Good People and Bad Brakes

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Oct 022012
 

First things first. Last Friday night we held a benefit for friend and co-worker, Mat Barton. Mat was paralyzed from the chest down following a bicycle accident. There have been some impressive efforts to help Mat and his wife through this really challenging time. Our company donated the $7550 Focus TT bike you see above and raffled it to raise money for Mat. That was pretty cool.

The Lumberyard here in Portland hosted us–great indoor mountain bike park built by the same team who created Ray’s back East. That was also great. Lots of people showed up to support Mat, too.

Even cooler, though, was that a friend of Mat’s bought as many raffle tickets as he could, won the bike, and is selling it to give the proceeds to Mat.

I never thought I’d say this, but please buy this TT bike.

Seriously, if you know of anyone interested in a time trial or tri bike, please let them know about this bike. It’s the exact medium Focus Izalco Chrono 1.0 shown above, and the eventual owner is going to get it for a phenomenal price, but the karma coming along with this bike will be serious, too. Good for some tailwinds.

So Interbike. I’d left that somewhere back there, but still have a pile of photos that still correspond to half-formed ideas in my head. Here’re some more.

I like Magura’s hydraulic rim brake for road bikes. There, I wrote that. The timing is bound to make this far more wind-pissing than the luck Magura had with the original HS-33 (which I’m proud to say I used to really like–except below 20-degrees), but good for Magura for trying anyway. If you’re old enough to remember how you could never exactly explain why you put up with all the crap you did just to be able to run HS-33s back in the day, you’ll know that these could have a hell of a lot of feel and control to them. Five years ago, maybe they would’ve earned a following. Not going to happen today.

No, Salsa’s Colossal and Warbird look a lot more like the future of road bikes. Shiny little rotors and all.

HED was showing off some pretty cool disc-ready tubulars that included Shimano Centerlock rotor mounts. Not nearly as common as the six bolt standard, Centerlock is definitely lighter and almost always easier to use. They certainly look more at home on road wheels than large six-bolt flanges.

One thing’s certain: the next three years are going to be pretty interesting for road bikes. Thing is, I rode some mechanical disc brakes out at Dirt Demo that felt worse than cantilevers. In fact, descending some of the roller coaster descents on ‘cross bikes caused my brain to automatically revert to “canti” mode, adjusting everything about lever pull and causing me to recall songs from the mid-90s. All of that’s painful stuff. Avid’s BB7 Road brakes felt consistently good, and I suspect setup was to blame, but suffice to say, there are still opportunities for someone to come along and make a kickass mechanical disc brake.

How nice would it be to see the likes of Paul Components or even Chris King producing a mechanical disc brake caliper? Wonder who owns the Grafton name these days?

Thanks to everyone for the feedback on Danzig, too. Hope to have more news on that this week.

Full Transparency

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Oct 012012
 

Yes, that’s a photo of Mr. Lance Armstrong winning the Superfrog Triathalon in California while wearing (if not, as the kids say, “rocking”) a speedo and sporting a requested “7” race number. You’re welcome. Happy Monday.

Still have some of my “insights” from Interbike I need to post this week, but one of the best parts of this year’s show was running into engineers–some I knew, some I’d never met. It was pretty humbling terrifying to discover the caliber of those you who are out there tolerating this blog. Does no one watch TV any more?

Interest in Project Danzig was higher than I’d expected, too. Given that I’d expected interest to be “virtually non-existent,” that wasn’t a tough expectation to exceed, but still. Thanks to everybody who wished me well with the project.

I know it’s been a while since we’ve seen or heard anything about Danzig, so today seemed right as ever for a quick update. While I’ve been babbling about launching new e-comm sites and wheelsets and my job collection, Danzig has continued, albeit slowly. Initial prototype discussions suggested we’d have to make some room on Danzig’s driveside to accommodate a triple.

Sorting all of that out is largely why I’m working with a great company on the prototypes in the first place, but still, being me, I took it upon myself to figure out just how much clearance I could come up with there, how it would look, and how it would affect everything else.

So I’ve been building new mainframes and swingarms, focusing on a more extreme asymmetrical design that’ll offer enough room to run a triple, even though I hate triples, personally.

It’s been really interesting to experiment with different asymmetrical orientations for the chainstays and that part I’ve always referred to as the “crankcase” that houses the lower link. Turns out I can move that off pretty far to the non-drive side, which should really improve clearances in general.

That’s what I’m working on these days.

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