I love my Pike 426 coils. Simple fit and forget forks. 55s use a coil alongside an air preload and its just a rubbish system. I hated my 55s and went to Pikes.

They may have sorted a few things out for 2009 over the 2008s but that air preload thing was awful. Weakest spring you could imagine topped up with a single air chamber, meaning that if you're heavier than average you have to put so much air in that you're basically riding a very sticky air fork with incredibly crap and very linear travel, once it starts moving. In 2008 they didn't make any aftermarket heavier springs either so you were stuck with tons of air preload or constant bottoming out. Useless on the little bumps, useless on the bigger stuff. I tried really hard to make them work for me but switched to Rockshox and haven't looked back. If its air preload and a crappy spring, avoid them.

its also here (same vid) if you want a biggerer faster server

Pinkbike takes your huge vid and re compresses it to a smaller Flash file. Making it easier and quicker to view. They do have a faster server, but its the recompression that they do that makes it so quick to watch. I'd always rather stick a vid on vimeo or pinkbike or similar. Its easy for people to find, watch and embed and you only have to upload a high quality big file to them once. After that its their bandwidth not yours. Mind you people still whinge about it.

Nice looking descent though. Don't have enough rocky trails down here.

And then buy an Alpine and conduct a lengthy and detailed review of each so we can solve this important debate once and for all.

Hey you bought it. Cool.

You won't regret it I'm sure.

Well I can't speak for the Sov, but what with it being a similar design I can say I've always found the Alpine v comfortable. Only time I find it a bit jarring is when I switch back to it from my bouncy bike and realise how lazy I've got at absorbing things with my legs.

Perhaps there's no Alpine's around second hand because they're just so good that no one wants to get rid of theirs 🙂

I'll stop with the Alpine enthusiasm now.

Have you considered a Dialled Alpine? Very similar and a very lovely bike indeed. I use mine for everything from long XC days to chucking about on some jumps. Way cheaper than a Sov too.

http://www.dialledbikes.com/products/mtb/alpine.php

Ti29er – I bought an HD Helmet Hero and then an additional bar/seatpost mount (big enough to go round my seat tube and down tube on a steel frame), as well as a chest mount harness thingy. For any frame with fatter tubes, you could get a roll cage mount or modify the bar mount a bit.

Popstar – Yes, 2 cams would be better than one. Certainly cut down on repeated riding of trails (although thats never too bad a thing with a good trail). I know there are tons of other trails, by many different names. I've been riding many of them for years. This just happened to be the ones that worked best (camera wise) the other day. Having said that, theres always fun new stuff to find up there at the moment. It's a busy place, but that does mean constantly evolving trails.

Buzzlightyear – I know. I have done in the past. I failed on that one this time. Hence only a brief bit of chest cam stuff.

Does anyone know who Barry was? It was called The Reservoir Trail when it was first built. Then seemed to evolve into Golden Birdies and then Barry Knows best. I'm not sure Barry knows much about where that trail came from.

Thanks for the all the responses. See you all out there sometime soon no doubt.

That trail was always called just 'The Reservoir Trail' until Barry showed up.

Excellent use of bifurcated. I had to look it up. We've always called that one 'Christmas Pudding'.

Its 'Swoon' from the new Chemical Brothers album.

retro83 – Its the GoPro HD Hero. With the Ride Hero bar mount stuff and the 'Chesty' harness bondage gear.

joolsburger – which one do you call 'ladies legs'?

njee20 – it's not sped up. The camera is very low on the bike. This does, I hope, make it feel quicker than attaching to a helmet. That's kind of the point.

yesiamtom- agree completely. Chest mount needs to feel like its almost pointing at your face when you're standing up. I got it wrong this time and have 10 minutes of my bars to watch.

Cheers all. I'm not making any great statements about riding or film making here. Just showing some alternatives to the headcam option on some nice flowy singletrack with some mates. The GoPro mounts are quick enough to switch about during a break in riding so you can come back with a better variety of stuff.

And it's always amusing to watch your riding buddies hitting a tree.

njee20 – the vid is not sped up.

joolsburger – The choppiness is possibly your computer, or possibly your connection speed. It looks smooth on Vimeo to me here.

It's obviously been compressed from the original though and Vimeo adds another layer of encoding when you upload so it's not as smooth as the original file. I've never been sure whether Vimeo changes it to 24fps by default, which can add a certain amount of crapness when the original is 29.97 as it was here.