Mark W

True. Not sure which hub it would have been from though, unless their road hubs are a different design or something. It almost had a hint of corner cutting (literally and metaphorically) in a way as it looks like a cheaper pawl, although I wouldn't have thought they'd have risked that.

Yeah, I fully agree with that That's also part of the reason I've got a Hydra on the back of my Arcade. I just don't think that the MTB industry is necessarily designing around the loads/use cases for trials, so a lot of 'normal' hubs won't really be up to the job. The Spank seems like a better option compared to others, but I'd let Yohan see how it goes first! As I mentioned in the other thread, the Hope pawl situation is an interesting one as they're technically going back to the pawls they used to use in the Pro 4. I'm not sure when they changed to that other style of pawl, but it seems it wasn't a successful switch. EDIT: Forgot to say, but I'm not a big Hope fanboy or anything - the Pro 4 has plenty of room for improvement, but it's hard to deny it's a fairly reliable setup for a lot of riders.

Aaaah, I get you. Classic trials Even if it's at the edge of adjustment, you can still try and get the pistons to hit at the same time even if they're effectively offset within the caliper. Not ideal, but should give less lever mush hopefully. Had heard about the new compound pads, but in all honesty I'd probably just get some of the Jitsie/TT pads. They're a fairly cheap upgrade to make, and I doubt that Hope would make a compound as 'aggressive' as them simply because they'd be pretty shit for mountain biking! I don't think they do bespoke compounds for their trials brakes so it'll just be a carry-over from the rest of their line.

Yohan's doing a lot of shows at the moment so I'm not sure how much riding riding he'll be doing to really test that hub. Just thinking that it might be best to wait until further in the year to really draw any conclusions about more long term reliability/durability of that hub. I've ridden a mountain bike with one of them on and it did feel good, and in terms of MTB hubs it's probably one I'd lean more towards for using as a trials hub, but in all honesty just stripping your current hub, checking out the internals, replacing any worn pawls and clearing out the grease Hope use from new (and using a light lube instead when you re-build it) would be a better way to go. It does seem like there have been a reasonable number of Hope Pro 4 hubs dying, but as Adam alluded to that's out of a lot of hubs out there, and to an extent it's like plane crashes. You always hear about the planes that crash, but not about the millions of flights that successfully reach their destinations. Even just looking at the number of Hope hubs released into the wild on Inspired Team spec bikes every year that's a few hundred hubs alone, so with them also being used on some other bikes, people buying them aftermarket and so on there are a seriously large amount of those hubs out there in use, going on fine.

They will be releasing the levers separately, but I think it's just production that's holding them back at the moment. Tech 4 brakes still have at least an 8 week lead time from Hope so I expect they're slammed trying to fulfil brake orders before doing separate levers. Glad you got them feeling better though, really shows how much spending a little extra time on setup can really pay off with disc brakes

The "new" pawls are essentially what the "old" pawls were - this is a Pro 2 pawl: I was under the impression the original Pro 4 pawls were a slightly narrower version of them. I haven't seen that kind of rounded one from that hub further up the thread before! It's weird they'd make that switch to that design, but at least they appear to have gone back to the original Pro 2/4 pawl design now.

I think some of the top guys do, so you're not alone! That's in comp and street trials. The thing is, these bikes are - for a lot of us - our sole hobby so if you've got the money to spend on stuff like that there's no real problem, assuming the bits themselves are decent quality. I used to have ti bolts all over my bike just because they were nice to have, although now I don't have the odds-and-sods TartyBikes ti bolts stash to choose from my bikes are pretty standard these days As before, over time you'll most likely find that things will wear a bit squarer and the lever should firm up a bit. If the frame is really out then I think TartyBikes have some adaptors for their PM facing tool to fit the random sizes trials brands are pumping out these days, so it might be worth dropping them a line to see if they can sort it out for you.

I was working at TartyBikes when they brought in the revised axle design. From memory, it was due to a production issue with the axles, more specifically with the tooling used for the broaching. There was a conflict between the design of the axle and the tooling used, so the axle design needed to be tweaked. This is why Inspired were replacing any of those original 2020 axles free of charge with the updated designs. It's worth noting that not all of the axles broke though, there are still some going strong out there now. It's weird that you've had one of the new axles break as in my experience at TB once riders had the new ones installed they didn't have any further issues. I expect that that might be why they're suggesting the Pro axle as it's effectively a fail-safe solution, even if the simpler design is slightly less 'refined'. Just going back to what I said in my last post about my mountain bikes, this is my Radon's dropout setup: It effectively works the same way that the Inspired system does in that there's no contact with the frame save for the end cap of the hub and the axle in the threaded insert. My Commencal is the same. To put it another way, it's best to think of the axle as a bolt and the threaded insert as a nut. If you have a bolt passing through an object before going into a nut, you have to drill the hole out to be larger than the bolt. For an M12 bolt (like an axle), that would 13mm at least for a 'close fit'. It looks like the hole for the axle on your frame is larger than that, but essentially if it was 13mm or 130mm it wouldn't make any difference functionally. If the axle's not contacting it, the axle doesn't 'know' it's any different.

Boo! From the fittings or something more serious? If they're from the new ti fittings that's kind of along the lines of my experiences with dealing with companies making those kind of 'upgrade' fittings. Their attention to detail on more intricate/difficult parts like that is often pretty bad, I don't think they necessarily understand the products or purpose of them fully. Things like bolts are a bit more straightforward, but I know we had a few ti brands send us samples at TB and they were a bit sketchy, and even from better known brands we had to be careful before sending stuff out as quite often the more technical/brake specific parts just wouldn't work. Shrouds and stuff are generally fine as they're basic, but it's not worth dicking about with olives, inserts and stuff like that IME. If you can't see them and the weight saving is marginal then it's worth saving yourself time and money by just using the standard fittings.

The frame is designed like that intentionally, it's not a 'design fault' or by accident. If the axle made contact with the bore of the dropout on the drive side, you wouldn't be able to tighten the axle up correctly. It's not unique to Inspired - on both my mountain bikes with through axles there's a similar setup, albeit with a different way of getting to it as they each have bespoke dropout and threaded insert designs. The clearance and securing principle is the same though. The contact between the end of the hub and the insides of the dropout due to axle tension will be enough to keep things in place, so you don't need to have the axle fully in contact with the inside of the frame as it passes through it. That is why it's really important to make sure they're tight though as if the axle isn't tensioned correctly it will be taking more of the load than it should be. On that note, in the photo of the frame it looks like it may have been ridden with it a little loose as there are witness marks from the hub that are elliptical rather than circular: The red circle is about Hope end cap size, and it looks like to the bottom left there's been movement from the way the frame has been marked. It's almost impossible that's just from when the axle broke, it looks like its from repetitive movements over time going by that image. In any case, the Pro axle has more material there, so hopefully that should resolve things. Just make sure you use plenty of grease under the axle head and on the threads, and check it regularly (especially from new).

Haha, fair enough. They'll probably firm up a little once you've used them. Disc brakes are super sensitive to caliper alignment, and if they're even a tiny bit off (which realistically they're always going to be unless you have everything perfectly faced and it's all been made perfectly) you get a decrease in lever feel. Once the pads have bedded in to the rotor that should be lessened because basically it'll have adjusted itself (through the pad braking material) to be as square as possible with the rotor. That's quite often why 4-piston setups feel a bit mushy too. I developed a slightly sticking piston on my MT5s which meant that they weren't all operating evenly, and it made me think the brake had leaked because the lever feel went so squishy and it lost so much power. It's less noticeable with MT7-style individual pads, but for the MT5/Hope style pads that cover both pistons on each side it's more noticeable. My E4 pistons used to get sticky all the time so that might have been having an impact on that too, possibly.

Some of the squish may be in part down to the design of the Trial Zone caliper - from memory, they can splay open a touch when you brake (similar to a 4-bolt frame with no booster) as there's not a huge amount of material in the caliper itself. If the lever's generating more power now it might be exacerbating that aspect of them a bit, and there'll most likely be a bit more flex within the blade itself compared to the old levers. That's interesting to hear about the pads sitting closer to the rotors now. When you've been trying to bleed them, have the pistons been fully retracted into the calipers?

To be fair, Deng died in 2012 and Echo have been doing alright overall since then - not perfectly, but then they weren't before that point either. Hopefully something works out with them either way, thanks for the extra info

Some chrome vinyl stickers might look quite cool on that? Do you know from that person if Echo are fully closed down, or if it's just a continuation of their covid lockdown closures? Hopefully it's the latter rather than the former. They had some swings and some misses over their history, but they put a lot of great bikes out at really good prices.

How are you watching/following it, out of interest?

They'll still be much, much slower feeling than most of the tyres people use for street trials, and will feel pretty sluggish due to the sidewall and compounds too. I got a chance to try out some of the Conti MacAskill tyres when they were first prototyping them, and one of the sets was the same as the other tyres but in the Der Kaiser Black Chilli compound. Even with the rest of the tyre being exactly the same, that Der Kaiser compound tyre rolled noticeably slower and rebounded much slower simply because of the compound. The Der Kaisers always feel fairly lifeless which can be good in some ways, but it'll just feel like an anchor on the back of a streety bike. I suppose the Stiky Lite tyre might not be as bad, but the original Stiky wouldn't be a million miles off that same feeling too. The other thing to bear in mind is when you have a wider rear than front tyre, if you're doing things on two wheels (such as carving into spins) it tends to make the bike handle differently. That's why most street trials bikes have matching tyre sizes front and rear as you get a more predictable ride from it. The last thing to consider is that most street trials setups will have way higher tyre pressures than you'd use on a trials bike, and part of that is puncture protection. You do also need it for stability too, but a lot of it is to prevent pinches. It'd be interesting to know what the Kenda Booster would be like. They're available in 26x2.2 and 26x2.4 in a few different compounds and casings from the look of things.

If they're the same price, the Arcade will be the better value out of those two. You never really know what you're getting with a second hand bike, so if you can get one that's barely been ridden that would always be the preference for me (assuming they're reasonably equal spec wise, which these are). I expect the price of those Raceline brakes is factored in to the overall price of the Fourplay, but you're essentially paying a few extra hundred £s just for the paint on the calipers. If you particularly want neon yellow brakes then cool, but again, when that's on a second hand bike I'd rather that extra cash went into a better condition overall bike rather than some random aesthetic difference. The Arcade will do everything you want it to do. They're heavier than the Fourplay but the geo means they still ride fairly light. You can easily drop half a kilo from that bike weight by switching to some SRAM cranks on the Arcade if you wanted to further down the line. The Arcade does have a slightly more supple ride than the Fourplay thanks to it being steel, which (IMO) is nice.

If you go on social media and search for trials related hashtags you'll find there's a lot of people still out there doing stuff, it's just that not much of it happens on forums any more. Social media has made everyone want to share photos/videos, and a forum isn't the ideal vehicle for that when you've got social platforms with larger audiences with built-in features allowing you to do it. In terms of parts, it's mainly due to the pandemic and the knock-on effects of that (and other stuff going on in the world). Production got seriously delayed for almost all brands, or stopped entirely for others - due to China's zero covid policy Echo shut down super early into the pandemic, and the last thing I know about them was as of January this year they still hadn't been able to re-open their factory. China are still pursuing that method of dealing with the pandemic, so I assume they're still closed down now. Hopefully they'll be able to make it out the other side, but it's a huge financial burden to not be able to produce anything for 2+yrs while still having a factory... Overall though, it is just the delays in production that mean things look slimmed down as far as parts go. Flipp's right in the sense that a lot of people have shifted to bikes like the Crewkerz, Clean and latest-big-on-social-media carbon brands. He's also right about the increase in proprietary parts being fitted to bikes, which in turn mean you're pretty locked into each brand's ecosystem. With Clean (the same is largely true for Crewkerz) as an example, once you've factored in the cost of the frame, the tensioner, the specific hub you need, the specific tensioner, the crankset and so on you're looking at not far off a complete bike price so I think for most people it makes sense to just do it in one. With basically all brands but Inspired selling direct to customer now it's easier to try and get a bit of a deal too.

I've had BMX and MTB cranks that have done similar, so it's not necessarily just a trials thing. My right ankle looks a totally different shape to my left because I kept taking chunks out of it with my Profile cranks, and that was a decade ago. I also did similar a while back with some RaceFace Aeffect cranks. If you have your feet near the crank arm I think it's somewhat of an inevitability, which is presumably why riding-specific shoes for MTB and trials have raised collars around the inside of the ankle area. I would agree though that trials brands tend to be a bit looser with tolerances and what's deemed saleable/acceptable. Some stuff we used to get through was questionable, and we were pretty surprised to see other shops sell them, or sell them without modifying the parts first.

It must be a pretty old one - Speedrace switched to more 'modern' (horizontal dropouts, different headtubes, generally seatless, fancier tubing) frames in 2010-2011 or so from memory. It means being able to ID it will probably be tricky. That said, it looks like you could do whatever you want with it really! The guides under the right side seatstay and the hanger mean you could run gears if you wanted, but you could just as easily set it up single speed. If you're just looking to do trials then SS would be the way to go as it's lighter, simpler, you can put a heavier duty chain on and have a shorter, better tensioned chain. For longevity I would probably go for a V-Brake on the rear. If you go for a disc brake, it'd be best to use a relatively small rotor. They appear to just be catalogue dropouts with a relatively small brace, so if you put a 200mm or something of that size on there, if used for trials moves it'll probably snap the frame pretty quickly.

To be fair, my latest MT5s on my MTB have been really good. Much less hassle than they were on my Arcade at any rate! The MDR-Cs have been on my MTB, I use the Storm HCs on my Arcade and I found they were fine for me. I've used some non-Galfer rotors that had a really similar profile to that and they sucked. The design was different though and I imagine the Galfer rotors will be better quality steel, so hopefully they'll be better

Jeez, setting up MT5s with an even thicker rotor gives me the shivers, haha. If you're looking for a stiffer rotor the MDR-C rotors are really good, although I appreciate there's a bit more weight to them than you're likely to want. I use them with my MT5s and Magura Race pads and they've been sweet. Could never really get on with the Performance pads, they just lacked a bit of 'oomph' for me.

Which brakes are you planning on using them with? The only thing that would put me off them a bit is the surface area of the braking portion of the rotor. Whenever I've tried rotors like that with a lot of material there and/or a fairly consistent outer profile, the bite of the brake has usually suffered. There are those smaller drilled holes, but the bigger cut-outs you get in some Magura/Hope rotors really do allow the brake to bite that much better and give a crisper feel. That material vs. no material is a trade-off though, so at least the hold should be good with them.

The small batches is the problem really - bigger brands came in when the Covid/lockdown bubble started becoming apparent and either increased their production quantities, or waved enough cash around that factories would drop their pre-existing schedules to fit them in. Trials brand orders will most likely be nearer the 'minimum order quantity' side of things for most factories, so if a big cycling brand comes in wanting to expand their quantities it's a no brainer. Less time for the factory having to faff around with stopping production to set up jigs and so on means more money for them, so there's not much incentive for them to honour existing commitments. The smaller brands have no leverage so it's not like they can do much about it. Whatever the root cause, it's certainly not by design! I know when I was still at TB we were expecting Jealousy bikes around mid-to-late 2020, but that got pushed back into early 2021, which became mid-2021, which became late 2021, which became early 2022, which seemingly has been pushed back again until July some time (from Crewkerz social posts). The 2022 Inspired Arcade got launched a month or two ago when it should have been out around the same time as the other 2022 bikes (in late 2021). It's just hard getting things made these days. Even Canyon have suffered with Fabio's bike - they don't have the Tripod saddles available for them that the bike is shown with so are just fitting a basic Pivotal setup instead. In the larger MTB space I've seen a few brands mention they've really struggled to get hold of anything (in mid-2020, SRAM were quoting 400+ day lead times for things like rear mechs, up from 30-40 days). It's definitely not for the want of trying! It's more competitive, but again I think the use cases are a bigger thing. The way a phone operates is fully constrained by the manufacturer, and you're not going to do much else with it. They tightly control which apps can be used on it, and there isn't much leeway for you to do much else with them. That's a little different to a bike brand which sells a bike that an end user might use for nothing more than riding a mile to their shops on a smooth tarmac road, while another end user might go and huck it off some huge drops at a bike park. Couple to that the unrealistic expectation that riders have for warranty replacement - if you drop your iPhone and smash the screen, you don't go to Apple expecting a free replacement. Riders smash their bikes into things and use them in an abusive manner, but then expect a free replacement if something does break. On the thing about a more middle of the road/TGS style frame, I think there's definitely an opening in the market there but I'm not sure how much people would really embrace it. There's still a tendency for trials riders to buy parts that are, realistically, too light (sometimes meaning too weak) for what they really want them for, but weight is still such a driving factor that it's hard to really steer people in a different direction. I'd often get people asking me for advice on parts, I'd know their riding style so I'd suggest something suitable, but they'd wind up buying some light comp stuff because the allure of a light bike was too strong. I think most people want a cheap frame for TGS-y kind of stuff too, and that's just not really doable any more compared to what things were like back in the mid-2000's/early 2010's. Realistically, a frame that was suitable for the bulk of riders out there would wind up being "too heavy", and probably "too expensive". I think it'd also just be a difficult one to spec, too. I imagine most customers for that type of frame would want something like 135mm spacing, but the options for 135mm hubs are really limited now unless you run a rear freehub (much more money, generally more weight). Even a standard non-disc 116 x 10 bolt-in style hub can be pretty hard to find these days, and the ones that are there are somewhat generic catalogue hubs with narrow flange spacing, so aren't necessarily what most riders would really be wanting or needing. BB wise most people would probably want a BSA BB (rather than Spanish, AS30 or whatever else people are using press-fit as the options for cranks are restrictive and expensive), but again there's diminishing options available for suitable parts for them. The geometry would be difficult too as some riders want a comp-y setup with a high BB, whereas others want a more moderate geo with a mid-height BB (40-60mm). There's no real way of winning that, and whatever you do will immediately alienate a chunk of your already fairly small market. It's a shame as I do think that a lot of riders would be better served by something like that, but I can see why no brands are really looking to take the plunge, especially with how hard it is to even get their normal product lines made these days. EDIT: This "how would you spec _____" chat is one we'd quite often have about cheap, entry level bikes too. With Onza not really being as involved in the trials world any more there's a real gap in the market for a cheap, beginner bike to get people into trials, but with how expensive things are in general now you have to really cut corners on the spec to make something happen, and even then it winds up falling into the kind of territory where - if you can find one - a second hand bike will make it look really poor value and spec in comparison.

I forgot to say, but that's all it is. They can claim the frame is 'updated', even though it's the same tubeset as it was when it was released 7-8 years ago. It's a pity Jitsie haven't spent the same amount of time designing their products as they have designing endless colourways for their rider outfits. They have a lot of resources at their disposal to really move things forward, but make the most basic bike you'll see at a World Cup.