We’re all going on our summer holidays… no more worries for seven weeks or so. Hannah is basically unbearable as she’s off to the USA with her kids for a mega trip as part of her sabbatical. Veering between extreme stress (flight shenanigans) and overexcitement (Utah, Colorado, Idaho…), everyone at Singletrack Towers will be glad to see the back of her for a bit. Pray all the flights go as planned or she’ll be back here next week being all different kinds of unbearable.
Already on his holidays is long term forumite, TJ. If you need a dose of mellow happy vibes, head over to his Recovery Ride thread, where he’s posting nice pictures as he meanders around the country on his custom Shand, meeting up with other forumites and doing his best to avoid headwinds.
We hope you, your pets, your plants and so on all made it through the extreme heat this week, and if you have got school holiday getaways, may they go smoothly.
Garmin Forerunner 945
- Price: £499.99
- From: Garmin
Techno watch from Garmin. Billed as a running watch but has loads of specific sport options in there. What’s this one about then? 10 hours battery while GPSing and music-ing. Performance metrics. Contactless payment. Full-colour mapping. Safety tracking features.
Oakley Holbrook XL Sunglasses
- Price: £131
- From: Various bike shops
Charlie says… Whilst half the MTB world is reliving their gnarly neon 80’s youth with their whopper sized wraparound sunnies. I however had gone back even further for a more classic Blue Brothers look. The Holbrook XL, is just like their standard Holbrook but a few mm bigger in most directions, for people who have big and abundant faces. Optics are the usual Oakley awesome, and their Prizm lenses “enhance colour, contrast and detail for an optimized experience”. And who would tolerate a sub-optimised experience?
It’s great that people with larger faces now have options. People with lesser faces have always been spoilt… they even had their own music.
Vivobarefoot Primus Trail II FG Women’s
- Price: £130
- From: Vivobarefoot
These are lightweight and flexible shoes designed to allow your foot to move naturally, as if you were in bare feet. Made from post consumer recycled materials and vegan friendly, at the end of their life they can also be recycled or sent off for repairs and refreshing under the Revivo set up. You get a 100 day trial too – if you just can’t get on with them in that time, you send them back and get a refund. Tread on the bottom of this model provides grip off road, so Hannah is hoping these will work well as hiking shoes in her upcoming mountain adventures.
Fox DHX Factory 2Pos-Adjust Shock
- Price: £629.00
- From: Silverfish UK
Another coil shock in for our imminent group test of not-massively-expensive coil shocks. New chassis and damper. High-flow main piston. Tool-free adjusters. Climb switch. Hydraulic top out control. Reduced damper noise. Spring preload collar with clicky detents (niiice).
Singletrack Distressed Road Trip Van T-Shirt
- Price: £25.99
- From: The Singletrack Emporium of Gnar.
Charlie says… we have taken our turbo popular Road Trip Van artwork and popped it on a somewhat distressed organic shirt for the crusties of the Singletrack world. Here is Hannah, quite clean actually, in a size medium.
You know what? This shirt illustrates a very noble life goal: dog, board, bike, van, lots of hair and adventures ahoy. If I had to draw my retirement plan… this is it.
The distressed effect organic cotton creates the illusion that you have already had an awesome adventure. It’s a bit like a grunge era bleached effect. Hannah is wearing a medium sized T-Shirt, and is not distressed.
Who knew that before Nirvana, before Mudhoney, before even Iggy and The Stooges, it was the legendary Kenneth Williams who invented Grunge?
Works Components -1.0° Headset
- Price: £69.99
- From: Works Components
Technically not from Works Components at all; this headset came via Cotic and I [Benji] have stuck some SLT bearings in it that I got send over from CeramicSpeed.
The headset (including normal bearings, not pictured) came with Cotic RocketMAX frameset for mullet-isation reasons. If running a 27.5in rear wheel in a RocketMAX, Cotic recommend steepening the head angle back-up a degree. I’m using the headset to slacken the head angle when running the bike as full 29er. I just like 63° head angles. Soz!
What are SLT bearings? Solid bearings. There are still trad metal ball bearings hidden inside the white stuff. It’s the white stuff that is the thing here. The solid white stuff acts as both the seal and the lubrication.
They have a relatively limited range of suitable use on bicycles (they’re too draggy for hubs and bottom brackets for example) but we have seen them being used on Canyon Lux frame pivots. And, we think a lot of people will be interested in using them in headsets. Like here.
DJI Action 2
- Price: From £349 for DJI Action 2 Power Combo
- From: DJI
We’ve used DJI’s dinky clip-on cameras before (mainly the Osmo) and we like ’em. So we’ve got a fair old bundle of stuff based around the new DJI Action 2 action cam.
Headline spec: magnetic attachment(s), 4K/120FPS, 155°file dof view (12.5mm equiv in 35mm terms), 10m waterproof, horizon-leveliing, ‘A.I.’ editor, aluminium body, a LOT of accessories available.
Hammerhead Karoo 2 bike computer/GPS/so much more
- Price: £359
- From: Hammerhead and retailers
We’ve got a new Hammerhead Karoo 2 in for evaluation. Hammerhead (recently acquired by SRAM, don’t you know) certainly adhered to the Apple camp of beautiful cardboard packaging, but what is it? The Karoo 2 (or Karoo II if you’re being Roman) is the second (with display) bike computer from Hammerhead and it offers the usual GPS benefits of speed, height/elevation and knowing where you are. It’s also very clever in that it has the knowledge of millions of Suunto and Strava heatmaps to work out where you’re probably going to go and it can predict how long you’ve got until the top of the next hill. It also has access to live Strava segments and a load of stuff that’s probably in the manual…
We can see faces in that mount…
Most mountain bikers we know don’t actually want to know where the next summit is, so we’ll see how well this works out in the real world. Regardless, it’s a neat unit with a clear display and a reasonably easy to follow learning curve. It also gets the kind of ‘over the air’ WiFi updates that only Tesla drivers get to enjoy, so each time you turn it on, it’s a little bit cleverer… Review/first impressions here from Chipps soon!
Bum Butter Bottle Opener & Sticker
- Price: Priceless. Literally.
- From: Technically not available in the STW Shop but it you ask nicely when you order something…
Is there anyone out there who isn’t already aware of Bum Butter chamois cream? Anyways. We’ve just taken delivery of some new Vision Street Wear-inspired BB stickers and keyring bottle openers. Get in line!
Islabikes Creig 26
- Price: £1,099
- From: Islabikes
Kids mountain bike test ahoy! And any test of proper kids’ mountain bikes simply has to include Islabikes. This is the 26in wheel Creig MTB. Designed for kids aged 9+ or, more usefully, advised minimum height of 138cm.
Newsletter competition goodies from Lezyne
- Price: Tubeless CO2 Blaster £55, Micro Floor Drive HV £52, Super SV23 £62, Multi Chain Pliers £42
- From: Upgrade Bikes
For the past couple of weeks we’ve been running competitions for those folk on our weekly newsletter. Next week’s prizes have been provided by the kind collective at Lezyne.
Basically, if you sign up to our newsletter and correctly answer the question that will be in the next newsletter, your name will go into the draw to win all the stuff above.
Thread Of The Week
Congratulations this week goes to… highlandman, for this murmuration-a-go-go posting…
For a limited/unlimited time we’ve decided to award An Actual Prize to the TOTW. And it seems pretty obvious that it’s the Forum Bottle Opener that is to be awarded.
Yo, highlandman please email editorial@singletrackworld.com to claim your opener.
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