Mark W

Was certainly a return - badly stuck together packaging, and they'd done a pretty good job of f**king the allen key broaching on it. Cheers to whoever did that Luckily they only mullered the first few mm of them, so I just mashed my allen key past that point and it was all good.

I mean it's all a con really. The lack of clarity, deliberate obfuscation and generally chicanery of it all is only there to protect the industries involved, not for the benefit of anyone using them. Aside from our surveyors who've been great the whole time, the rest of the process has been as opaque as anyone could possibly make an industry while periodically requesting their clients to punt them a few hundred quid here and there. We now know where we're at from our side, but we have no idea at all what the situation is with the seller as the solicitors and agents involved seemingly can't be bothered either finding out the answers to our questions, or just relaying those questions on. I'm pretty relaxed about it all really as I know that things are moving in the right direction, even if we don't know what speed yet, but it's definitely weighing more on my wife's mind as she's experienced 3 homes falling through at various points from having had the survey done through to being about to complete.

Yeah, totally - it was more that the 'ride a normal looking bike' guys that Dave mentioned tend to be the ones doing demos and trying to increase visibility that way. Fully agree that it's not the look of bikes that's the bar for entry, but my point was more that the dichotomy of "Ride a specialist bike and nobody will be into it" or "Ride a 'normal' looking bike and people will be into it" just doesn't exist any more, if it even did in the past.

Mortgage approved. Feels like things are actually happening. In related news, I have no idea why anybody gets into the business of being an estate agent or conveyancer. All jobs have a degree of faff/stress to them, but it seems like you'd need to have some kind of sadomasochistic desire for perpetual f**kery* to want to get into those businesses. *Or just like being a stressy f**k to other people I suppose.

Simply to get popular riders on a bike with their name on, really. There's no actual interest in trials whatsoever from them. Which is pretty much the worst thing that can happen as far as the progression of riding goes. It's funny there's still so many people talking about riding a 'relatable looking bike' when it's been pretty clear for a while now that it doesn't really make a huge difference as far as visibility goes. Even Sergi Llongueras went 'viral', got onto various news networks around the world and so on riding his Comas, which is as far away from riding a Norco with shit geo and sus forks as you can get

Depends what 'profitable' means to them in a way - margins in the MTB world seem to be way higher than the trials world, so if they can make more while having to do less work (if you're just buying groupsets, forks, cockpits and stuff from OE suppliers) it's probably simpler. I think Joe replied to a thread about Onza on here and said they had had a reduction in sales, but it'd be interesting to know how that broke down. It seemed their range was fairly cluttered at one point - for example there was one year where the Bird and the Ska were separated by £30. The Ska had an upgrade to FFW and had better brake pads, so nobody bought Birds. They got offered to TartyBikes on mega discount because they just weren't selling. Can remember helping unload them and that was a tedious process... If you're dealing with issues like that, it's probably not making that sector appealing to the people who have bought your company out and are looking to maximise their return. Onza have ended up stripping sales back to just the Tyke and Sting AFAIK, but from my experience at TB it seemed like there was (and possibly still is?) scope for doing the mega cheap 20" front and rear style bike, a 20" front/19" rear cheap bike and a cheap 24". You don't necessarily need to have a bike at every £50 price point. EDIT: Obvious caveat here is that it's much easier to hypothesise about running a company than actually doing it, I'm sure there was/is other stuff going on.

Seems there was potentially more money in the MTB market for them, although having seen how cheaply they're selling those hardtails second hand now...

Just going back to this - I'm not sure which bit you're referring to, but when I was talking about cheap bikes, I mean cheap bikes - Onzas used to be about a 1/3 the price of a Jitsie is now. Obviously inflation kicks in, costs go up, etc., but it should be doable to get a bike for less than £500, and that's quite a big psychological barrier. As far as Jitsie and street, as far as I'm aware they believe they have done a real street/trials bike. I mean they also thought that putting a Pivotal seat on a Varial 26" made it "street style", so... yeah...

Cheers for the info dudes I had a stock reminder on the Brand-X axle, and it came back into stock today. Only one though, so I assume someone got it but it didn't fit their bike. They're a bit cheaper than all the others so I've given it a punt. Fingers crossed...

They don't appear to as far as I can tell, save for the 2.5mm allen key adjuster for the lever tension itself: There isn't the cone spanner type adjuster that some Maxles have, and definitely no easily rotatable clicker setup either. Appears to be just a one-piece axle in that regard, as far as I can tell. That's where it ends up towards being fully tensioned. Prime. That's partially why the 'loosening' face of the axle slot is so f**ked (the other part being me doing it wrong obvz) - when it starts loosening off, the position of the fork leg relative to the axle means it lifts it pretty far out of the slot so there's hardly any contact with it, and with it being fairly thin aluminium taking a bunch of force... Cheers for all the tips anyway peeps, looks like some form of stealth axle is the way to go. Be glad to get rid of that muntery lever from my forks!

Feels weird to be using a different part of TF... Anyways, I've got some Rockshox forks on my bike with a regular Maxle. It's the full poverty spec one that isn't adjustable (save for the grub screw for the paddle), and with where it ends up when my wheel is the right torque it's a faff to use. Basically, it ends up almost in line with the fork leg, but due to the diameter of the fork leg you can't really keep the paddle fully engaged with the cut-out in the axle body. It's resulted in it slipping out a few times and mulching the sides of the cut-out in the axle, which in turn isn't great either... It also has a habit of coming loose. Basically, QRs of any sort can get in the sea so I'm looking to switch to something like the Stealth Maxle. I've got the OneUp EDC Lite tool in the steerer so I've always got an alley key to hand, so convenience wise it's not a problem. My only real question is how well they work, and if they're less susceptible to coming loose than the QR Maxles? I'm not really looking to spend Rockshox money on a replacement, so for full disclosure I'm looking at something like the Brand-X version: https://www.chainreactioncycles.com/brand-x-bolt-through-axle/rp-prod176624

Good question... from memory, the Hope one pushes things more over to the drive side. I don't believe it's the full 6mm just being applied to one side though. The rotor spacers they include appear to be from the same steel as their rotors so I assume they're more in the region of 4mm non-drive, 2mm drive? As before, they use bespoke end caps for them so they're a bit harder to really work out what the difference is. I guess either way you should have enough adjustment from the high/low stops on your mech to get yourself in the right ballpark?

Just found that there are actually a load of generic options out there, e.g.: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/302967074405?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=710-134428-41853-0&mkcid=2&itemid=302967074405&targetid=1140014333262&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=1007415&poi=&campaignid=12126112062&mkgroupid=119550279089&rlsatarget=aud-629407027105:pla-1140014333262&abcId=9300482&merchantid=113700346&gclid=CjwKCAjw9MuCBhBUEiwAbDZ-7hn7lVoWBEBelq5q-mEakc6S8QoLZ9LnY9cVOC6HPF-Ctjak5ByRvBoCbEYQAvD_BwE That's essentially what the Hope one is, but with plain spacers rather than bespoke end caps. Doesn't seem like it'd be too bad? As before, will open up a load of options for you so it may be worth considering.

If a company came in and did it right I think rather than just taking a slice of the pie, they could make the overall pie much bigger. Inspired (and now Crewkerz) have generally not had the supply to match demand, so there are certainly some sales left on the table at the current price points. Looking below what's currently available though, the Alias 24.1 is similar-ish to the Onza Zoot in terms of opening up that part of the market. The parts kit on the Alias 24.1 is broadly speaking in line with the Zoot, but the frame is not a million miles off an Arcade which is what drives the price up. If a company came in and just did a super simple frame and fork you could feasibly make the bike overall a chunk cheaper, and with the preferential pricing big brands get I'm sure you could get the build kit lower in cost too. If you went similar to the Zoot and did it strictly V-Brake only on the build it would take an even bigger chunk off the cost compared to an Alias as well. Likewise with 'normal' trials bikes too. There's certainly scope for someone to put out the kind of bikes Onza used to. That would definitely be more niche and wouldn't get the same amount of sales as a cheap street-style bike would, but depending on how they did the parts kits you could theoretically share some parts across the range and keep costs even lower/margins higher that way.

If Jitsie can sell this for €85, definitely scope for a Shin Dig Podcast branded tape measure Fun video! The level of riding across the board these days seems to be getting really up there. It's kind of remarkable Steve is still alive with the crashes he has!

It's definitely possible - the first Canyon frame Fabio had was based on their dirt jump frame. It's easy enough for them to do, but won't generally last too long.

A big part of it isn't so much the rigid setup of the bikes, but just that you're not doing constant full pedal rotations. The way that pedal and BB threads are orientated is to counter precession, something that only really 'works' if you're doing full pedal strokes. Because trials is a lot of jabbing forward/backward motions it makes it more likely things will loosen off. For the DUB preload adjuster, that's kind of independent to the rest of the BB in a way. The SRAM manual does a pretty decent job of explaining how to use it - skip down to P20 and you'll see the start of the preload adjustment bit. Those locking collars are fairly 'soft', so just go easy on them. It's something you really only need to nip up rather than cranking down on - the 54N/m on the crank bolt is the thing that's really keeping it all in place! https://www.sram.com/globalassets/document-hierarchy/user-manuals/sram-mtb/drivetrain/dub-mtb-and-road-cranksets-and-bottom-brackets-user-manual.pdf

Which rear hub are you using, Dave? Reason I ask is a few companies like Hope offer 142mm to 148mm conversion kits, so it might open up options for you a bit

Essentially, yes. It allowed them the chance to run this snappy bit of ad copy: "YT does not care about rules. No one would stick to them anyway. Young Talents live uncaged! But still, the guys at YT want to play." If they're saying from the get-go that it's a limited run of 25 then you can afford to run them at way less margin that you typically would for a bike because you know it's a one-time event, and it's not something that needs to be sustainable. Although "YT does not care about rules", they did set the rule that that bike was only available in Europe, so that kind of suggests that they were definitely cutting margins too. Shipping bikes internationally isn't cheap, so keeping that price low elsewhere might have eaten in their margins too much. As far as trials bikes go, I honestly don't know the specifics but I'd assume low hundreds at most for most brands. The thing to bear in mind is that company size plays a large part in how easy things are to get made (in terms of production scheduling, getting factories to agree to doing limited runs, how amenable they are to random changes) and how much they cost to get made. A brand like YT will be getting a huge amount of frames made so you'd assume they'd get a better rate than a brand getting a handful of frames made. That will probably carry over to smaller runs like this simply because of the amount of leverage they have - their business is worth a lot to the factories they work with.

If you've got a frame with horizontal dropouts, it may be worth getting hold of a half-link too. Single tooth changes quite often lead to issues with lining up brake mounts, so having one available might be handy in case you need it.

When bikes are new things inevitably tend to bed in and slightly loosen off, so things like pedals, headsets, cranks and BBs can sometimes need a nip up. Due to the leverage BBs and cranks have got going through them, the smallest loss of tension (and therefore the smallest bit of movement) gets exacerbated and you'll generally hear about it fairly quickly. You shouldn't need to full remove and re-grease it, I'd just whip the cranks off and nip the BB up. That should generally get you sorted. If it remains then you can strip/re-grease/re-build, but it'll have been greased from new so it'll most likely just have bedded in and worked loose a touch. As above, the tools for these BBs don't necessarily engage on every spline. There's still plenty of tool contact, so as long as you make sure that there's still pressure holding the tool onto the BB interface when you're giving it some beans you won't have problems. The extra splines are just a neat way of reducing weight while also increasing functionality. It's similar to the Echo SL freewheels which used to have 8 slots for a freewheel remover, but only needed to use a 4-prong tool (and then ended up just having long slots rather than the traditional small, prong-sized slots).

I think more people have Crewkerz bikes than you'd expect. There seem to be a decent number of them out there. Worth bearing in mind that in Europe, buying high end complete bikes is much more of a 'thing'. Just look at how big Trial-Bikes are now - they're a huge shop and they've focussed more on the comp side of things, and are based in the heartland of comp riding. The UK isn't hugely representative of trials as a whole really. Randomly, from my time more on the order side of things at TartyBikes, a decent number of their high end comp bike sales (Koxx, Clean, Crewkerz, Monty) would go to Japanese riders, so there's that to bear in mind as well. Luckily for companies like Crewkerz, there does seem to be a bit of a culture of buying a new bike for the new comp season, so I guess they probably get a bit of help from riders wanting a fresh build each year. Part of it is also probably similar to Inspired where they sell out of bikes annually long before demand is satisfied. For the big brands/copying Inspired thing, you can theoretically just send parts to wherever you need them to go to and get them copied, but it's not quite as easy as that in some ways. If, say, you wanted to copy the forged BB yokes on some of the Inspired bikes, you're generally looking at - from my general understanding of the process - a 5-figure sum for tooling costs. You can make that cheaper by just CNCing them, but then you wind up paying more per unit simply because you're taking more time making each one. Either way, if you do it the 'proper' way and forge them it's a reasonably large up front cost that you then have to recoup. Big brands are all data driven, so they'll be able to run the numbers and see what's worth it to them in terms of bike sales, profit per sale, cost of R&D, cost of tooling, customer service, warranty support, etc. That's not factoring in the delays currently hitting all disciplines though! I would have thought they'd be purely focussed on getting their core ranges out there. My local shop are really big on Marin stuff (as one of Marin's team riders is a local), and even though they ordered stuff a while back they really struggled to get much of anything simply because there's so much demand and production has been so disrupted.

Your friends and mine, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert... Savvy timing from Canyon though. That valuation will never have been better than it was at the tail end of last year when they opened it up. All the chat about it was them "betting that Canyon's strong growth will continue after the pandemic", which may be a little optimistic if they were basing them on the demand they saw last year... Nah, definitely not. That's why it seems weirder still that they won't allow them to ride other bikes. Canyon even made Fabio tape over all the Inspired logos on his bars, rims and any other parts he was using from Inspired after he switched to them, despite the fact that Canyon don't make any competing products. It just sucks in a way because the top riders really do help drive the evolution of bikes. The technology on the Fourplay now is derived from things that were created for the Skye, and that was largely because Inspired needed to create a bike that wouldn't break when Danny rode it. That pushed them to make better bikes, and that then trickles down and benefits the rest of their bikes over time. There is obviously still an incentive to keep making better bikes, but having the top riders for any discipline pushing things will inevitably help. If they just get cherry picked by random brands who can just chop out a one-off frame for them, that isn't really beneficial for anyone. There was/are rumours of Canyon making production bikes, but the volume they'd do may not end up being something they're interested in, and with how impossible it is to get parts made and the super long lead times for OE parts from brands like SRAM and Magura, it's probably not something that's particularly easy to achieve right now either. Marin have been implying they're making a trials frame from comments they've made on social media, but again, with the factors above I'd be pretty surprised if they went all out for it. We'll see, I guess. A big brand like Canyon or Marin would have the potential to get some really good entry level bikes out there for a good price which can only really help get more people into it, but I don't know how much they'll really push things forward design-wise. Santa Cruz clearly didn't get things right with the frame they did for Danny judging from the issues they publicised about him breaking them, and considering they're the ones who appear to have spent the most time and money making one that doesn't really bode super well for other brands to raise the bar. It's not like Canyon have a stellar record with frame longevity judging from comments on Pinkbike and Facebook.

I believe he'd just tell you to head into your kitchen, find the sharpest knife you've got and go to town.

Pretty much. I've heard rumours about the figures involved and it is substantial, although obviously pales when you compare it to the salaries for other 'athletes' to an extent - I imagine most Premier League footballers will earn more in a week than they earn from their bike sponsors in a year. Whichever metrics you use though, they obviously bring a massive amount of exposure to brands and help bolster their brand identities so it's presumably all worthwhile for brands. Relatively speaking it won't be a big deal to them either - Santa Cruz are donating over $1million (tax deductible...) to trail building projects, so they've obviously got some cash about. Worth bearing in mind they're owned by a company worth $2.2bn so they'll have the firepower. Canyon are massive too (having listened to an interview with their founder about the growth of the company, it's insane how big they are now) so will also have a big chunk of money to play with. Their turnover for 2019/20 was €400m so they've sold a fair few bikes. They've also just been bought out by a company worth €13bn so again, don't think cash is likely to be much of a problem for them. In terms of it being 'personal', that's only because I'm very much into this aspect of trials and it does kind of suck in that regard. SC/Canyon are obviously supporting Danny and Fabio (and everyone else who gets lured by massive paycheques) with what they want to do, but I strongly doubt that if Danny or Fabio turned around to their respective sponsors tomorrow and said they weren't looking to ride trials again that either Santa Cruz or Canyon would lose any sleep over it. They aren't selling trials bikes (at all for Santa Cruz, possibly 'yet' for Canyon), so either of those riders opting to bin trials off is only a good thing for them as it'll mean 100% of their riders media will feature them on bikes people can buy. It feels like they take a punt on riders hoping that they'll grow out of their phase of riding silly little impractical bikes and start riding some serious, marketable, grown-up bikes ASAP.