Interbike '05: Bucking Bull at Bootleg
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As Day 2 dawned on the most fun part of Interbike, namely riding cool bikes all over the great trails in Bootleg Canyon, the mechanical bull waited, its single horn barely attached but its pride and determination intact.
Soon enough, in Yakima’s Bucking for IMBA promotion, one attendee after another came to be spun and tossed about by it while hanging onto a little stub of rope, all under the laughing gaze of people wearing pink foam Yakima-labeled cowboy hats. And sure enough, every would-be bull rider found themselves on his or her back soon enough, thrown off into an inflatable swimming pool with an inflatable floor.
Tire mounting
As high noon hit Bootleg Canyon and the bull continued to fling helmeted riders wearing baggy shorts off one by one for daring to mount its mangy hide and Park Tool had found the Fastest Mechanic in the West at 1:41 to remove and install a pedal, a right crankarm and a chain. A pair of Hutchinson tubeless tires waited in their truing stands to be torn off and put back on.
Tire changers squared off in a seeded, head-to-head format to deflate, remove, remount and inflate a UST tubeless tire to 35psi with a hand pump (oh, and put the wheel back in the truing stand and tighten the quick release). A hair over one minute was the fastest time at the high noon shootout. Pretty good, eh? For those who showed up on time for Hutchinson’s press presentation, there was a media competition in which VeloNews’s own Matt Pacocha placed second, performing the task in a minute and 20 seconds. Fortunately for the thumbs of those of the racing mechanics, those UST tires had supple, 127tpi (threads per inch) cross-country racing casings. But new for 2006, Hutchinson claims its 2X27tpi freeride and downhill casing to be the stiffest in the business. Obviously, since each thread is packed adjacent to the next, the threads in a 27tpi casing are more than twice as fat as in a 66tpi casing, which are over twice as fat as those in a 127tpi casing. With vulcanized rubber filling the valleys between the tops of the threads inside and out, that would make a stiff casing already, with the normal wrapping method of a tire casing. But instead of just using the normal method, in which the rubber-filled fabric, cut on a 45-degree bias, is folded over the bead on each side so that three plies, whose threads cross the next layer at 90 degrees due to the bias cut, underlie the tread and two plies form each sidewall, Hutchinson folds the fabric once more around, so that there are four plies on the sides and five under the tread.
That makes for a very stiff casing. The new tread patterns, the Barracuda, which resembles the Octopus but with stiffer side knobs, and the Piranha, which features a semi-slick center and large, stiff side knobs, are among the tires available with the new 2X27 casing. Those tires are also available in enduro and cross-country models with smaller profiles and 66tpi and 127tpi casings. Hutchinson also has a triathlon tire with toughened silver tread compound backed by a Kevlar anti-puncture belt to reduce the frequency of riders standing around changing tires on lava-lined roads.
Dragonflies in the desert
Craig Calfee’s new Dragonfly Pro road frame is intended to dispel the myth that a carbon-fiber frame has to have oversized tubes in order to be stiff. Maintaining the classic Calfee slim tube diameters and carbon lugs, the tubes of the Dragonfly Pro are made of high-modulus carbon fiber, already the stiffest available, commingled throughout with fatter and stiffer boron fibers. “I think you can feel that this is a very stiff bike torsionally,” says Calfee, “but the thinner tubes do not beat you up on a long ride the way bigger ones can.”
Available in 46cm to 66cm sizes (every centimeter) and custom, there is a Dragonfly Pro for anyone with $3500 to spend on their frame. I rode a 65cm one, the only road bike at the Outdoor Demo big enough to fit me. It was equipped with an oversized carbon handlebar that Calfee will build into a custom one-piece bar-stem with exactly the length, stem angle and bar angle the customer chooses. It also had Topolino’s new ac29 composite-spoke wheelset, and it was a really light, very stiff bike that wanted to jump forward with every stomp on the pedals.
Purely Custom
Speaking of stem angles and lengths, PurelyCustom.com offers a new dynamic crank- and stem-fitting system. You can install its adjustable crank and stem onto your bike and ride them, farting around with the lengths and angles until you find exactly the combination that feels best to you. The crank varies in length from 155mm to 185mm and has a built-in bubble level for the knee-over-pedal plumb-bob check. Two big bolts securely hold the arms onto either a square-taper- or ISIS-compatible bottom-bracket interface, and a dealer can own a single pair of arms, a number of different spiders and the interfaces and be able to fit different road and mountain bottom brackets and chainrings.
The stem features angles from zero to 45 degrees, lengths from 100 to 150mm, and clamp diameters of 31.8mm and 26.0mm. Both components are stiff and strong enough to ride on, releasing you from the bondage of doing fitting only indoors on a trainer.
Catch the Rush
With almost five inches (120mm, to be exact) of front and rear travel, Cannondale’s Rush all-mountain bike is light and nimble enough to race cross country yet will get you over some big obstacles without bucking like the mechanical bull. It comes in six models (numbered 400, 600, 800, 1000, 3000 and 4000) with the same frame, ranging from $1300 and 31.5 pounds to $5500 and 24.5 pounds (large size).
I rode a $2,000 Rush 1000, equipped with a Lefty DLR2 fork, SRAM X.9 trigger shifters and derailleurs, Avid Juicy 7 hydraulic discs and a Fox RP3 ProPedal rear shock. I rode it all of the way to the top of the mountain and back down on a rocky singletrack loop and found it to climb great, digging for traction on steep, loose dirt in low gear, as well as swooping in and out of deep G-out dips and rolling up over rock slabs like a freeride bike without the mass. And it is nimble steering and gentle over big drops when descending fast, too.
The pivot location is designed so that, when the chain is on the little chainring, pedaling extends the rear end, pushing the wheel down into the dirt for more traction. On the middle and large chainrings, the chain is just below and just above the pivot, respectively, and pedaling with the chain on either of these rings actually pulls the rear end in to drop the bottom bracket and the bike a little, while working with the pedal platform of the shock to avoid bobbing. I did use the third position of the RP3’s lever for highest low-speed compression damping when climbing, else it did give a bit more with each pedal stroke than I liked.
The single fork leg, rather than having a plug-in air cylinder, now is machined out as the cylinder for a much larger piston, resulting in greatly increased air volume. Since force equals pressure times area, you need less pressure in a bigger air spring to get the same spring force. The lower air pressure gives a more linear spring curve as it compresses and a less abrupt ramp up as it reaches full travel.
The Cannondale Prophet’s “Hollow Core Hot Box” swingarm with internal cable routing through it found its way onto the Rush as well. The downward curve in the chainstay allows it to flex a bit at bottom-out, increasing its fatigue life and allowing the use of thinner, lighter aluminum. Similarly, the curve in the top tube with a shock mount that distributes the load, allows the use of a lighter tube as well. And did I mention that the Rush is Handmade in the USA?
Slingshot is Back
Scott Templar, who raced Slingshots when lots of mountain bike races were being won on them, could not stand to see the company drop its dirt roots and first pursue only road and triathlon models with one new owner and only folding bikes with another. He bought the company and is committed to bringing it back as a hard-core, fast, racing mountain bike. He also wanted to bring the traditional Slingshot design to cyclo-cross as well, but UCI rules require a down tube, not a cable with a spring where the down tube normally would be. Undaunted and in love with ‘cross, he is making a more traditional cyclo-cross bike now, so people will have to get used to the idea that what makes a Slingshot is that it is designed by Slingshot and says Slingshot on it, not just that it has a cable connecting the head tube to the bottom bracket.
Templar also wants to re-energize the Slingshot brand by incorporating the stretching cable design with new materials, rather than just the steel tubing of old. It has taken some doing, though, since initially aluminum tubing caused a much higher rate of fatigue of the flexing “board” connecting the top tube to the seat tube. Now, Templar makes that piece replaceable and has changed its design to deal with the new, lighter frame materials.
In addition to 26-inch models, Templar is offering 29-inch wheel mountain bikes with the cable on the bottom. “People are going to be amazed at how fast these bikes are,” he chuckles. You won’t find a bunch of suspension travel here, but you will find a bit of compliance over bumps and the energy-return of the old Slingshots.
So that’s the story, with a bit of bull, from a piece of mountainous, canyon-cut desert spiderwebbed with trails where bootleggers in the 1930s kept the workers building Hoover Dam supplied with liquid refreshment.
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