Sponge

Hey, I'm pretty bored, home alone, best friend just flew off to Canada... soo I'm waiting for the evening the come idly. I wanted to make the trials world a bit more aware about these diamonds though in the mean time: These "wheel slammers" really caught my eye as a better alternative to the traditional chain tensioner. Simply measure the space between your axle and the front of your drop out and fill it with one of these bad boys that slot right into the drop out (see below) . The picture above (green dropouts) has the "wheel slammers" and also the "peg adaptor" which is a washer with a large centre hole that fits over the "wheel slammer" for anyone that wants to run pegs. Dialled. These come in the following sizes; 1.5 and 2.0mm (for those who wheels are close to being slammed in the dropout) 2.5 and 3.0mm 3.5 and 4.0mm 4.5 and 5.0mm 5.5 and 6.0mm 6.5 and 7.0mm 7.5 and 8.0mm (for those who like their back wheel close to the back of the dropout) So basically, it's a damn Simple idea (pun intended). I would much prefer these and trust these over snail cams and especially tugs for horizontal dropout'd bikes. They work wonders on my flatland bike and really have stopped all problems with wheel slipping and misalignment. What's so good about these over snail cams then?: -Well, they're lighter and more tucked away for starters (so you never bash them like you may on snail cams at times!) -So long as you pick the right size, your wheel will always be in perfect alignment in the dropouts and at a desirable tension -Pretty damn cheap. -So basically, even for the thickest idiot, these will hold your wheel perfectly fine. -No more faffing with trying to get either snail cam just about right. These just slot right in and the job's done. BUT.. and this is a big BUT... Simple BMX has only made them in 14mm so far... But, with any luck, a brand like Trialtech should pick up on this idea and introduce it to the trials market in 10mm. It's not patented I don't think, and also it'd cater other markets like the BMX racing and Flatland worlds as most of the frames use 10mm dropouts like trials, unlike in street BMX. These work a treat on my flatland bike, and it's really a miracle product even though it's so simple. I would love it if trials could get a hold of these in 10mm. Of course, to get the right size, you'd need to measure the gap between your axle and dropout innermost area... this is quite simple by experimenting with various allen key sizes and slotting them in and seeing how big the gap is. Mind you, each slammer 'size' comes with 2 different sizes on either side, you see have a bit of leway. For those worried about chain stretching... well... that's kinda inevitable for some chains... But in reality, most chains just stretch at the beginning of their lives. And there are also chains out there that are Stretch Proof by design... check out some of the higher end KMC stuff, which come at a good price too. (NB: the popular KMC Kool chain used in trials is NOTORIOUS for being a stretchy bitch, so...) Interesting stuff! and it can easily be bodged with a ball bearing in the dropouts... but hey, having a proper fresher product is nicer. Bring it on Trialtech! (because I know other brands are too ignorant )

I never have liked the Diamondback brand to begin with, even their 'high end' stuff seems like cheap churned out trash, to be fair. The brand just doesn't have a winning look to it. Once Ashton separates from Diamondback, which'll happen sooner or later some day, that'll be brilliant for ABikes

Hola! I live near Kingston, along with a few others. There's normally a group of three or more of us that regularly ride Kingston. Though right now I recently transitioned to learning Flatland and am temporarily without a trials bike, I'd still be happy to teach you trials stuff. There's plenty to ride in Kingston, and also the nearby towns, s'allls good! PM me your MSN and mobile number and we'll go riding sometime !

Open/caged bearing hubs aren't as good as sealed usually, that's kinda true. Having to tension the cones just right is a complete pain the arse, which isn't something you ever need to really worry about on sealed hubs. But.... the Open/caged bearing hubs aren't 'terrible', especially if looked after and serviced correctly. I would know, as I am using a Nankai Bamboo freecoaster rear hub, which on purpose was designed to use caged bearings as opposed to sealed bearings because up until a month ago or so, every other sealed bearing freecoaster like KHE models, Federal, Alienation, Odyssey, ... they all soiled themselves at the driver bearings horribly (sealed bearings snapping in half for example) and on the other bearings sometimes too. The idea is that caged bearings can take side-to-side impacts and loads a lot better than sealed cartridge units can. Also, caged/open bearings can easily be 'bodged' to make the wheel tight and run smoothish even when the bearings are a bit old.... which isn't always the case when a sealed cartridge bearing begins to loosen up. The trade-off however is that these unsealed bearing hubs will not be able to run as smooth or as long as sealed ones can. That's just a fact that we have to live with. You can get damn close to the smoothness and long-runningness of a sealed hub however, if you use high quality waterproof grease like Phil Wood (think: if there were a Chris King of greases, this is the ONE), you'll find that your hub runs smoother for longer and doesn't need maintenance nearly as often if you used greases from other brands. This is what we have all come to use for our Nankai hubs, and it's still working fine for flatlanders for decades and decades. Especially in trials, you don't need speed or maintaining very fast speeds, so the 'grittier' feeling of an unsealed hub isn't really a disadvantage. Though to be honest, I'd still go for a sealed hub just for simplicity's sake, and a 20 pound extra spending into a sealed over unsealed is likely to save you more money in the long run. For those who might be interested: This is a brilliant grease, the absolute best, and I highly recommend it to anyone for any general application purposes. It'd work wonders in your freewheel especially open or caged bearing ones like Tensile. Also it is great grease for applications such as greasing the fork steerer/stem and bar/stem, similarly it's the best grease you'll be able to inject into your open bearing pedals and into existing sealed cartridge bearings once their original grease starts running thin. Truly the 'Chris King' of greases, and good for all-round use. The tube is fairly large despite the picture making it out to be small. It costs around 6 pounds only... Those living in London have it easy... Brixton Cycles has quite a few of in stock. This is recognised as the pinnacle of grease in the Flatland world where servicing freecoasters is a very 'common and often' part of being a flatlander. Those of you that know much about freecoasters'll know how important it is to use good grease over cheaper counterparts. What else needs to be known? Oh yeah, it's dark green, and waterproof, and should not be consumed.

Did the low-slung chainstay frame that Slinger rode for a while get abandoned? Wasn't that supposed to be the new 'T-Master'?

Just import from the US.... heck, that's what I have to do for almost all of my Flatland parts. Despite the unfavourable exchange rate, if you email the shop owner, he may be able to come to a compromise and find the lowest shipping cost to send out to you whilst maintaining a speedy delivery service.. This is what the US Flatland store does for any international buyers. Some places still have the long 07 Pythons in the US even.

I have owned every incarnation of the Python up until the 2006 version, including the 2004 Prototype that Craig rode in most of his Zoo! Vids without a bashguard (the very first mod frame designed this way!) I remember clearly that each of them measured in at around 1060mm... except for my 2005 Yao Zhi version which was actually 1030-1035 (despite it being labelled as 1005 on paper)... Therefore, you can not trust the measurements on websites entirely, especially for mods, because there's so much room for discretion. Chainstay length is adjustable depending on what size sprocket you want to run, as well as what chain, and how much it stretches over time. Furthermore, forks can vary slightly, causing changes in wheelbase... therefore what Inur (Greetings ) said about front cockpit reach is a better measure of frame 'lengthiness' than WB... Heck, you could get an Onza T-Lite and whack some fairly largely offseted forks and have it at 1060mm, yet it won't mean crap in reality if we're concerned about advantages of longer frames. On paper, all Long Pythons from 2004 up to 2006 were 1045mm wb, with 375mm chainstays... however, in reality, people would end up with 1060mm... hardly surprising. Similarly, my GU ST (dual disc) was 1035mm, nearing 1040mm with Echo Team CNC forks... and these frames are meant to be what... 1005 or 1010mm on paper? Seriously, don't trust WB measurements. But instead, go and look for front reach measurements. If the measurement isn't available on the sites, then go email or phone whoever owns that shop and they'll go measure it and email you later. I bet you the 1020mm Lynx ends up as 1040mm or so in reality.

For younger riders, they seem to pick it up pretty quick. Honestly, from the very beginning trials may look 'impossible' and 'unnatural'... but really, it's not at all. Once you learn how to lift the rear and front wheels up independently, that'll open up a whole new door of bike control... 'rocking' from front to rear wheel is basic, as is the trackstand, both of which will make backhops seem a lot more manageable. Once you break that barrier and get backhops, you're pretty much set. Gapping isn't that hard to grasp after learning how to hop about. Trials is made up of a very short and limited list of relatively similar skills, so there's not much 'new' stuff to constantly learn. It's all just more an adaptation and manipulation of old/current skills... which is what all these good riders are doing. Take a sport like Flatland BMX... and man, you've got a lot more to worry about! . There's a ton of tricks, variations, and so on... each one a bloody pain to master. It's like learning manuals and nose manuals constantly from scratch... now that is a bitch. Trials riders have got it gooood

Looks awesome man! I'm assuming the logs are pretty *damn* heavy? Otherwise, it seems they might be really prone to rolling about? Probably the last thing you'd want after a big gap, haha!

Deng used to test his frames extensively through riders. Nowadays he does it on the computer through some advanced CAD sorta program to analyse stress thresholds or whatever... I'm not an engineer, but it's something like that?

That looked awesome. I will still remember the awesome time I had in the 2006 Abingdon ride, though I won't be missing Radley station . The venue looks like it has changed a bit though? At least from last I remember in '06

Because is Neon's budget brand... and Neon to begin with aren't of that a high quality, strength, or design compared to Deng. Despite people slagging Deng off, he knows what he's doing, and just needs a reliable factory to carry it out for him (some times, the factories in the past have genuinely screwed up... e.g. the Zoo/GU/Czar/Adamant Riser bars) Lynx.

Kings are good, but now that there are so many awesome and reliable freewheels on the market, the need for a King has diminished a lot for trials.. Heck, 108 EP on a Mod with a King is more than enough. No one really needs that much to be honest, and in many cases it can make the bike feel *too* responsive. BMXers tend to hate Kings and hubs with massive EP because during stuff like 180 bunnyhops, when they land in fakie, the massive engagement causes the cranks to 'catch on' almost too suddenly, throwing people off a bit... Mod riders buy King for the gimmick and the look. Functionally, a decent freewheel would be a lot better price-wise, easier to sort out, install, and the setup would be overall much lighter and better proportioned over the whole bike. I agree with Simpson. Buy a better frame and better cranks first. Onza's low end stuff really isn't that great for long-term investment.

That's fairly grim. I always suspected that that would be a bit of a weakspot, especially after the first batch of T-Mag 2005 frames just caved in at the downtube bashplate mount (and these had a small gusset no?) I suppose that means every Deng frame with a bashplate is vulnerable to this weak design. Why did he ditch the gusset? The 2004 Pythons and 2004/2005/2006 Echo Teams all had this gusset too, which spread the impact over a larger area. It worked, heck.. haha.

I suspected they were fairly weak, I did see a few pictures of the 08s cracked at the toptube near where it welds onto the seatstays. By 'cracking at the bash mounts', do you mean at the horizontal chainstay piece between the yokes, or do you mean that silly blotch of weld on the downtube?

On a quick note, someone mentioned the mod version of the 07 GU (smoothed welds) to have a particular weakspot? Where was it? I'm off on my gap year soonish, and would like a trials bike to ride during that time... deciding on which Deng frame. Have the 08 Typhoons been cracking a lot too? (Mod version specifically)

Ok, let me simplify it for you then. It's not a matter of how big I go, nor how harsh I am on my bike (which I'm not)... Heck, I haven't even ridden trials in half a year, since I moved to flat. My above post was with regards to people in general abusing the bike, it's not meant to be derogatory or insulting in any way. Truth be told, most trials riders are people who couldn't give a toss about their bikes or taking care of them, which in turn makes frames die far quicker than if taken care of. I hope this somewhat clarifies it to you Matthew Smith. Magnifico!

To be honest, I think *any* frame would die like that if it were beaten up enough. Most trials riders seem to not give a toss about their bikes and just liberally trash them and scratch/dent/scrape them without care. Ok, though this is kinda inevitable in trials due to the nature of the sport, you can actively limit it, which will seriously improve frame life. Almost all chainstay breakages are spawned off *excessive* damage, like scratches/dents gone so damn damn far. I'm hardly surprised since the material's been thinned and weakened so much!

Mat Smith, you are wrong. It's actually an early 05 one. The holed headtube ones were realistically the 06 ones released in mid-late 2005, which matched with Deng's 06 range when he first released the Czar and Adamant brand too. The 07 ones were the meaty looking ones, which carried into 2008.

Indeed! Echo tried it but Onza made them stop, saying something like 'it was their idea first'. In reality, even though Onza/Tensile is the first brand to have thought up using the Shimano BB spline for freewheels, it is after all a Shimano design, a Japanese design that has been used for many many *many* years. In this way, I still think it's a bit savage of Onza/Tensile to tell other people to not use it. I doubt any profit or revenue is being lost if other brands decide to take it up. People primarily buy the freewheel for its reliability and engagement points. Tool removal fittings are fairly low on people's list of priorities when coming to buy a freewheel!

It'd be nice if it were offered in a non-white version! I'd jump onto the bandwagon then!

Not bad

By overpriced and overrated, I meant it from a BMX standpoint. Compared to other hubs and designs, the Profile is a fair bit more expensive and less reliable, whilst newer hubs are up to 100g or more lighter as well as being stronger, cheaper, and with higher quality. Profile in the BMX world is getting a bit outdated, but it's still popular just for aesthetics.

Profile hubs can be dodgy or good. But either way they are *overrated* and *overpriced*. In the BMX world where they come from, this is well known. I used to have a Profile and it skipped occasionally, I thought nothing of it really, because I believed it to be part of the bedding in process. Maybe not though. Go and get the bearings replaced, especially if the current bearings are the blue-rubber-sealed standard Taiwan bearings. Depending on the store, if you ask them nicely they'll replace the bearings free of charge with upgraded black-rubber-sealed Japanese bearings with a shim to reinforce stiffness in the overall internal structure to prevent any play/wobble. Furthermore, go and clean the driver and engagement ring properly and lube it up lightly with some wet teflon lube like Finish Line XC. If problems persist, let us know. But it should be fine after that^