All

Porsche-inspired Propain at Crankbrothers Crankbrothers always has the coolest one-off builds at Sea Otter. This year it's a Porsche-inspired Propain.

Brembo GR-PRO I got to see the new Brembo GR-PRO brakes in real life, and while the master cylinder is larger, and the red doesn't help hide their size, the brakes do look incredibly clean. Quick hit notes from chatting with them: There are three lever adjustments: reach adjust is tool-free, and then you have tooled lever ratio (3 positions) and dead stroke adjustments. The leverage ratio affects how quickly the power engages during the initial lever stroke, but power builds consistently throughout the stroke in each position. They found that Specialized Gravity riders all run slightly different lever ratios...

Brembo has officially arrived in mountain biking: https://www.vitalmtb.com/news/press-release/brembo-now-makes-brakes-mou….

How many of us would have instantly paid $350 to have this when we were balls deep on the first CC install 🤣

Maybe Knolly can sue Cannondale before it gets released…

One challenge with low volume apparel is amortizing the development cost. Soft goods sometimes cost more to develop than hard goods as it's a ton of labor making patterns, sewing up samples, testing, reworking the protos, repeat this several times, then have the factory make a few pre-production samples to make sure they interpreted your tech pack correctly. You also need to validate for durability (all brands do this, right? RIGHT?). It's as much voodoo as it is hard science, which means lots of back and forth. Yes, we give them CAD files for patterns, but it's still all hand...

Last year, for one of my engineering classes I did a simulation in Ansys titled “The influence of the axle diameter on the torsional stiffness in an USD bicycle fork”. It was an exercise more focused on Ansys, not on being scientific, but still the results were interesting. Here’s a link to the presentation . TLDR: 20mm was only 4% stiffer

They only blew that embargo by two whole days, nice going road.cc crew... 🤔

Somehow, the orange looks even worse on the Podium

The past few years have seen Intense quietly revamp its entire product line while publicly developing the latest M1 downhill bike at World Cups. The transparency of the downhill project was a reminder of the passion Intense pours into bike development. Unfortunately, I think it also overshadowed the work they put into the latest Tracer 279/29 , Primer and DJ models. Not to say that SoCal is the best sample case, but it is Intense’s backyard, and I’ve yet to see their bikes filling trail heads as I did a few years ago. What really put Intense back on...

yep, never ending issues I've had with their forks and the Fox place here is trash that had bad attitude people working there(arrogant) I believe they've been bought by anther group and moved so hopefully its much better I've had maybe 1 good fork from OEM bikes, even the 2 new 36's i bought in the last 5 years So thats a strike rate of about 1/15(yes had lots of bikes)

Had an interesting chat yesterday, during a group ride with a product manager from Conti. Apparently management of the bicycle division at Conti is not yet convinced that 32"-wheels will become a mainstream wheelsize, let alone are even here to stay. The guy told me that he personally believes this to be a repetition of the 650B-Plus situation. Conti anticipates very little consumer demand for various reasons, not least of which being a sort-of innovation-fatigue within cyclists. Also, apparently a lot of brands expect and anticipate the UCI to pretty much immeaidately ban 32" wheels for XC competition, should they...

Well that disproves the hypothesis that Fox takes special care of the forks for the press camps.

Nah. Top tube straight continuous to seat stays is very 2020. Now it’s all about the grasshopper. Steep down tube to low flat chainstay. And I’m all for it. Maybe your right, straight line is industrial design where grasshopper, is sex. as long as no one does steeper chainstays than top tube. 🤮

It should not be this complicated.