This week the reality of what I do on a day to day basis filled up my living room. 10 boxes of 2011 year samples fresh off the plane from Taiwan. All new 10 speed drive-trains from Shimano, wheels from Easton, and DTSwiss and more stuff than I can poke a large stick at. And no, you can’t have any of it, because 1. it’s not mine and 2. it probably is the only representation of these parts in the country. Ultimately though, for anyone into bikes, this is really like a bit of a fantasy follow up from being at the Taipei Cycle Show back in March and I know just how lucky I am to be in this position.
But there is more to this that a bike porno on my living room floor. A big part of my role at Mountain Cycle is ‘product manager’, in other words, the dude who makes to call as to what parts go on the coming year’s bikes. At first it sounds like a trip in the candy store but after you get into it, pour over spreadsheets and try to determine what will make someone buy your bike over the other (or not), it becomes a lot more serious. After all it’s all about the end number and speccing what would be your ideal bike when it’s your own cash and you are building one, in fact is something very different when you are speccing for 1000 bikes.
As I mentioned in by post about the Taiwan Cycle Show, there is a dearth of stuff available, more than you can ever know what to do with. Some of it defies imagination some of it is total crap and some of it is really cool. Interestingly when you look at what bikes come build with, one has to wonder why some of this cool kit never sees the light of day on bike shop floors. For all intents and purposes, what we see year after year is pretty much the same stuff, different graphic, different colour.
I don’t have an answer as to why this is the case. I have my suspicions, especially after working within the machine of the bike industry but I’ll leave them as that. What I do know though is that the ‘omni branded bike’ as I am calling it, is limiting some of lesser known, yet rather cool stuff that actually will make your riding better.
In my 10 boxes of stuff that I have been sifting through are several small packs of grips. I remember the meeting with the company, where we saw pretty much every style, type and form of grip you could ever think of. We also saw grips you could never think of, some really ‘whack shit’. Our search was supposed to be simple, find some lock on grips, like everyone else does. I mean, that’s what everyone else does, right?
In the line up though several grips took my eye. The first was a pair of lock on ‘foamies’. If you do a lot of XC, you’ll know that your hands get sore and the majority of lock on grips do nothing to help that. Oury have always been the choice of the astute but foam grips are the next step. The pair I was playing with felt really good but not being on a bar, you can never really tell. The second pair was a real blast, lock on grips they were but wrapped in bar tape. Yes road bike bar tape. Any bar tape, put it on the grip and off you go. The idea was novel but had a lot of merit. The wood grain tape was just trippy!
At the end of the meeting we organise samples of the boring, what everyone does grips, you’ll what they are as they are probably on your bike now, and I organise samples of the foamies and the taped versions.
Today I pulled them out of the box and put them on a couple of Easton bars to see if they still felt as good as they did sitting around a meeting table. To my surprise (and relief) they actually felt better. Lockon grips that are actually soft, that’s a novel thing and something I am sure many riders will love. I am so impressed with these grips that I have selected them for the 2011 bikes. And there’s the thing. I know I’ll get some flack for it from sales, not because they suck, which they don’t but because they are not like everything else on the market and different is, different. As we all know, different is scary.
So what’s the moral of this tale? None as such, other than different is good and I feel many product managers out there should try it on rather than take the easy road of the ‘omni branded bike’. It’s one thing to say spec only what people want to buy, but how do they know if you only offer them the same thing year in year out?
Mr Paul Smith’s winter journey from Waimarama, Hawkes Bay to Karori, Wellington. 28/29 June 2010
30 hours door to door, 15 hours day one (13 hours riding), 290 km, 8 hours day two (7 hours riding), 130 km, 7 hours mid-ride rest and sleep, 1 hour fog, 7 hours sun, 3 hours overcast, 5 hours rain, 7 hours darkness, 40km state highway, 30km urban roads, 300km rural backroads, 40km off-road path, 10km singletrack, 0 freewheels, 1 gear (42:17), 1 toolkit, 1 sleeping bag, 1 set warm clothes, 1 toothbrush and toothpaste, 2 rear lights, 3 front lights, 5 muffins, 1 cooked breakfast, 8 salami sandwiches, 1 panini, 1 cinnamon loaf and jam, 1 dutch honey loaf, 1 portion hot chips, 12 litres water, 4 espressos, 1 chocolate milkshake, 4 hills too steep to ride up, 6 hills too steep to ride down (without dragging brakes), 4 disused railway tunnels, 8 logging trucks, countless friendly greetings, 0 close calls with traffic, 1 close call with an angry dog, 1 close call with American tourists (in a disused railway tunnel), 1 hour riding at night with no lights, 0 punctures, 0 mechanical problems, 0 house keys (forgotten), 1 hour frustration trying to remember where the spare key was, 4 numb fingers, 2 bruised buttocks, 1 sense of satisfaction, 2 well-earned beers.
I told myself a little while back that I was going to only try and post meaningful discourse (to me in anyway) or entertaining/inspirational things. Prolly will last about a month and then I’ll start throwing up random shite again.
I stumbled on this this morning doing the rounds. As per my post about iPod apps I like and use, this one’s really interesting in helping people work out all those little niggles on their bike. The concept is totally interesting and signifies just where media is heading, especially the media that Apple (love them or hate them) is moving into the market. What I find most interesting about this is where once you had a book, which might or might not have been out of date or was soon to become so, this App should and could in theory always be up with all the latest. What’s more, unlike a book, you can have this with you when you need it most… when you are out on the bike. The interactivity is also far more intuitive than trying to leaf through a book to find a particular niggle, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and a picture that goes ‘bing’ is worth who knows how much?
Over the years I have written numerous bits about the (lack) of service from bike shops. It’s not a pet peeve but it does get my back up, after having spent the past 10 odd years selling to the ‘cycling community’ and now being on the front line, steering a mountain bike marquee. So that I am writing about it again, in a sad sort of way, tells me that for some of the ‘bike shops’ out there, how they view their customers could be similar to the way I view their so called customer service.
It was time to buy the Lad his first real bike. The past year or so in his ‘like-a-bike’ proved time well spent as his sense of balance grew to the point that he needed something more to do than push. Now I know buying a ‘kid’s bike’ is fraught with all sorts of dangers, mostly to do with the total crap they pass off as kid’s bikes these days. So rather than going to some big box store and picking one up cheap, I decided to the the ‘right thing’ and go to my local bike shop… LBS. Now where I live in Sydney I have several choices. Towards the city, down Oxford Street, is the well executed store that’s bang on the demographic for the areas it’s in. They have kid’s bikes but based on my past experiences with them, their ‘too cool for school’ attitude, means you basically have a target painted on you the minute you walk in (read paying them $100 service charge for shortening brake hoses), so there was little chance I was going back. The other option was the smaller, much less cool shop in the opposite direction up in Bondi Junction, where I bought the ‘like-a-bike’ in the first place. They seemed OK then, so why not again?
Be it a mistake or not, a week ago I headed down with the Lad to scope out the options. While there was next to no choice, something that didn’t bug me because at that level and price, the only thing that changes is the colour, we found a bike that looked like it fitted the bill. We (the Lad and I) stood around, looked at the blue and decided the green rocket on it is a definite feature. The (what I presume was the owner) and I discussed the machinations of kid’s bikes, had a look at the 2010 colour options and decided that with a wee discount, the blue was not a bad option. More to the point, the Lad decided that the blue was the go… but I think that was more because he thought liking the colour there and then would deliver some instant gratification. Well, no, the shop guy (SG) said he’d build a fresh one sans training wheels and if he could find one, throw on a kick stand instead. Good deal as I noticed some nice scratches on the floor model.
A week later and I realise I’d better go get the bike, there was riding to be had on the weekend! Back to the shop on the Thursday afternoon to pick up the bike I put a deposit on but what panned out I have grown increasingly pissed off about.
With a smile I say that I’m there to collect the bike I ordered the previous week. What I got back was that a new one was not built, as promised, because when the time came there was not one in stock to be built (so much for onscreen inventory). Apparently the distributor as well was plum out, though at the time the SG thought they had a wad of stock and was considering picking the lot up. Instead I was getting the one on the floor. OK, right. Sort of unimpressed because if this was the case, he made no effort to call me and ask me if I’d be happy with that – they had all my contact details and there’s a big difference between a brand new one and a floor model, especially when it has scratches; but maybe he thought the wee little discount (for last year’s stock) meant he didn’t have to? Running the sale through the till, I expected a better discount, the SG may not have noticed at the time, but originally I noticed the floor model had a $165 price tag on it. Instead, they tried to run it through at the ‘new’ price, quite a bit more than the sticker price which had since been removed from the frame.
“So that’s the price for the scratches too?” I jibed to the nice chap behind the counter.
“That bike has no scratches, I put it together before the gentleman arrived”, SG says from behind the work stand.
So I walk over, get the bike and point out the scratch that’s down to the metal on the head tube. “Oh yea… OK, I’ll take another $5 off”
!!
The final price was around $50 odd more than the original sticker price of the ‘floor model’. No small amount when the entire bike was sub $300.
I feel pissed that I was ‘taken’. Maybe not intentionally, that’s a speculation, but taken definitely by a ‘they are schmucks so won’t notice’ attitude held by a segment who work in bike shops, SG being one such person. I could have made more of a deal about it and if the bike was a bigger bike I would have. But I get the feeling SG knew I needed the bike, knew the Lad had his heart on it and knew I’d ultimately go with it to not let the Lad down. In other words, I think he knew he was taking me for a ride (no pun intended). And he got away with it. What shits me more is that today, when out and about with the bike, I noticed several other to the metal scratches on the frame, not to mention the shitty assembly job I discovered when doing some adjustments.
When I walked in the shop originally, he was bemoaning to another customer the fact that he recently had to relocate and rent was costing him double and while I guess there are shafters in every segment of society, I hate seeing it in the bike industry because there is no need for it. Instead though of choosing to do a stellar job in keeping me as a customer, SG chose to shaft me and as a result I’ll never set foot in the shop again, period.
The upside of all of this is that the Lad loves his bike and has a brand new head bruise to prove it. He didn’t notice the scratches and I made sure everything else was right. I think he’ll be a rocket when he finds his wings and really, his smile is that’s all that counts :)
I was in the shower and the thought crashed out of the sky on me – “did we allow for sag in the head angle?” (we all have moments like these in the shower, don’t we?). Over to Skype to call up Mr. X and a conversation something like this ensued (rather abridged):
Me: “Did we adjust for sag at the head angle?”
X: “No, we don’t really allow for that.”
Me: “Well, that means when we say 70 degrees, it’s not, it’s 70 less whatever it slackens by whatever when the shock allows for sag.”
X: “It’s not a problem, because everyone does it. To change that would mean that that the buyer has no benchmark ie. your 70 will be different from everyone else’s.”
Me:”OK, I can see that…”
And I did. But when I thought about it some more, accepting this status quo is even more wrong than when I first thought about it.
OK, so what am I talking about?
Back in the days when there was no rear suspension, when you claimed that your bike had a 71 degree head tube, that’s what it had because the rear end did not sag when you sat on the bike. Today though, with full suspension bikes, when you sit on the bike the rear end (on a well designed bike) will sag X amount to create what is called negative travel. Negative travel is critical for suspension as it allows the wheel to stay in contact with the ground by loading the rear wheel. A side effect of this is that the head angle slackens by an amount and our 71 degrees slackens off to maybe 69, maybe less. See the issue?
The argument that was proposed to me was that because no one allows for this and states the head angle for FS bikes in the ‘unloaded’ state, there is no point stating the factual angle as it will confuse people when they try different bikes – a true 71 will be different to a ‘claimed’ 71. That’s a fair enough argument and if every bike on the market was a full suspension frame, then it would not be an issue. It occurred to me though that hardtails still account for many bike sales, so therefore the angles stated for FS bikes can not be used to compare against handling characteristics of hardtails.
Right, I’m hearing you saying “so what?”.
Well, that’s a fair question but as I spoke about in my last piece, MTB Misinformation, discrepancies like this only add to confuse and make it difficult to make fair and baseline comparisons between bikes of various brands. Like trying to ‘factualise’ numerous claims made by marketing departments in regards to suspension designs, I think there needs to be a more open and clear way to compare the various design and performance characteristics. ‘Reach and Stack’ is one such attempt to sort out sizing between all manufacturers of mountain bikes, initiated by Turner and transition Bikes. ISIS previously and BB30 now are attempts to standardise bottom brackets and while for a period there was some harmony, it’s on for young and old again as ‘the boys’ are at it with their respective 10 speed systems – which are also tied to BB shell specifications. It’s become such a mess now that manufacturers themselves are in the dark with some electing to design and allow for one and forget about the other, as by allowing for one, you can’t easily allow for the other. To make matters worse, a particular 2×10 engineering spec goes so far as to make designing an effective FS bike for it increasingly difficult making life difficult for their key customers, the OEM companies!
Madness!
From where I sit, I’d like to be able to line three bikes up and look at the specs for each and get a solid feeling for how they are actually going to perform before I get on them. Right now, I can grab a hard tail and know it will perform in a particular manner just by looking at the numbers, making comparing hardtails easy. If I hop on a FS with similar geometry though, the way it will behave will be guess work until ride time. This makes the task of buying difficult as I either have to guess and hope for the best, spend a lot of time riding a lot of different bikes, which is very difficult, or buy something and hope there is not something closer to my liking. Personal experience tells me that looking at the current claims of figures for most bikes tells me very little about how the bike will feel or ride.
I might be alone in this, I might not be. Judging from some of the comments made by various people I work with, I think there is a feeling for a factual comparison system and less of the deeply seeded marketing hype one that surrounds the industry currently. I personally don’t feel accepting the accepting the status quo is a good enough reason to stay with something, especially if it is counter to what should be best practice, or to the detriment of the end buyer.
“Never again”. It was early May 2008, and I’d just completed the Moonride 24 race in Rotorua, solo. I should have been ecstatic. I finished second solo overall and first (probably only) singlespeed. The physical and mental fatigue had overwhelmed me though. It was a tough race. Torrential rain fell for 12 hour prior to the start and turned the Rotorua trails into a quagmire. Rain was still falling as the pedals turned at 10pm, and it continued for the next six hours. By dawn, the rain, mud and late autumn cold had got to me and my short planned break to change clothes turned into over an hour of shivering in the van, trying to get some feeling back in my left foot. There were still 15 hours to go. The race did get better from there: the rain was replaced by sunshine, the course dried out and the pace quickened. It wasn’t exactly easy though, and having to ride the last five hours in the dark and cold again really wasn’t amusing.
Fast forward to August 2009 and I’d spent a year of infrequent riding and a loss of motivation for most things mountain bike. The Moonride felt like a last fling, and family expansion meant playtime focussed on children, not bikes. I reached a decision point. You might call it a mid-life riding crisis. My weight was creeping up and I got frustrated pushing up hills I used to be able to ride, and descending at the reduced speed that my rusty bike handling skills allowed. I enjoy riding so much more when I can actually ride. So I set myself a goal. I decided to race in the 2010 24 Hours of Adrenalin, the Solo World Championships. I have secured a place on the start line in October (through my previous 24 racing results), my entry is all paid up, and flights to Canberra are booked. The words “never again” have been repeated to me many times since by family and friends.
After 20 years on various mountain bikes, my riding has become simple and very defined. I search for a purity of riding experience. I want to feel and interact with the terrain. I demand an element of craftsmanship in my riding. I choose to ride a rigid single-speed bike, and I have no plans to change that. So it goes without saying that I’ll be racing in the single-speed class. Riding for 24 hours on a rigid single-speed is pretty unique and fortunately, for someone like me who loathes the idea of training, it lends itself to a unique preparation. My plan is simple. The race will require physical and mental toughness, so my preparation must develop this. The bulk of my riding will be done on my race bike, mainly because it is my only mountain bike. It will involve short fast rides at night, slogging up hills and undertaking long hard days in the saddle. For a little respite and to deal with a damp and blowy Wellington winter, I’ll turn to my other bike––an old fixed-wheel roadie. There’ll be plenty of riding with friends, and always room for just having fun on a bike.
Believe it or not (and I’m not sure I do) I’m actually looking forward to this. The last 8 months have reminded me how much fun mountain biking is. I’ve rediscovered how satisfying it is to get leaner and fitter, and to be able to ride harder, more frequently and for longer. Now that winter is here, I’m going to embrace this slight sense of masochism and enjoy my riding.
Footnote: Paul Smith is our…. well, we don’t actually have a name for what Paul does for Lab-Gear! We ‘met’ Paul quite a few years back, when he was running ‘Essence Bicycle’, importing Pace and Cotic into New Zealand. Before that, when he was living in the UK, he was an avid Lab-Gear customer. We kept in touch on and off over the years but this year, while chatting about the various things we are both doing, it came up that he had become one of the official nutters out there.
Long story short, Paul is our official, unofficial, how ever you want to look at it, NZ trail rep and kit abuser. He will be telling tales, big and small, of his adventures in NZ and further abroad as he preps up for his launch on the Solo Worlds. If you’re in NZ, say hey if you see him on the trails – he might just whip something out of his wallet for you!?!?!
To those who know me, you’ll know that for quite some time there was a definite lull in my getting on a bike. Almost like trying to get a clapped out Vespa going, over the past few years it was a bit cough, splutter, cough, wheeze… stall.
For some reason though, while up in Queensland last Christmas, I decided out of the blue to get up early and go for a ride on Christmas morning; it probably had something to do with the impending Christmas onslaught and bizzare lack of daylight saving, meaning at 5am it was light and already 20 odd degrees. That first ride, which had me discovering off-road track right next to the famous Gold Coast beach line was like a total engine rebuild and I ended up getting out pretty much every day afterward up on the Sunshine coast, rain or not.
Since then, other than a few weeks around the time I went over to the Taipei Cycle Show, I have been turning the wheels and been good about going to the gym on a regular basis. Now that it’s become cold, that motivation has definitely waned and I have not been out on the bike for a few weeks. This is not to say the legs are not turning, they are, just indoors on the bike at the gym. I am damned sure riding one of those things for 45-50 minutes is harder than riding an actual bike, because there is no ‘coast time’, it’s just pedal, pedal, pedal….. maybe that’s the attraction to single speeding? None the less, if it has not been the bike or the gym, then out the door and walking, so that 4-5 days a week, something has been happening.
But why the sudden burst that’s now in its sixth month? Well, I am beginning to think that age has something to do with it and after moving past a ‘certain age’, you suddenly realise that waiting another few months to get back on the wagon only makes it that much harder physically and worse, mentally. I have seen it before in people that I know, when that age came along it was as if a rocket was lit under their arse. For some it lasted, for others it fizzled. None the less it happened and I am wondering if that’s happening to me? A plus too I have found in all of this is that after all those years you know what your body is doing and when something goes wrong, rather than trying to fight it and make it worse, you have a more sane view and realise the faster road is to back off and let get better rather than fight it.
What’s more, that damned donut you ate takes three times the effort to loose… and who wants to give up donuts?
Next month I take delivery of the first production sample Mountain Cycle. Not a full susser but a carbon hardtail which I’ll be running with a rigid carbon fork and 2×10 as an urban menace. I have a feeling that this will be a turning point in my riding because I have not had an officially light bike for years – maybe 5? Pushing a big 6″ bike around with 1×9 gearing might get you fit but it’s as engaging on the road as watching paint dry and while I have a little section of singletrack worked out in the local park, after a few weeks it gets a little old. The idea of getting back on a bike that’s fast I am finding intoxicating and in a childish sort of way, July for me is almost like Christmas when you’re a child; I’m thinking that I might actually get back to riding some of the old road loops I used to years back.
Bike aside, I am thinking I am on the wagon once again. After six months, it’s got to the point that if I don’t do something each day, I’ll go a little potty and it gets worse… if I have not spun the legs for a few days, I start loosing the plot and that’s the sure sign of being back on board. Most importantly though is that the bike is fun again, not a pain, and riding up the hills around here does not leave me thinking I’m about to expire but rather wondering where that strength has come from. It’s even got me thinking about events later in the year, and that is something I have not done for a very long time.
So is there a morale to this blurb? Maybe. If there is it’s that maybe getting older has its advantages… maybe.
I am a little chuffed today as a project that has taken us something in the vicinity of 8 months or so now moves to the next stage, as the factory prepares to quote for the production of two of the key 2011 Mountain Cycle frames.
It’s been a lot of work, a lot of money but the end results, or those so far, are pretty damn cool; at least everyone so far seems to think so. But what is a little saddening is that despite the fact that the head engineer is responsible for some of the most renowned bikes on the market today, we all know that people will question what we have done, not because they know different but because they have consistently been fed a load misinformation, masked thinly as fact, by marketing departments over the years. So thorough has this information been that I would hazard a guess that that an entire swag of today’s mountain bikers don’t actually understand why their bike stays upright, or at least not in a real world sense.
As part of the line launch, a new site is being designed for Mountain Cycle and a key component of this will be a section dedicated to explaining the dynamics and structure of bicycles, or pretty much any two wheeled vehicle. Putting the section together has been a re-education for me, as I have not studied these texts in detail for quite a few years, so creating it has been a refresher course in dynamics – something I have not looked at since my days obsessing over motos in Italy. The end goal though is to create a completely neutral presentation of the information, distilled from a number of texts and keeping to the ‘real’ physics, not some imagined ‘marketing dynamics’. I’ll give all the sources and associated ISBN’s so people can go look it up for themselves.
After I completed the first draft, I handed it over to Mr. X, our engineer just to make sure I was not off the mark and luckily I have not been. What is most striking though is how it belittles so many of the claims touted as fact in order to sell new bikes. As I switched between texts and broke the, often complex, information down into something that is easy to read, it became very clear that claims made by some as ‘fact’ is nothing more than sham. It’s not that I have found some holy grail, far from it, it’s more that the claims made by some that seemingly now have become ‘lore’ simply defy the laws of physics. It reminds me of a conversation I had with an ‘informed’ and oten published mountain biker years back, who point blank refused to accept the principle of counter steer, the most basic of the physics forces that affect a bike. He had been told otherwise by someone in the ‘industry’, so how could I be right? I have an equation somewhere that says why but that’s not the point. Marketing hype overruled the laws of physics.
It’s all a little alarming.
I am not going to ‘publish’ the info I’ve compiled just yet, that’s due in September. But the next time you read an advert that makes claims about suspension, braking, whatever, have a good long think about it – if what they are telling you sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
We have had to make the call earlier than expected. After spending the past hour checking the forecasts, we are not comfortable proceeding. The BOM is saying anything from 15-50mm of rain tomorrow for the Newcastle region.
Even if there are only light showers tomorrow, we prefer not to run the event and prevent any damaged to the trails such wet conditions cause. We are also sure you’d all prefer not to destroy several hundred dollars of dirvetrain and brake parts.
ALL entries will automatically be transferred to the August 21st VVC. For those that can not transfer, please notify us immediately and we will issued a full refund.
So BMW are about to drop this on its customer base and have even stuck the legendary ‘M’ badge on it. But SLX cranks and not so great forks?
It tells me that either BMW really does think their customer base has more money than common sense OR they need to learn how to spec a bike to the level of their M cars.
On the upside, it’s a sorta interesting design… at least one that will get you some attention.
It’s few and far between when one comes into contact with a product in the bike world that is 100% truly fresh. The PCB or ‘Pancake Brake’ by Ashima is one such product. Yes, it’s a disc brake but it’s unlike most others on the market not by what it does but in the way it does it.
And now for a bit of drivel…
Traditionally a disc brake applies force via a piston, housed within the body of the caliper. The piston is pushed out by the ‘brake fluid’ in the system, exerting a force on the rotor via the brake pads. This is the principle that pretty much all disc brakes use, from cars to motorcycles and mountain bikes, and a disc brake for the most part is a fairly simple hydraulic mechanism. A well designed system allows for a progressive application of force, so the more you apply pressure (by pulling in the lever), the greater the force applied, much like a vice. This is commonly known as ‘modulation’.
But in any hydraulic system the fluid within is prone to expansion when exposed to extended periods of heat and for a brake system, that can be exposed to prolonged heat (via the metal pistons) through things like heavy and constant application, this can cause issues as the expanding fluid pushes the pistons out into the rotor, radically reducing ‘modulation’ as well as power. One could also say that this problem is not helped by the fact that disc brake systems on a mountain bike are teeny weeny when compared to their bigger brothers, so the problems are amplified.
The Ashima PCB though is quite a radical departure from this in that they do away with the pistons and instead apply the force via a membrane that effectively replaces what would otherwise be 20mm traditional pistons. Pretty neat. To keep things really short, advantages of the PCB are claimed as:
- With no pistons, you loose the main mechanism to transfer heat to the fluid.
- Being a membrane that’s expanded under pressure, the membrane elasticity has an inherent memory, so the pads will always retract to .7mm.
- The fluid flow has been designed to be single path, meaning that from start to end, it flows in one direction, on a single path; most brake calipers use pathways within the body to channel the fluid to the pistons. It also allows for a thin body as well as the ability to locate the hose on the left or right of the body.
- One way flow means bleeding is dead simple too and with the Ashima bleed kit, will change the way you think about bleeding a brake.
- The fluid transfer tube, that red tube that passes the fluid from one side of the caliper body to the other, also helps cool the fluid.
I could go on about the technicality of it all but the most important thing is how do they actually work in every day use?
I strapped my test units to my 6″ dually that I use for pretty much everything at the moment and they replaced my Hope Moto M4 and Moto Mini, running 180 and 160mm rotors respectively; I fitted a 160mm Hope rotor to the front and crappy 160mm Shimano Deore to the rear, though the PCB will ship with the Ashima AiRotors (180mm front/160mm rear) which I feel will only add to the overall performance. For the records I weigh in at 97kg (213lbs) in full ride gear.
Accustomed to 4 generations of Hope brakes, the first thing that struck me with the PCB was the way the master cylinders sat away from the bars. There’s nothing new or strange here, Hayes, Formula and others use similar designs but for a first timer to this, it seemed odd. I do have to chuckle when I hear people comment how such designs are prone to tree damage as to me, if you are hitting a tree hard enough and front on like that, your brakes surviving are the least of your problems.
Once fitted, lever reach was easy to adjust and with the new blade design fitted, I could dial the reach to just the way I like it. During a ride the brake levers were comfortable and I think I am actually a bit of a convert to this style of design as it gave me a little more hand clearance than more compact units. In terms of the master cylinder and lever design, what did I like?
- Easy reach adjustment.
- The nice rubber lined clamp.
- The all aluminium piston shaft (the shaft from the blade to the body) body housing with internal ball to allow smooth action.
- Considered anodised bolts.
On my first ride I realised the new sintered pads needed bedding in but once done, over a period of weeks I have been riding the brakes through a range of different conditions but mostly the sort of riding I would do on a typical ride – a selection of XC single track, ranging from fast and flowing to tight and rough as well as hard steep braking on the road, where the tyres grip hard and tax brakes. It should also be noted that we have had a second pair tested on a 8.5″ DH bike in DH use.
Once bedded in I have found that the brakes offer plenty of power, even through a 160mm front rotor. Admittedly ‘brute’ pull up power was not as firm as running through a 180mm but I put this down directly to the rotor size, not the power of the brake itself. In tight singletrack, where one can often find the need to brake hard to snap a corner, the PCB worked very well providing ample power which is evident by the fork dive under application. Certainly when I needed to stop, I stopped and did so without thought. I should note that on a lighter XC rig, running pure XC use, the 160mm rotor would actually be a perfect blend of weight, power and feel.
Modulation has been good from the start and I am not sure if it’s me becoming more accustomed to the brake or if under more use it’s hitting its strides but I feel that modulation has been improving with each ride. Generally the more you pull the lever in, the more bite you get as it firms up so it’s easy to gauge the amount of power you’re putting into the units – the PCB system does not suffer from the on/off feel of some brakes on the market.
Perhaps the best way to describe the overall performance is that I feel one should not have to ‘think’ about the brakes working – they should transfer what you are thinking to the motion of the bike seamlessly. In my view, the PCB did this perfectly and the only time they didn’t was when I expected the grab of a 180mm rotor failing to remember they were grabbing a 160mm. Even then, I feel that they easily out performed my previous brakes both in terms of modulation and lever feel.
Reports back to me in terms of use under DH conditions are that after bedding in they performed well and pulled the bike up without issues. The second two stage brake Ashima is working on I feel will be the perfect DH companion due to the reported insane amounts of power they deliver. For now, my personal view is that the PCB system is a strong viable alternative to other brakes on the market for everything up to heavy trail/AM use – use it and be happy!
I’ll admit I have remiss in updates of late. It’s partly because I am really trying to find interesting/entertaining stuff to post here rather than the next latest thing from one of the ‘big S’s', and partly because in dealing with said stuff everyday, you realise it’s just not really that interesting; in some respects you learn that some of it is just plain daft.
This though IS interesting. As we all are victims to wanting a cool bike, which usually involves spending lots of money (once equated to $100/gram for components and $1000/0.5lbs for a frame) we loose sight of just why bikes are cool. I’m not talking about those twats on pimped out fixies in Sydney in skinny jeans who can’t ride up, and sometimes down, a hill, who think they are cool. I am talking base line cool, like when you were a kid and a bike gave you freedom and doing up your bike was not about the latest bit of machined cool for $500 but about some paint or other basic thing you could afford at the time.
This vid is about that. Watch it and reflect a little, it’s worth the effort.
