Corsair

Corsair Bikes came to our attention last year, but the 2009 bikes are substantially revised. There’s also now an all-mountain bike in the range in the shape of the 130mm-travel Marque. It’s a single-pivot back end, with a high, rearward pivot delivering a rearward axle path in the first part of the stroke and a very neatly implemented idler pulley warding off evil drivetrain effects.

A rocker rotating around the bottom bracket shell drives the shock with a 2:1 leverage ratio. All the pivots and shafts are secured by pinch bolts (threaded into steel inserts) for easy maintenance, and the frame includes ISCG mounts and bosses for a Shimano bolt-on front derailleur. You also get an adjustable head angle. It’s all beautifully put together – if it rides anything like as good as it looks it’ll be great.

Need more travel? The Maelstrom uses all the same technology but yields 180mm of travel. Corsair also offers bikes for DH, slopestyle and dirt jumping.

Lezyne

Ordinarily, bicycle pumps wouldn’t attract too much attention, but up-and-coming accessories brand Lezyne turns out stuff that’s shiny enough to trigger our inner magpie, so here it is.

In the pictures you’ll see Lezyne’s new shock pump – the clear bit with the spring inside is the in-line pressure gauge, a lower-pressure version of which is also available as a retrofit for existing Lezyne minipumps. Also shown are two of the new range of track pumps, and a mini folding floor pump.

Other things you can look forward to include minipumps with carbon fibre bits, redesigned carbon fibre multitools, a complete line of new packs, pumps with integrated heads instead of houses, the combined spanner and bottle opener that all tool companies are required by international law to produce and a whole bunch of other stuff too.

Knolly

Knolly is a brand that we’ve been keeping half an eye on over the past couple of years. Its two best-established frames, the 7.7in travel V-Tach and 6.3in travel Delirium-T, both feature adjustable chainstay lengths and head angles for considerable customisation. The goal with those bikes was to let riders tune the bikes to what they wanted to do with them, given that they could be built up in a variety of ways. Knolly’s latest project, though, is a pure DH race machine, allowing it a rather more single-minded approach.

While the look is distinctively Knolly, it’s quite different in a few ways. For a start, the characteristic Four By 4 linkage has been reconfigured for a DH-optimised axle path and rate curve, and combined with a forward-positioned idler pulley to ensure efficient pedalling. In the honourable tradition of the Roberts DOGS BOLX, Knolly calls this design “Omega Metered Factored Gaussian Super Theoretical Forward Ultimate” pivot technology. They could probably have added a “Linear Optimised Leverage” in there too…

Despite its impressive finish and respectable 11.5lb weight, this is merely a prototype frame. Several months of testing, including the promised signing of a biggish-name World Cup rider, are planned before the as-yet unnamed frame is released to the public.

And just to show that it’s not all about big travel gnarly stuff, Knolly’s showing a 26lb build of its 140mm travel Endorphin. It’s a bike that we’ve ridden and liked in the past, so it’s reassuring to see it unchanged.