PaulSection7

Nice scans there! I was getting a bit of deja-vu seeing the old catalogues and worlds programme as I have all those in a box somewhere too. I assume you attended the '96 worlds - did you ride? I've no idea how many Ibex bikes were made, but I only ever saw two - a 26" one ridden by Ian Cooper at one of the NEMBA series in 95 and the Brentwood village 20" bike originally owned by Stuart Matthews and ridden by pretty much every up and coming Essex club rider. It's probably still going round the white/blue route even now! Ah, good memories!

I'll dig it out some time. It's funny, but I consider that new school riding - it was the time when all the old guard were still riding but riders like Vincent and the Coustelliers were already way ahead. Gilles (I think) and Marc Vinco did the entire expert route for zero dabs. I guess I'm an old bugger though.

Ah, good to see both old videos again... all 1 minute of them at a sketchy quality! Damn our bandwidth restrictions. I have > 60 minutes of video from that event on a couple of mini dv tapes somewhere. I wonder if my old camcorder still works after living in a box for 5 years?

Trimble! It's a Trimble not a Tremble. I remember this bike appearing in Mountain Bike Action sometime in the very early 90s - it was a custom one off for a team rider, moulded without the seat mast. It's a vintage bike, so no, it wouldn't ride like your modern Koxx frames, in fact it would be sacrilege to ride it for trials at all! Trimble's were always a bit weird, but they go for big money now in the retro scene. Here's the XC version in an even more wacky paint job: Trimple Inverse 4 The idea of a carbon monocoque frame for trials is pretty suspect. Crash that big downtube into a rock and you're looking at total frame failure.

That BME has nothing on the wrongness of this frame: more spidery weirdness here.

180rpm... I'm just remembering the roller racing competitions from when I was a 'serious' roadie. I'm not sure we were pedalling that fast with two burley blokes basically holding the bike upright. Not sure I'd want to pedal at 180rpm when I was actually moving along the road at 60mph. Sure 60+mph on the flat is well possible if you've got someone driving a massive wind breaker in front of you and you've got a 100+t chainring... but that's not what's being talked about here is it? With no aerodynamic aids, you'd be doing very well to get 40mph for about a second - ie you ain't gonna beat the UCI world records. (I never got the 3rd cat licence - I gave it all up for trials when I was still a junior).

> you could sprint out of the slipstream and get up towards 62 for a short while. Um. I've just done some napkin maths to work out how fast you'd have to pedal a 53x12 gear to do 62mph on some 700c roadie wheels. It comes out at nigh on 180rpm. Which is 3 complete crank revolutions a second. I'm not sure that's possible even on rollers... Oh, and to put some of the above figures into perspective, the world record for 500m from a flying start on a velodrome is held by Michael Hubner, who had legs that must have been at least 60" in circumference and looked like a powerlifter. His average speed was just over 41mph. For 200m the world record is about 44mph. So anyone who claims he can do 50 odd mph on the flat ought to consider becoming a professional road racer... or maybe sorting out the calibration on their cycling computer.

Indeed. I paid £270 for some HS-22 Race Line Ds back in 1996. So, the real question is, how the hell can they sell them so cheap now? Rip off? Sheesh. You lot don't know you're born.

I have straight pull spokes on a selection of Mavic wheels and the only problem I've had has been a spoke coming loose once on a CrossMax XL. But the spokes on that are chunkier than on any other bike wheel I've seen and don't touch each other where they cross (at least I'm pretty sure they don't) which wouldn't help them stay tight. My old regular CrossMax trials wheel which has more conventionally sized straight pull spokes is as true now as it was when I got it. In theory straight pull ought to be stronger than regular spokes, but the reality (at least in my experience) is it doesn't really matter since normal spokes are strong enough in all but exceptional situations like crazy drops and big crashes. Anyway... straight pull spokes are available as a custom order from Sapim.

Hey Martyn - shame you edited your post. It'd be very interesting to hear your insider views on this, but I guess they might not be for public consumption! )

I've ranted on about this in the past and it's not really worth going on about at length. It's very easy to be naive about how much it costs to develop a trials frame and run a trials company and say Koxx are evil rip off merchants "raping us" with their extortionate prices. Take one look at the number of world champions on their team, the number of unique frames they sell, the innovations they've made to the sport and the sort of events they put on and in the words of the late Bill Hicks, "consider shutting you f--king mouth". But there's one very clear demonstration of what happens when people rip off innovative designs from small companies - and that's what happened to the Coustellier brand. They came up with quite a unique design (I personally don't think it's fair to say it was a copy of an Ashton or a Pashley 26ghz). They take a big risk spending a lot of time and money developing it with two world class riders who could be earning decent money riding for someone else. Loads of people in the trials world want to buy one. Zoo or whoever it was, quickly followed by Onza and God knows who else bring out frames that look nigh on identical around the exact same time as the St Blaze was launched. And guess what? Coustellier practically go bust. Big deal I hear you cry. They shouldn't have tried to sell their frames for however much it was (£500? £800? I can't remember). So they deserve to go bust? Well, maybe. But where's the next innovative frame design going to come from? You can be 110% certain Coustellier will never risk so much again. So we all lose out to short term quick buck making brands who don't have the skills or rider expertise to design truly innovative products that push the sport forward. These are the brands that are only in it for the money, not people like Coustellier. They sell their frames for less so they must really care about you trials riders? WAKE UP! They're in it for the money way more than Coustellier ever were and you can be damn sure they make a ton more profit that Coustellier, Koxx and so on make.

This is getting a bit weird, but hey, lunch isn't quite over yet so I'll reply. Everyone is entitled to opinions. The problem I have is when opinions start contradicting FACTS. I listed my opinions on Hope vs King above. Which one(s) of them do you disagree with? Is it the one where I say not all King hubs are SHIT? Because if it is, then your 'opinion' is provably incorrect because at the very least, both my King hubs are pretty far from SHIT; in fact they're been 100% reliable from day 1, which was 6 years ago for one of them, 3 for the other. Christ, it's not like I'm saying this new Hope hub is rubbish - in fact quite the opposite - it looks great! It's just that I'll wait and see how well it works in the great wild world of non-Hope supported riders before I buy one. My original doubts were that it's not massively different from the old hope hubs I used to kill very quickly. Lunch over... back to work.

100% guaranteed it would slip?? What a load of rubbish! If it's slipping in this situation then the hub is buggered. Certainly the hubs are designed so the pressure on the ring drive plates increases with increased torque on the drive shell, but there's a nice spring in there to push those two plates together all the time. If the plates are slipping with low torque on the drive shell then this spring is not doing it's job or the ring drive plates are not meshing properly (too much of the wrong oil perhaps?). Either way, your hub is f--ked and needs to be fixed. If what you claim is true for all King hubs then you'd be able to turn the freehub both ways by hand (so long as you didn't twist too hard) and lets face it, no one could possibly sell a hub that did that. I'm sorry, this thread has moved away from the Hope hubs and is starting to miss the point, but I point blank refuse to accept that all King hubs slip if you pedal lightly on them and are therefore SHIT. It's all a bit crazy really, because had people claimed: "This hope hub is as durable as a King, nearly as light, but costs £200 less" ...then that's something you can't really argue with. The only doubt in that sentence is how durable they are and sooner or later we'll all find out for sure. Everyone looks forward to trying these new hubs out, hopefully they'll prove to be durable and hey presto, no one needs a £300 rear hub on a trials bike anymore. Instead people say: "This hope hub is a million times better than a King hub because as everyone knows King hubs are completely rubbish and always 100% of the time kill their users when they slip which they do 100% of the time when people pedal lightly on them" Which many people, myself included, will argue against because it does not match their own experiences. And when this stuff is written by people with connections to Hope it just sounds like advertising bullshit to me. For what it's worth (which is probably not at all) my 'honest' advice on trials hubs would be: 1. Kings are 2 to 3 times more expensive that this new Hope hub. 2. If you set Kings up incorrectly then they can skip very badly and dangerously. 3. If these new Hope hubs prove to be as or more durable than King hubs then there is no point spending 2-3 times as much on a King. 4. 48 vs 72 engagement points is not important enough to justify £200 extra, neither is a saving of a couple of tens of grams.

I absolutely love the "I don't understand it so to me it's SH!T" attitude! I don't see why people think the inside of a King hub is such a complicated mechanism though. Is there a video of that cut away hub they used to have at the shows somewhere? Didn't Adam Read have some videos/pictures up somewhere describing it all a few years back? I guess I'm biased towards King hubs as I've never had any problems with them in 6 years of usage, while the years prior to that I went through a good number of Ti Glides and Bulbs. Maybe I got lucky? I do think they are aimed at different markets though - they are twice the price of Hopes, they can be a bit sensitive to set up (never a problem on mine), and as you say, when they have problems they can be hard to fix. I will wait to see how well these new Hope hubs stand up to some serious abuse. They've certainly been tested for a long time. The reason I am sceptical and don't really buy the "it'll be much stronger than Kings, trust me, I'm getting free kit off them!" lines is the mechanism is still fundamentally the same as those old Hope hubs I used to break. If it turns out they last then great, the next rear hub I buy for a trials bike will be a Hope one. PS. I appreciate I've been out of the "hope hub loop" for some time now. And hell, I'm using a cheap as sh!t ACS freewheel at the moment )

Correct me if I'm wrong, but these new Hope hubs are still 'just' a ratchet system. They might have nice strong springs, hard materials used in all the right places and so on, but a ratchet system is still a compromise between the number of engagement points and durability (more engagements == less durability in general, unless you go doubling up ratchets and so on). The King mechanism is fundermentally different (and how it works is hardly rocket science). It's not subject to the same limitations as a ratchet - it has more engagements and has proven to be more durable than pretty much all the hubs on the market at the moment, and has been since the late 90s. Absolute torque strength, ie torque it up on a machine until it explodes (which I assume you're talking about Ash) is only half the picture. Ratchets are great at this sort of thing, but what really counts is how the mechanism behaves with many sharp applications of torque, like someone stamping on the pedals doing gaps for example. This is where stress fractures and so on occur in pawls, ratchets and so on and these are what kill normal hubs. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure these Pro 2 hubs are great (and I'll probably get some for my XC bike) but I think I'll hold on to my Kings for a while on the trials bikes.