Mark W

Those tyres make it look like a 26" for some reason! Looks fun though.

Possibly, but then I think some of it is marketing in a way. A look on Instagram and TikTok shows there's no shortage of young riders getting into street trials - there's a lot of well known riders who do a good job of publicly making it look good/fun/cool/exciting that helps get people interested in it. I'm sure some new riders will fade away, but it seems like there's a decent amount sticking with it. I'm not really a fan of them as a company, but Jitsie have undeniably done a good job of promoting the more biketrials-y side of things too. When they first got into the biketrials space, they made things look much more professional than other brands had before. The budgets they appear to be working with have meant they can really push promotion of comps and events too. Trials will never be mass participation, and it seems to appeal to a certain type of person, but just by helping raise the profile of trials in general I think it'll allow those who are more likely to want to do it and stick with it to get involved. "A rising tide lifts all ships" and all that. The main issue now is just the lack of affordable bikes, but hopefully once things stabilise and the second hand market gets a bit less insane it might be easier for people to get hold of them.

I was about to recommend that BBB tool - I've used one for ages now and it's really good. Not as 'fancy' as some others out there, but it just works which is ultimately all I really want/need from a chain tool!

I think there will always be a market for a custom builder of some sorts, but it's inevitably going to be a very small market. Even when there was good availability of frames from a whole host of different brands with different concepts and geometry people would still buy Marino/JAF/WIP frames, so that would suggest that now trials frames are much more homogeneous there would still be some untapped interest in a more bespoke frame. This was typically more from the street side of things rather than the comp side in fairness - nobody has really put out a light, comp-orientated custom frame. The extra weight doesn't really matter as much in the street world, so that might explain a reasonable part of that. Probably less of a factor, but I expect that with how easy it is to get "sponsored" by street brands now that some of the more experienced riders who would have previously gone custom are now happy to just ride something they can get cheap or free.

The M6 bolts in the 10mm hole isn't an issue - it's how the bikes came specced from Onza both in this form, and on their bikes like the Onza Zoot. While you're tightening the tug to adjust the chain tension, the chain tug is pulling the axle back while the chain tension itself is effectively pulling the axle forward, so when you tighten them the axle bolt will just sit at the 'front' end of the hole. The plate on the end of the dropouts will keep the tug itself stable while you're tightening it up, so it won't be able to tighten off axis or anything weird like that. With the axle bolts fully tightened up afterwards it can't go anywhere Just make sure to use plenty of grease on the axle bolts and inside the axle to get the most possible torque through them. The only other thing to note is that when you ride, the chain will stretch and you'll need to tighten the tugs/cams up to take up that slack. If your cams are towards the maximum end of their adjustment now, you may find that you'll either need to just use the tugs, or get some larger cams. I just had a quick look at the TartyBikes site and it seems that the Comas are towards the larger end, with only Hashtagg and Trialtech being larger. They only have 1mm more adjustment at the largest end though, so it won't be a huge amount. In all honesty, the snail cam bolt holes on those T-Pro frames were probably more afterthought rather than anything else. I'm fairly sure the bikes only ever came with chain tugs, and most riders used them like that, so it's possible that they didn't really check how the snail cam positioning would work in practice.

So firstly, just as disclosure, I left TartyBikes 8 months ago so things might/will have changed now... I think there's been a gradual thinning out of brands simply because things started getting expensive to make. Fundamentally it costs more to get products made now, so the days of being able to lash out a load of random samples and see what worked are kind of over. It's also not quite as easy/profitable to just rebrand existing stuff and keep things affordable or hit price points people used to be able to hit, which is how a lot of brands bulked up or filled in their parts lines. I imagine that that extra margin helped them keep the 'core' bits going too, so might have played a part in some brands disappearing in general. There have been two main shifts that have very much impacted the industry, and will play a part in why you can't necessarily find parts at your preferred shop these days. As of now, I believe the only brands you can't buy direct with are Inspired and Trialtech. Every other brand gives you the option of buying direct from them, through their own websites or through social media. As a shop, it's extremely hard to compete with that. Whether it's the specific version of a complete bike or an obscure proprietary component for it, a brand has the huge advantage of having all the product lines under one roof and ready to go (assuming it's in stock, naturally). From past experience, it's not unheard for brands to actually over-sell to direct customers, then take those over-sold products out of a shop's order. Brands know that their dealers/shops are 'stickier' than direct customers, so it's in their interests to keep direct customers sweet if they want to keep them coming back. Brands also make way, way more money on direct sales than they do selling to dealers, so it's also very much in their interests financially to prioritise direct sales (fun fact, while I was at TB still a brand DM'd me on Instagram asking me to share their post that was about a site-wide discount they were offering - they didn't seem to understand that as a shop, we might not want to drive sales away from us to them). That extra margin also gives them much more leeway to offer discounts and reductions. In comparison, the margins that trials shops make are smaller than ever, so often it simply won't be possible for them to discount in the same way. This dynamic means that a lot of the 'power' in the relationship between brands and retailers shifted to the brands, so it became pretty hard/virtually impossible to work with some of them. If they don't have any real interest or need to keep a shop on board, they don't need to offer particularly good service or good pricing to them as it doesn't matter if the shop walks away. It just means the brand has more stock available to then sell at those greater margins. For brands entering the trials space who were selling direct to begin with then tried pursuing shops, they'd priced their products at such a point where it wasn't really viable to have a margin for shops big enough that it was actually worth selling them. A lot of those newer brands don't really seem to understand the extra costs involved in actually running a shop legally (e.g. actually using legal/accurate customs declarations, taxes, etc.) so what they considered acceptable margins didn't/don't factor in the real costs a shop faces. The other thing has been covid. China are still pursuing their zero covid policy, so that has meant a significant amount of disruption in factories over there. Echo own their own factory, and those lockdowns have basically kept them closed (or at least their production lines closed) since mid-2020. It sounds like it might have put them under, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's the end of Echo now, which would be a real shame. Not all brands get their parts made in China, with a lot of them being made in Taiwan. Taiwan aren't pursuing the same policy as China with covid, so they have been operating somewhat as normal for most of the pandemic (AFAIK). The problem though is that the big name cycling brands that got their parts made in China then had to switch to producing them elsewhere, and Taiwan is the only other option for the most part. Taiwan was where most of it happened years ago, but gradually brands started pulling production from Taiwan to other places like China where they could get things done for less. That trend over time meant that operations scaled down a bit in Taiwan, so although they still had some of the best production facilities in the world and very experienced staff, the overall capacity reduced. This was then totally overwhelmed when all those brands suddenly came back in, and it led to a lot of the smaller players (e.g. trials brands) getting bumped down production schedules to make way for these huge orders coming in from big cycling brands who were responding to the pandemic cycling boom. Even that wasn't enough though, and lead times even for those big brands with huge chequebooks were super long. To use one example, pre-pandemic the lead time for something like a SRAM GX mech would have been 30-40 days. At one point in the pandemic it was 470 days. Those long lead times also affected parts that trials riders do use though, e.g. SRAM GX/Truvativ Descendant cranks. Brands had to prioritise their biggest selling product lines so that involved either reducing or totally cutting production of other, less popular product lines (which include the random bits and bobs that trials riders might have used from them, hence it being super hard to get hold of Maxxis Holy Rollers or Kenda K-Rads for ages). The upshot of that was that the relatively small orders trials brands place got pushed down the queue, and in some cases I expect also lost some production time entirely meaning that the quantity of parts they received were reduced. The way that brands have to pay for their production orders can also lead to cash-flow issues (if you've got to pay for your production months before it's going to ship to you, let alone from you to your dealers/shops, you effectively have to pay for it all out of pocket with nothing to actually sell to offset it), which I think is probably a big part of the reason that most brands now focus on complete bike sales vs. just selling frames and parts. As anyone who's tried selling a complete bike in the FS section will tell you, as soon as you offer to split them you always end up with random stuff hanging about because people don't/won't want it. I expect that's also what the case is like for brands too, so being able to order 50x all the products you need for a bike then sell them as 50 complete bikes will mean they get a bigger injection of cash and also get rid of their stock cleanly, simply and more efficiently than if they had all those bits for those bikes available separately. Forecasting sales in the trials world is a nightmare, and it's pretty easy to wind up sitting on a load of stock that was either desirable a month ago and out of fashion now/people said they really wanted but then when it came in stock they didn't want/is superseded by a new product. That's easier to control as a brand (because you control some of those variables) but it's still not easy. Specifically on experience with V-Brake products in the trials world - the phrase 'vocal minority' comes to mind. Whenever we'd mention V related products at TB, there would be so many people saying we should get them in, that V-Brakes are the best thing ever and that they'd buy them as soon as they were available. That almost never translated into actual sales. V-specific stuff was often the hardest to sell, and I think that will have put off a lot of brands from making V-specific stuff. V users are a very small subset of what is already a small market, so it just isn't really in their interests to pursue it when there are generally lacklustre at best sales. It's also worth noting on the booster front that most trials brand boosters (Trialtech are the main exception to this) are basically shit, and if you can source some carbon or aluminium of your own you'll be able to make one that is just as effective yourself, with minimal tools. Just to wrap this up, the cycling bubble has definitely burst and those big brands I mentioned are suddenly finding their sales are plummeting. Orders are being cancelled so production spaces are opening up, so I think we'll start to see greater availability of trials products from the brands that have managed to tough it out. It probably won't be instantaneous, but I expect over the next 6-12 months it'll go back to being somewhat more normal, although realistically the higher prices that increased shipping, material and production costs have generated aren't likely to go away unfortunately. Just to go through the brands you mentioned specifically: - Echo: had their own factory, mentioned their story in that wall of text above. - Monty: ran out of money, think they went into administration and got bought out by a brand who wanted to maximise their return. That's why they basically don't do any trials stuff any more but do random 'city'/hybrid bikes and awful looking BMX and kids bikes. - Koxx: they had external investors keeping them going, but also ran out of money and declared bankruptcy, with Dominique Hermance immediately forming Hashtagg. I believe some of the product/engineering guys at Koxx went over to Jitsie. The materials shortage you mention is still a real thing, especially with steel (which is why Alias bikes and frames have been out of stock for a year or so now). When those materials are available they're just a lot more expensive now. You're on the money about MTB vs trials manufacturing, although you could probably add "00" to the end of the MTB figures and maybe one or in some cases 2 0's at the end of the trials figures... I'm not really sure we'll see another JAF/WIP/whatever custom steel frame builder again realistically. It's just really expensive to do now, and hard to do well, so to keep costs vaguely close to what people could spend on a random Chinese carbon frame would be tough. I believe all those smaller brands had issues with their frames in one way or another, and as soon as you're starting to go down the path or warrantying or repairing frames what little money you might have made on that original sale is effectively gone. ----- If anyone's made it this far, kudos to you.

If your hoses/cables run through the frame smoothly you should be all good. They didn't on my Commencal, so even just running bare hoses/cables through sucked. Those foam outers are fairly slim and soft so even if you lost one in the frame it'd just push/squeeze out the way when the new hose went in.

You may be better off on a mototrials message board like Trials Central. This place is for biketrials, so it's unlikely anyone will have the know-how.

It isn't especially - you only need to go from caliper up to the lever. You also shouldn't need to wind on the adjuster dial to firm things up. That would suggest there's still some air in there. With the Trialtech lever that should be relatively easy to solve though - rotate the lever so the bleed port is the highest point of the lever, wind the adjuster dial so it's completely 'off', open up the bleed port, attach the bleed hose, then fit a syringe without its plunger. Pour some fluid into the syringe, then give the lever a couple of quick pulls. Doing this in a way where you pull the lever in then flick your finger off the lever so it returns really quickly can help out with breaking up any air bubbles and getting them to move up the hose faster. If there's any air in the system it should rise up and into the hose/syringe. It's worth tapping along the hoses in case any air bubbles have stuck onto the inside of the hose walls. I've always called these top-up bleeds, they work really well as a kind of interim bleed or if you think there might be any air in the system. They're much quicker and easier to do than a full bleed, but should give effectively the same result. Just on the barbed fitting vs. shroud and olive, I believe it was done to help minimise weight and lever size. Barbed fittings are M6 compared to M8 for the olive/shroud, so the lever design can be slimmed down. I believe the actual port itself is shorter than the port you need for a shroud & olive combo too, so that helps with getting things smaller and more out of the way too. There are pros and cons to each, but once you've got the bits you need to install a barbed fitting it's not too much hassle typically. If you've got an old spoke, wind a nipple onto the end of it and then cut the spoke a few cm down from the threads - you can slide the barbed fitting onto that bit of spoke and use the excess as a guide for the fitting into your hose, while you then tap the head of the nipple with a hammer/mallet. You'll still need some form of clamping blocks, but the spoke guide really helps out!

Was about to suggest the same thing. My MTB is internally routed, and when I switched my gear cable over I didn't add a foam sleeve back on (I didn't realise it had one initially, when I pulled the cable out of the port the frame slid the foam sleeve off inside it, so to me it just looked like it had been a bare outer hose). As soon as I rode it it was abundantly clear it had had something on before. I picked up some of the same stuff as that Jagwire foam and it worked a treat. If you want, to avoid having to take the hose fully out of your frame you can just slice the foam lengthways then slide it on that way. I taped it up in intervals as I fed it in to avoid it splaying off the hose, and it seemed to work fine. It was on offer pretty cheap from Wiggle. Just make sure you get the right diameter for your hose (they're either 5mm or 6mm from memory, you'll most likely need 5mm).

I remember from back in the day that we recommended open bearing headsets for those specific frames for that reason Open bearing headsets still work fine. As long as you make sure you use plenty of grease when you install it you shouldn't have any problems realistically, and it shouldn't feel any different to a sealed headset in use.

Haha, I wouldn't go that far... So as far as pads go, the Trialtech/Jitsie pads are noticeably better than the standard pads from most brands. That's especially the case with Hope and Echo, although in my experience (and from talking to TB/Inspired team riders) the Magura pads are fine really, especially if it's for the front. Production issues from the pandemic are the issue really. With the boom in general cycling sales, a lot of production time got taken up by bigger brands throwing their cash around trying to capitalise on it, so the relatively tiny orders that most trials brands place get bumped down the list. I think most of them have prioritised complete bike sales too, so aftermarket parts have been hard to get hold of. It's a little different for Echo - the zero covid policy in China has meant that they basically had to close their factory almost since March/April 2020 until now. There are plenty of rumours swirling around that they might be finished because of it, which isn't too surprising. They own their own factory, and I imagine that owning a factory and not being able to produce any parts with it for 2 years would probably make life hard financially. I hope they come back as they've done a lot in the trials world, but... yeah...

It's rare but it can. It tends to happen more when the cylinders are older or a bit more worn around the section that they get clamped on. You have to be really tightening the bolts up for it to happen. When you got the bike, were the brakes bled with water, oil or ______?

Most of the Jealousy bikes I was involved with back before I stopped working at TartyBikes were not the same as the geo was claimed to be. Quite often it was 10mm difference, sometimes it was 5mm. I'm not sure what it is that kept making them be that same amount out, but 1) it's clear something isn't right with their drawings somewhere, and 2) that's why you don't put the geo numbers on the frame. Almost every frame I can remember dealing with from any brand that had the geo written on it was wrong. The only exception to that rule that springs to mind was Onza who tended to be correct. The "issue" for Crewkerz is anyone actually measuring physical objects, rather than just taking their word for it.

That is indeed an Echo Pure (as TartyBikes would have called it, think it's a Mk3 from other places). Those Echo disc brakes use Hope pads, so throwing some Trialtech or Jitsie disc pads in will improve things a lot. It's safe to say that they're not the most reliable of brakes, so you may need to switch out the O-rings in the lever if it's leaking up there. If it's leaking caliper end, you may as well just try putting a new brake on before rinsing through pads and rotors as it keeps leaking. With how cheap things like Magura MT-series brakes are there are some really good options out there that are pretty cheap. The white pads are just standard Echo pads, so won't really be amazing. If you throw some tar on they'll do OK - as will almost all pads - but getting some grind-orientated pads and giving that rim a fresh grind will be best. A booster will help too. Those brakes are mineral oil based so theoretically can be used with water, but I'd put some anti-freeze in there too so you've got the corrosion inhibitors/lubricants that you typically get in anti-freezes.

The BB thing did come to mind! I remember discovering that treat as I partially stripped the threads on mine...

The geo will be altered a lot, even just from the 24" fork. Most 20" trials forks tend to be about 360-370mm axle to crown, whereas 24" forks are going to be about 40mm longer than that. With a 20" front wheel at least you've limited the geometry change, but with a 24" you're obviously adding a fairly considerable amount more to that too (about 50mm or so). With a 24" front wheel, that's going to make that head angle really slack so it'll be worse on the front wheel, and the extra weight and size up front is going to make it harder work on the rear wheel. It's also going to make the reach of the bike much shorter, so it'll most likely feel even more cramped than 20" bikes typically do. There are only really marginal benefits to a mullet setup on an MTB, and the benefits you have there don't really cross over onto a trials bike. Technically your T-Pro is already mullet anyway as you have a 19" rear wheel on it compared to the 20" front, but that's to allow the use of the much bigger rear tyre so it works out as effectively being 20" front and rear anyway (which is why Maxxis confusingly label their Creepy Crawler rear tyre as a 20x2.50", even though it won't fit 20" rims). I rode a couple of those T-Pro frames and enjoyed them - the geo was fairly neutral and it felt quite comfortable to ride. I typically used a 180mm stem with some low-ish rise bars, but the 150mm should still be good with the amount of rise you've got on those bars. A random one, but you may find that to make the frame last longer you'll be better off using just the bashring, rather than using the bashplate. That style of bashplate puts a lot of force into the middle of the downtube where the forward bash mount is, and it's not uncommon to see 20" frames crack and snap at that point. You don't have that issue with a bashring, as well as having some additional benefits like saving a significant chunk of weight and gaining more ground clearance.

The cranks will bed in and sit a little further on the axle after you use them for a bit, so that'll rob a little clearance too. If you did want to go shorter then you could probably get away with a 122mm, but that'd be about it realistically. Chainline isn't a huge deal in all honesty - it's never great on trials bikes on the whole, but it's worth bearing in mind you'll generally have a bit of float from the chain links on the sprocket and freewheel teeth (especially if you have a 1/8" chain) so that helps smooth things out. Ultimately though you only need to see how insane chainlines get on modern 1x MTB setups to see what you can really get away with! I'm not sure I'd want to go as extreme on a trials bike as the chainline at the furthest ends of a 1x12 setup, but a few mm either way on a trials setup won't be a deal breaker.

Hope did a Pro 2 Evo Trials/SS hub which was 48-click, while the regular Pro 2 Evo was 24-click. They then introduced the 40T ratchet version so the Trials/SS was 80 and the regular hub 48. They both use the same freehub body, pawls and so on - it was just a change to the ratchet within the hub shell, and was designed to use the same freehub parts. The crack isn't ideal obviously, but I've seen several people ride with rotor bolts missing and not have problems so I don't think one bolt hole having a crack will necessarily lead to a catastrophic failure. It's definitely worth keeping an eye on to make sure it doesn't get to that point, but realistically you could ride it as-is if it's not causing any obvious issues right now.

Getting the conversion kit for the regular hub and picking up a Trials/SS hub will probably be the simplest way. The conversion kits are easy enough to get hold of and that totally sorts that hub without having to faff around. In terms of quality on the Hope and I9 hubs, you really don't have much to worry about. As comes up in all threads about it, there are failures with those hubs, but they're very much in the minority. You hear about all the plane crashes, you don't hear about all the flights that land safely. Just on your point about the MTB/trials ratchets, they're the same for both. The only difference is the standard Hope hubs engage all pawls simultaneously whereas the Trials hubs are 2 x 2. There are other differences between them that mean that some parts aren't cross compatible though, although that varies from generation to generation (e.g. the Pro 2 Evo Trials hub had a different diameter on the drive side - IIRC - to the standard hubs).

That'll possibly depend on the cranks. Some cranks have much less offset/Q-factor and will cause more problem than others. If it's a trials frame, most are designed around the use of a 128mm length axle so you should be fine, but if you're using something like some Middleburns or older RaceFace cranks with minimal offset you'll possibly still encounter problems.

Holy smokes I'd totally forgotten about that game series. So good!

If all the people who are striking decided to "find a different job" then there'd be a lot more than just a few weekends here and there of disruption happening with the railways.

Out of interest, was that bar clamp, steerer clamp, or both? The only reason I ask is that it looks like with the bar clamp fully closed there the bolts are close to flush with the ends of the bolts holes, but once you've got some bars in there and the clamp gap opens up you might be rolling the dice a bit with the amount of thread contact those bolts will actually get. I think there's typically more overlap with stem bolts just to ensure there's a lot of thread contact as most people really crank up the tension on them, so it's best to have a bit of extra support for them where they can.

Nah, you'll need to get a long boi for that to possibly work. The 2015 Arcade has a 68mm shell, but with cranks like Middleburns you'll need something like a 122mm or 127.5mm BB length to get clearance I'd imagine. Part of that is arm clearance, but part of it is chainring clearance too as from memory the Middleburn ones hold the chainring quite far inboard. You might be able to get away with something a little less, but I'd always rather have more clearance than less. Cranks will always have a bit of flex to them under load so you need to factor that in a bit as well - the original Truvativ Descendant cranks fitted the Arcade when the bike wasn't being ridden, but as soon as you started riding the bike properly they'd flex and hit the chainstays pretty badly. Square taper is... ok. It's theoretically not a bad system, but I broke several square taper BB axles whereas I don't think I've broken any form of splined ones. As far as I know there's increasingly less support from manufacturers for longer square taper BBs too so that might factor in to things further down the line as well. If you wind up getting a 122/127.5 BB and there's acres of clearance then you could possibly size down in future so it wouldn't necessarily be an issue.