Mark W

No worries! I'll be honest, when I read your post I thought they were on there too and it was only when La Bourde said he couldn't find them there (and I checked a few pad product pages) that I remembered what the deal was.

From memory, when I was working there we'd measure the durometer out of curiosity, but we didn't list them as they can be a bit misleading. We list tyres durometers as there's a bit more of a correlation between the compound being softer and the tyre being better for trials use, but for brake pads there's more to it. The formulation/composition of the pad material will have a big role to play in how the pad performs, so you could theoretically have two pads that were 90a that would perform differently to each other. To use an example from your own list, the Odyssey pads are 81a and the Jitsie pads are 81a, but if you used them both on a ground rim or both on a smooth rim the pads would perform in completely different ways to each other. The other aspect is that - as you've found - a softer or harder compound doesn't really mean a pad will perform better. For example, you found that you really liked the Jitsie pads which you measured at 81a, but a lot of people prefer the Coust pads which are 90a. The performance characteristics people describe from each of them are broadly similar, so how do you really use that durometer information? Is softer 'better' or is harder 'better'? There isn't a right answer to that, so I think that's why we kept the info mainly to ourselves. Although we didn't/TartyBikes don't list brake pad durometers it made more sense to list them for tyres as a softer durometer tyre will typically offer more grip than a comparable tyre in a harder durometer. More grip is generally more good for trials, so it seems a more legitimate comparison. Equally, some brands were printing Shore numbers on their tyres (e.g. Maxxis saying Slow Reezay was 40a, Super Tacky was 42a and MaxxPro was 60a), so actually measuring them and checking them made more sense. It also helped compare tyres across brands better too.

Try this one: https://wetransfer.com/downloads/3c6e2a11ee820e95ee984bd14521b12020230313171650/8c4c86bdefc529916c8e6d502ebbb9e820230313171702/c4b136 Basically, I will have the video, it's just a case of working out which one it actually is! The video with the thumbnail in the quoted post above was called 'The Roots', I think. Stan didn't have the Kloud in 2011, he was on an Echo Pure around then, so basically it can't have been the Summer 2011 video as far as I know...

Pricing has leaked for them now. Excuse the Euro copy/paste job, but holy smokes they are pricey. 2925€ - Sram XXSL T-Type Eagle Transmission Powermeter AXS Groupset 2475€ - Sram XX T-Type Eagle Transmission Powermeter AXS Groupset 2214€ - Sram XXSL T-Type Eagle Transmission AXS Groupset 2205€ - Sram XX T-Type Eagle Transmission AXS Groupset 1800€ - Sram XX T-Type Eagle E-MTB Bosch Transmission AXS Groupset 648€ - Sram XS-1299 T-Type Eagle Cassette 594€ - Sram XS-1297 T-Type Eagle Cassette 432€ - Sram XG-1295 T-Type Eagle Cassette (E-MTB approved) 162€ - Sram XXSL T-Type Eagle HollowPin T-Type PVD Chain With PowerLock 135€ - Sram XX T-Type Eagle HollowPin T-Type PVD Chain With PowerLock I don't think I could emotionally process snapping a £135 chain, let alone a £160 chain.

It might not be the most modern looking site in the world but that's not the end of the world! I'll definitely be checking back in on it, it's cool to have trials news somewhere more constant than flying through a social media feed. Nice work!

About to be released next week it seems. The bashring is serious business:

I think this is the right video, but the name doesn't quite match up. From that super high res thumbnail I think Stan is wearing the same clothing and riding the same bike, so hopefully it's right. You can download it here. When TB shut down their Vimeo Plus subscription, it meant that almost all the videos got deleted. We got notice in advance so I downloaded the source files for all of them so they've been backed up. I handed them over to Ben/Charlie a while back and I think they'll be doing something with them in future, but otherwise I have them here if anyone wants a direct download for a particular video. EDIT: Hi, people from the future - the above link is on wetransfer, so it will be dead a week after today's date.

I'd imagine more than 90%. It definitely feels like a 2014 throwback. Max had so much in hand in that race! Perez was close to him at points, but I don't think he's consistent enough (or good enough) to really challenge Max that often. It feels more Hamilton-Bottas for them rather than Hamilton-Rosberg. From the tone at Ferrari it sounds like they're well aware that their car isn't fast enough, it munches tyres and they still have reliability issues. Mercedes have admitted their car is shit, and the upgrade they're planning is based on a flawed concept so is barely going to bridge the gap as it is now, let alone the gap once everyone else has developed in-season. The Aston Martin (by which I mean Alonso) positioning will be interesting this year, just in terms of them being a spoiler in some instances, but we'll see once we get to some less outlier-y tracks I guess. It's pretty remarkable how many teams have f**ked it though. Alpha Tauri are nowhere, McLaren have shit the bed, Mercedes wasted last season and effectively at least the first part of this season with a car that just doesn't work - there's usually a team that is way off the pace, but to have so many off in different ways when there's not really been extenuating circumstances is odd. Like when Haas decided to not work on their car for a year to get ready for the rule changes, it wasn't surprising they sucked. That's not really the case for AT/McLaren/Merc.

Once you've sanded the pads they'll need to wear back into the rim again. With grinds it can sometimes take a little bit of time for things to settle down and work their best. With the grind, getting it sharp rather than deep is important too. Just the usual stuff like avoiding doing multiple passes over the same area, having the disk at a relatively steep angle compared to the rim, etc... The Carthy rim will probably work a little better overall as you'll get less flex from the rim when your brake, but the pads will need to wear into that rim so it probably won't be an instant success necessarily.

You can get away with just using a light oil in the Pro 4, I personally tend to avoid grease on any hub/freewheel just because it's 'stickier' than I really want anything to be in that kind of area! On the Pro 5 note, looks like people are going to have to get creative if they want to run the double spring setup on there with the new spring design/assembly...

I wouldn't necessarily go that far - Industry Nine hubs are more and more common as OE wheels on mountain bikes, have a reasonable uptake with aftermarket sales and so on. There aren't that many trials riders using them but there are a lot of the hubs out 'in the wild', and have been for a while now. There will definitely be an element of people justifying their purchase to themselves, but that tends to end pretty quickly when those expensive things go wrong, and save for those 1-2 examples I mentioned before you just don't really hear much of that. Bear in mind too that those hubs have been out since March 2019, so if there was a big issue then I'm fairly sure we'd have heard more about it by now. They're genuinely a good, well-made product. I imagine part of the reason for their price tag is that they're made in-house in their facility in the US, so compared to most other hubs which are made in Asia they will naturally cost more. Hope are a little different obviously, but when you compare the Pro 4 to an I9 it's a night and day difference. The Hopes just look and feel fairly basic in comparison - part of that is because Hope like to go for simpler designs for reliability reasons, but also they just move incredibly slowly as a company and don't really seem to have much focus on innovation or development of products in a way. You can tell that some parts of the Pro 4 were optimised for lowering production costs too, so if you compare an I9 pawl to a Hope pawl there's quite a sizeable difference in design and quality to them (especially compared to the sketchy Hope pawls). Their initial offerings can sometimes be a bit iffy too. As an example, they launched the F20 pedals with a bang, but then almost immediately had to change the pins they supplied them with because the original pins offered virtually no grip. The pedals themselves lacked grip in general, and just weren't really as good as the price tag suggested. It took them 10 years to release an update to them in the form of the F22 which has some improvements, but reading between the lines on some reviews they're not really much different to the F20s in terms of performance and grip. Whenever a reviewer talks about how it's nice that they can adjust their feet easily on a set of pedals, that's a red flag... For what it's worth with Hope's warranty, I don't really remember hearing them refuse warranty to anyone that I can think of. I'm sure they will have done at some point but typically they're fairly reasonable about it (I even know of instances where they've warrantied clearly second hand hubs without really being too stressy about it). I was left a little frustrated with how the warranty process for my Pro 4 hub played out, but at least I've got the replacement here now even if it's taken 3 weeks.

From experience I think some of the problems have been generated by Hope using some different pawls for a bit. They've had two different spec pawls, and the ones I've seen people break (which in turn chew up the ratchet ring and ruin the hub) were all the same type. They're clearly different visually - the ones I've seen break have a smooth finish all over, whereas the ones that don't have the little notches on the underside of them. I think Hope acknowledged a while back they'd had a 'batch of bad pawls' or something like that, so hopefully by now most of them should have been phased out. That doesn't really solve things like the ratchet rings stripping (I have a Pro 4 MTB hub on my desk next to me now that I've just got back from Hope after doing just that on my big bike), but that is somewhat less common. I think the Hopes suffer a bit from what other popular or ubiquitous parts suffer from, and that is that so many people use them that inevitably you'll see more failures out there with them, and they've got such a reputation for reliability that people comment on it more when things do go wrong. The flip side of that is that there are loads of Hope hubs out there that just keep on working and have been reliable for people for years. I still know people running the original Pro 2 and Pro 2 Evo hubs. I think part of that was that Danny started running them, then some other high profile riders, and they took off from there. The engagement on them feels ridiculous - it really puts Hopes in the shade, even though they're not especially slow in the Pro 4. If I was buying new, at full retail, I think I'd probably go for the Hope simply because the Hydras are super expensive, but I do really like the Hydra I've got on my Arcade. They feel really nicely made (as you'd hope for the price), and do seem to work really well. I know one or two people on here appear to have obliterated theirs, but on the whole everyone I know personally who's running them has had zero issues with them. Those people who've broken the Hydras also seem to break a lot of other parts, so in some ways it's not entirely surprising to me.

Is it for the first race now? I'd read they had something in the pipeline but I was under the impression it was going to be arriving around the start of the European block of races. Agreed though, looks like Max is going to walk away with it and it'll be left to seeing who else can perform on the day and dump Perez out of P2. Intrigued to see how Aston Martin's performance carries over to this weekend - I think Alpine will be closer to them than they appeared in testing, but where they'll both be relative to Ferrari/Mercedes at one end and Alfa Romeo/Haas/McLaren at the other seems up in the air. Just how far back McLaren are will be the other one to watch. If Lando's punching walls during testing that's probably not a great sign.

Before 2022 I'd agree with that in general, but in 2022 there were quite a lot of different concepts around (especially considering the rules were designed to be more prescriptive), and even now that the rules are a year old the concepts between Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes are all entirely different. Red Bull have got their super undercut sidepods that swoop down, Ferrari are going for the 'high bodywork' system with their scooped out sidepods, and Mercedes are persisting with their gash looking setup that they still seem to think has more potential. They're not all the 2023 cars as photos are hard to find atm, but they're the most different looking set of cars we've had for a while at least. Even the Aston Martin with the random rear wing scrolls, and some of the other innovations from teams all gave them their own twist.

From new, they're 233mm/236mm. In all honesty I'm not sure whether they're closer to 232mm or 234mm if you're stuck with even length spokes, sorry! The front hub dimensions are available here, and the ERD of the rim is 488mm, so you could always enter them into the online spoke calculator of your choice if you wanted to double check.

For the Pro wheel, assuming it's the Inspired Sealed Rear Disc hub to the Inspired Pro V2 rim, it's 234mm non-drive/236mm drive side. For the Team wheel, if it's a Hope to the Team V2 (up to 2020) rim it's 230mm both sides. If it's the 2020-onwards one (so the updated, tubeless-friendly rim design) then it's 228mm both sides.

And yet it wasn't: Certainly closer than some of the other "2023 cars" that have been shown so far though.

That's what I mean by doing a top-up bleed. Also works really well on Magura disc brakes too thanks to the EBT bleeding setup on their levers.

On the bucket bleed thing - that doesn't guarantee you're getting all the air out of the system, so it's not necessarily the cure-all solution some riders seem to think it is (not implying that's the case with you by the way, it just comes up a lot as a "Well, I put it in a bucket of water so it should be fine" type response). Doing a proper bleed will give the best chance of removing any air from the system, and if you think there might be any left in there doing a quick top-up bleed at the lever should resolve that. When there's no air in the system they should feel firm. How firm they are exactly will depend on the rest of the setup (pad material, pad backings, how square the setup is, rim type, frame/fork type, booster/no booster, etc.). Compared to some 14mm piston levers there may be a small difference due to them being 13mm piston and the different leverage ratios, but if they're "mushy lever all the way to the bar" then there's something not right in there somewhere.

Had a look at my current cranks when I went for a ride yesterday: Think I'd need to be getting some mid-tops if I got those SRAM ones! @La Bourde - the mech has a disengagement system built into the clutch that allows it to move with impacts better than cable-actuated mechs. It's something that's been on AXS mechs since they were first launched and seems to work reasonably well. The new direct mount mech also has a built-in failure point so in effect it kind of has a mech hanger built into it. If that breaks I believe you're then able to replace that one part as it's more of a modular designed mech rather than they normally are. The point of the direct mount system is in part due to the AXS system. On weaker/flexier frames/dropouts you get poorer shifting because things can just twist when you try shifting. The motors put a fair bit more force through things that a conventional cable actuated setup, seemingly. This direct mount system is stiffer, so rather than just tweaking the frame around it just shifts the chain properly. The other bonus of it is that the mech can be redesigned, and can be slimmer, lower profile and have the jockey wheels and lower arm slightly more tucked out the way compared to a conventional mech. It's not being based around a mounting point that's hanging some way below the frame any more, and that allows them to make the overall system better. Should probably point out there are some big "theoretically"s attached to all that...

It's bled from the caliper up to the lever. The bleed port positioning means you don't need to rotate the lever on your bars, it's the highest point in the system so you don't need to do the normal Magura thing of levelling the lever off. Did the rest of the system already have fluid in before you fitted the lever, or was it drained? If you want to check the bleed, wind the TPA fully off then gently pull the lever while watching the slaves. The pistons/pads should move as soon as you put pressure on the lever. If they don't, there's air in there.

Some more detailed shots of them. The crank profile is interesting. Seems it's very much like one of the generative designs, but with a 'face' to make it look a bit less weird.

Yeah, definitely going to be spendy! And yeah, they've gone for bolt-on bashguards now. They've dropped the 3-bolt setup for the Quarq style 8-bolt setup so you can presumably really BIU it up and not have to worry about your direct mount crank interface getting mulched. Jesse Melamed's got the single sided bash seutp on the go on his Canyon, Dan Booker (I think...) has the double sided setup on the Nukeproof.

You're all good. It's a big chunk of aluminium so you can do a fair bit of damage to the underside of the crank arm before you'd ever be likely to have any problems with it.

Seems that there's some interesting new SRAM stuff coming out in March. Some random shots that have leaked so far. New direct mount rear mech, new chains, new cranks (w/holes and integrated bash setup, also now using a different direct mount interface compared to their old 3-bolt system), new brake levers and calipers... In case you haven't seen it already the mech is designed to fit directly onto any frame which is based around the UDH system. Pretty sneaky of SRAM to go "Hey, everybody, let's standardise mech hangers so people can go into any shop and buy a new hanger easily", then once that had had wide scale adoption use it to do a direct mount mech. The new mechs have a sacrificial style fail point in them so if you twat it super hard then part of the mech will break instead of your frame, with the idea being you can get that replacement bit. Part of the reason they've gone direct mount was that the electronic mechs have more shifting power in them, and on weaker/flexier frames you wind up with sloppy shifting because basically the hanger/frame twists. With this system it's much stiffer so you should get better shifting. Check out how wafty those cranks are near the pedal broaching too. Needledick! They have some similarities to the generative design cranks they showed off a little while back so not entirely surprising: