cwtrials

Stay away from Zhi. It might be better to look for a used bike or just shop around more. Decent priced and decent quality entry level bikes are available from Czar, Echo, Because, Neon, and even Inspired. (see the Inspired flow / flow +). (Note: if buying a because / neon be super careful on how they are spec'd, as some of the builds are horribly cheap and others really nice) Zhi is a load of garbage. The reason you can't find them anywhere buy sketchy places, is because they are horrible quality with horrible business practices. (Please note: there are some very legit shops and dealers out of China, simply being from China doesn't make something bad, but Zhi is bad). When I had my online shop I made the mistake of trying to go with Zhi. After sending them a fairly large amount of money I never heard back from them for about 6 months. Finally was able to get the direct number for the factory they contract to make their piece of crap items, and paid a local Chinese immigrant to call and yell at them. They had no plans of sending me anything, but also didn't think I'd be able to find them. When I finally received my order about 25% of the frames were so badly made I couldn't even sell them. Poor quality metal, poor workmanship. Things welded in the wrong place, headtubes machined incorrectly so headsets can't even go in. Etc. I may sound harsh. But there are quite a few better options. Support one of them.

If you feel like the bike your on isn't letting you achieve 110% you should try making a ridiculously expensive exact replica of it out of carbon fiber and have it weigh almost the exact same. But really any jack of all trades bike won't do anything quite 100% and any bike made for just one purpose won't do the others well. You might get deceived into thinking otherwise by watching Ali, Danny, and others (Marco hoesel, joachim, tra, anyone from Canada etc.) but for us mere mortals it's not possible. Have you tried streety angle arcade bars on a more neutral pure bike? Also. I am selling the twin to ross's Marino.

I successfully went tubeless on my 26" pure for a bit. I need to set it up again on my new ride.

Is it sprung? What's with all the little holes?

Echo has started using EchoBIkeUSA's FB page as their primary page, and their USA distributor, is the admin. He is actually a super nice guy and easy to work with. I'm not sure how it works outside of the USA, but here shops order from a distributor in LA who gets freight orders from China and then ships them to the individual shops. It works well for since there are only a few (3 I think) Echo dealers in the USA and freight shipping items to LA is slow but very cost effective. The distributor was also running EchoBikeUSA as an online shop for awhile to sell direct to the American public, but it never really got past a website without products, and looks like that effort has stopped. The fb page now points to Echo.Bike and Echo.Bike points to the FB page, with the only artifact being the page is @echobikeusa on facebook even though it's renamed Echo Bike. Yes to the 2 piece crankset! They also need an update to their rear rim. I bent the sidewalls within a few hours on 3 different 26" rims, if they make it an h or I-beam shape it'll help keep the sidewalls stiffer, and the cutouts aren't the best shape.

Echo made a post with it on facebook almost a month ago. No one really seemed to notice then, I was excited.

haha, that first gap looks big to begin with and he completely overshoots it.

+4. Did Ben just run a shinpad thread into one of the best of all time? P.S. I never wore shinpads, but my left leg was so scarred I didn't have hair growing on the front of it for about 10 years. Shinning hurts like hell. My advice is wear shinpads at least till you haven't needed them for a year, and always if riding in the snow. Kneepads not really, unless you're really a carnage seeker.

! I bought one of Ryan's bikes off pinkbike awhile back, a manifesto with a few prototype parts. It was cool as could be. Also, it was like riding trials on bus made out of turd covered bricks. It made me respect him a million times more. Back to the OP. I really enjoy the triboulat brothers, they are doing some MASSIVE moves with for the most part, a lot of style. (The footplants are rad). Also, remember this is just a few instagram clips from the last couple weeks, not some majorly edited and thought out video. I can't figure out why people get after them so much.

Yeah, I never got anything to work on them. Just get some new rims. With how many brakes pads you've bought you could've done that already. They are light, but not strong and don't brake well.

Not sure I've ever seen anyone do a curb frontflip like this....

Try looking at a couple different bearings? Might be easier than trying to skim off the center.

Yeah. The options vary pretty significant depending on your welding / fabrication skills or lack thereof and your enormous amounts of startup money or lack thereof.

I don't think for street 110mm spacing would give a sturdy enough base. Then for rim brake bikes (like mine, clearing the slave cylinders is the major issue).

lol. Even in trials I'm not normal. I did try it with the Crewkerz bars the other day. I'm going to try several different bar / stem combos to figure out what actually works with this geo. To be fair, I've never broken a frame. Also, so far I am loving the Hope / SLX combo like crazy

Recently I got my Marino 26" frames back. (I have two identical frames, one in blue and one in red). The blue one is the fun build, so here it is. I'll update this thread as I make some changes to it. Geo is 1060, +80, 377, with a 73 degree headtube. Reach is 680. Either you think I'm crazy and the geo is just dumb, or you look at the numbers and think "hey, that sounds like a lot of fun." The long reach allowed me to go with a 130mm stem right off the bat and felt good. The goal is to have something that is more flickable and fun than normal modern pure bikes that still feels decent on rear wheel moves. The shorter wheelbase and slightly shorter chainstay make this manual nicely (not that I know how). I've got to work up some confidence on bigger rolling bunnyhops, but it should be nice. With the super high BB it still does rear moves and sidehops decently with the bars rolled back into a less visually oppressive angle. I liked the idea of MTB cranks and a hope hub on a pure bike. It took a bit more modification / grinding than I would've liked to get the cranks to work. Having the rim brake slave cylinders made the clearance super difficult and I had to sand the pads down to almost nothing and take about 1mm off the back of the drive side crank. At some point when I have some more funds, I may try a boost crank made for a 83mm bb. But so far this setup is AMAZING! It feels so stiff. Front Magura MT7 and rear Trialtech are a super nice combo. The Magura is working like crap since I moved it over, the disc mount must be at a slightly different angle or something. So far the rear trialtech Carthy rim is pretty nice! I love not seeing cutouts and it feels super stiff. The coust pads on it are a amazing. The rear heatsink tensioner is a bit sloppy looking. Originally Marino said he'd be able to fabricate a crewkerz style mount, but then wasn't able to figure it out in the end. Maybe at some point I'll weld one on myself (bonus of steel). Due to the gear ratio on this, there is just a lot of slack to take up. Maybe using a half link would help. I can put a hanger on it and just go with an old school two wheel tensioner too. At some point I will go rear tubeless on this bike. But right not it is fairly cold and my tires just feel like crap no matter what so I'm not stressing it. Tire clearance is a bit of an issue, I had to trim a couple center knobs a mm or two to get it to stop rubbing. The Inspired Arcade bars look incredible, but I am going to try my Crewkerz bars on my next ride. Between the 73 degree head angle and the streety bars, the front end felt so different it was hard to get used to.

Nice! I may give it a try. My slx cranks are on a Marino with rim brakes. I had to shave my pads down to almost nothing to get the cylinders to clear.

So there are a few topics on here about chaining clearance issues with mtb style cranks. Recently I spent a considerable amount of time with an angle grinder to get some slx cranks to work. Would cranks for an 83mm BB and a few spacers fix this issue? My frame has a 73mm BB, so two 2mm spacers in each side and then 2 of the 0.5mm axle washers per side and that'd work...right? Or am I completely missing something

I enjoyed that!

If it doesn't come with dedicated disc mounts don't try any weird adapters. They will not be up to the task of trials.

If you get flats a lot having a fixed rear end is nice. Also the brake pads are always centered. In a year of riding my crewkerz I haven't adjusted the brakes once and have never had to mess with alignment, even after getting a flat. The echo grub screws worked pretty good, but it always seemed I'd have to re-adjust after a few minutes of riding. Snail cams were a huge pain, I'd have to redo them after just about every move. It seems with snail cams if you weighed less than 180 lbs they were fine, but anyone bigger just hated them.

Finally got my Marino in. Sadly there is no way to make the SLX cranks clear the chainstays, even with axle spacers. I had it made with a 73mm BB shell, so I can't really use BB spacers. Ugh. Looking into other options. Anybody up to buy a brand new pair of SLX cranks with basguard? lol

If you don't know who Drew Fortner is, he should be on your radar. He's only been riding for 5 years I think.

Why not use a street trials fork?

Sounds horrible. On a related note I found some echo flats for super cheap.