Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
Five lucky people will be selected at random to win a Vital MTB t-shirt.
Thanks in advance,
The Vital MTB Crew
Realistically, they aren't.
You can already order a ton of competent bikes directly from the likes of Carbonda for excellent prices, but by the time you, as a consumer, build everything up, you often don't really end up that far ahead. There's a community that likes to play around with this stuff but pure financial reasons shouldn't be the motivation. Further, those of us in the community continue to see questionable or outright baffling choices all the time well into 2025.
As soon as you add the overhead involved on getting these bikes to non-savvy consumers in a format that most of the industry can handle, you're going to be in line with many of the lower end of the DTC brands - many of which are essentially already taking Chinese frames, slapping their logos on them, and adding in the overhead involved in getting the bikes to non-savvy consumers. Examples of companies that did this include Nukeproof and Evolve - look how that worked out. Were those bikes good deals? Yeah. Were they mind-blowing, industry shattering deals? Hell no.
There's a few cool things floating around. A company has something that looks like a high pivot Nukeproof Mega, it looks amazing. So does what you posted. Da Bomb has managed to find someone making high pivot Norco Sight and Range clones, and guess what, they look really good too. But so far, no real impact on the industry.
side note - CC recently updated eewings to the sram 8 bolt mount.
Wheelsets only or rims too? I wanted to sandblast the EX511s for my current bike 2 years ago but then there were so many problems executing that that I gave up...
How many Chinese actually ride MTB? I guess a lot more are into road cycling and if true, that shows. They are pressuring classic brands in the road market more and more, wheels are being developed left and right there.
If you're not into the scene, you can't do anything else but follow, which is what we are seeing more or less. So I'd be conservative and say it will take a while for MTB (in general) or at least longer than for the road scene...
"easy to bleed" it's just a plain lie, ok, with skills you can do everything, but a Intend brake is easy to bleed, if you need to do this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5lD1eUBYyl/ to remove air it's everything but easy and just bad design at this point, copy 99% and you skip the part where they put the bleed port in the best position to remove all the air?
As someone who runs Trickstuff, Lewis, SRAM and Shimano brakes across my fleet of bikes, I would consider Lewis brakes to be on the "easier side" of bleeding. I am also very pleased with my Lewis LHT's.
Side side note: They also updated the fixing bolt to 8mm (so no more 14mm hex) BUT it's not backwards compatible.
The CC CSR I talked to said he was on a personal mission to get them to update that to make it fit the older cranks, so give them them a call and let them know if you want that too!
Would very much like to switch both my sets of eewings from 14mm bolts to 8mm. I posted as much on their fb. I will drop them an email too I reckon.
10-4, thanks for clarifying your thoughts. And yes I am aware of tubes and their use in bicycle construction. I guess I was thinking you may have meant that crank "tubes" remain cylindrical instead of being shaped because hollow "tubular" cranks have been around for a long time.
I made an adapter from a RF adapter. Used a bench grinder to turn it into 14mm(ish). https://www.raceface.com/products/tool-8-16mm-hex-adapter?srsltid=AfmBO…
Every 18 months I poke CC about a steel Ewing... tooling is the big issue.
I come here for the pictures of cool stuff not the endless chat about horrible looking cranks which the majority people won’t buy, can we please move on!?!
we are so close to the first WC pit bits of the season I’m getting a warm fuzzy feeling in my pants
Some neat stuff in here. I know Vital doesn't have the budget to send someone to China for an extended period of time, but would be interesting to have a series covering the China scene (riders, small builders, trails etc).
Would also be cool if some more info is shared regarding the products, or at least if there are websites of the manufacturers. For example, several frames are pretty interesting (ok, the high- and mid-pivot ones 😃), with bombastically-low prices, and one cannot check their details or try to buy. It’s like “see, here’s some pretty good product for an absolute bargain of a price… yeah, you can’t order, you can only watch pics!” 😅
Chinese trade shows apparently make good games of "name the knock-off"
I had the oringal eewings with the 8mm. After they’d been on for a while i came super close rounding that thing off. Made sure I used a lot of the ti prep (copper grease) on it after that. The 14mm one was much better and its not hard to find tools when you look outside of the bike world.
can anyone identify what RR has on his bike instead of an ochain? it‘s not rimpact…
Yeti Switch Infinity Chainring
Power2Max power meter.
@krabo83 It´s a power2max system, i build a few XC Bikes for a German Team and they use them too.
are you gen z? do you need help in how to use a search engine?
The original 8mm bolt was made of titanium. Titanium bonds to the crank and is softer than steel. That is why they changed to a 14mm steel bolt. If you are interested in a 8mm steel bolt check this
£85 for a bolt.
correct
Made in Zürich...
They will considered it but will not update it. They want to sell "new" cranks.
Check my bolt that is retro compatible.
£55 gets me a whole SLX crankset with a chainring and I have £20 left for a few pints at the pub. That is a challenging value proposition for a relatively simple turned metal part. Appreciate we are talking about a part for a £1000 titanium crankset.
Wonder if they're using the same crown as used on their 1.8 bottom steerers. From a mfg standpoint, having one crown to rule em all makes a lotta sense financially.
£1200ish now and they have a stupid 30mm spindle so you bb bearings are tiny.
Possibly it's the 1.8 crown forging, it's not massively different to the original one so hard to know without being able to compare. As you say, simplifying the number of crown forgings makes good sense.