box…
Two piece cassette. The big bit cinches on to the xD driver body and the smaller sprockets lock in place to it with chain-whips

This is a pretty innovative kit in a box from e*thirteen. It consists of one of its two-piece, wide range cassettes – in 12 speed, along with all the tools and components you need in order to turn your existing SRAM 11 speed shifter and derailleur into a 12 speed system. While it’s a bit pricy for one extra sprocket, compared to the price of the regular e*thirteen cassette, it makes a tempting thought if you were going to get one of its cassettes anyway. We have this on test right now and will let you know how we get on with it. What do you reckon? Worth it to get a 9-46T 12 speed cassette?

Sweet Protection Clothing.

Chipps has got far too carried away with this summer heat business and he’s started to attract attention from the locals…

FGF sweet protection
Far too animated. Chipps had to go and have a lie down after this…

Sweet Protection Hunter Light SS Jersey

Vacant stare, model’s own…

Badlands Merino Jersey

Verr nice merino jersey that’ll double as a casual wear top too

Sweet Protection Bearsuit Elbow Guards

Slender slip-on Sweets

Sweet Protection Bearsuit Knee Guards

Sweet Protection makes chunkier pads, but these are the ‘wear all day, every day’ models.

The Bearsuit knee and elbow guards are both lightweight, slip-on jobs designed to be easy enough to wear all day so you’ve got no excuse for not protecting your pointy bits.

Sweet Protection Hunter Light Gloves

Other colours are available. Sweet Protection does a good line in nice colours too.

Sweet Protection Dissenter Helmet

He didn’t really have that much of an issue doing his helmet straps up, did he?

The Dissenter helmet is a full coverage trail helmet that’s a lot more affordable than Sweet’s other lids, but still has lots of coverage, big vents and a decent adjustment system. Also comes in a MIPS version too.

fgf sweet protection
The old boy was wondering when the rest of the fashion show would be…

Fox 34 Step Cast

fgf fox 34
34 Step Cast. Very Orange.

This is a 120mm Fox 34 StepCast, destined for Wil’s long term adventure machine (there’s a lot of adventure going on right now…) and it weighs next to nothing – or at least very close to the weight of the previous Fox 32 model, which is no mean feat. And it’s orange. So very orange.

SRAM X0 in a box

  • Price: £1225
  • From: SRAM
You get all of this. And a box!
Comes in a nice box. Which you’d expect for that amount of money, eh?

It’s… a groupset in a box. A SRAM X0 Eagle groupset in a box, to be more precise. With (nearly) everything to get you rolling, it includes carbon X0 DUB chainset and X-Sync II chainring, 12 speed Eagle chain, rear derailleur (is there any other kind these days?) and 12 speed Eagle Shifter and Eagle 12 speed cassette. As we said, nearly everything to get you rolling. You can supply your own stopping…

Dub Dub Dub, in press-fit or threaded. All SRAM chainsets will now come designed for these new DUB BB sizes.

Doesn’t include a bottom bracket, because there are enough different ones that SRAM doesn’t know what you’ll need (press-fit, or threaded), so doesn’t put one in the box.

Renthal Apex Stem

Apex predator – the new Fatbar Lite comes in a 35mm too.

Renthal Fatbar Lite

Fatbar Lite Carbon 35mm

The Fatbar range includes this ‘Lite’ bar which, despite coming in the new 35mm aesthetic standard, is engineered to have as much compliance as Renthal’s regular 31.8mm range. Now wider, it comes in a 760mm width.

Renthal Ultra Tacky Lock-on Grips

100% liquorice.

Renthal’s stickiest grips are made from melting down those little sticky octopi that you throw at windows to watch them crawl down. Well, maybe not, but they’re made of a similarly super-tacky formula that works well in the wet or dry. Even if you get them muddy, you can wash them off and they’re sticky again. It’s witchcraft, but it’s great.

Dirty Jerseys Posters

Helmets of famous noggins. Or are the helmets more famous than the noggins?
Back in the day classic jerseys from the UK scene. Can you recognise them all?

The brainchild of award-winning photographer, Geoff Waugh, is this series of mountain bike themed posters. What might at first glance look like some computer renditions of famous downhill helmets and retro jerseys is actually the result of months of painstaking work as Geoff has sought out rare cycling jerseys and sponsored helmets from the great and good of our sport and shot them in a studio environment and had the results printed on heavy art paper, sending them out in heavy tubes, ready for framing. The website’s worth a look as there are a load more there too.

Sockets

  • Price:Probably a lot
fresh goods friday 406
Sockets! It’s kind of a big deal. We’ve been short of them for a while
fresh goods friday 406
Outdoor sockets! Also a big deal. Means Mark can recharge his car and we can run the jetwash (when we’re allowed).

We’ve just had some rewiring done at Singletrack Towers, adding indoor sockets to power more bits and pieces as well as some outdoor sockets, mostly for Mark’s electric car, but also for the jetwash for when there isn’t a hosepipe ban (coming in on Wednesday apparently…)

Handpresso Coffee Maker

Not a blood pressure monitor.

And finally, talking about electrics and cars, here’s something for those of you who absolutely must be able to make espresso wherever you are. This kit will work off your car cigarette lighter (or are they now just called ’12V sockets’?) and will heat and pressurise heat to make a perfect espresso with pods or ground coffee. Or you could go to a coffee shop.

And with that, it’s time to start the inevitable slide in quality of service that you’ll get from us until we see you bright and early next week… We hope you have a fine weekend of bike rides and good times – and that lighting doesn’t even strike the once near you.

We’ll leave you with a bit of GoGo Penguin to keep those musical brows high…
Oh, and don’t forget there’s a Blood Moon tonight in the UK, about 9pm. Hopefully you’ll have clear skies for it.

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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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