There’s a couple of new Duster variants – this is the EBB-equipped Duster Singlespeed, which’ll cost you £499 in rigid form.

There’s also now a Duster XT geared bike to go with the existing Duster Mid and High.

Apart from the two carbon fibre tubes, the whole frame is machined from solid aluminium. The rear caliper mount is particularly neat.

The seat “tube” is as big a piece as will fit into Hope’s £340,000 five-axis CNC mill – good job the frame’s quite small, really…

Another product that’s gone from plastic to metal in a few weeks is the latest Vision LED light. With four LEDs (two flood, two spot), this one pumps out an impressive 1,000 lumens. It’s got five power settings – Hope says that the middle one is about as bright as its HID lamp. The new system will be £299 with a Li-ion battery.

The Hope chaps have also come up with a whole new light in the space of the last month. The Vision One is a single LED light with a 240 lumen output for bar or helmet mounting. To keep the cost and complication down, it runs on four AA batteries – regular alkalines or rechargeable, it’s up to you. Four power settings plus flash, £80.

We’re impressed by the look of Bergamont bikes – we’ll be testing something from the range shortly.

Element is a Taiwanese company that doesn’t hide the fact. And with bikes as sleek-looking as this, why should they?

The 2Stage system is effectively two stacked single-pivot layouts. On small stuff the swingarm pivots around one location and activates the first, soft, shock. Reach bumps of a certain size, the secondary shock kicks in and the swingarm pivots somewhere else.

The AM8 is 2Stage’s all-mountain bike. Under power one of the shocks is locked out, so you just get 4in of travel. The rest of the time, there’s 8in on tap, and with no levers to remember to flick.

Back end is a four-bar setup – designer Cy Turner spent many hours with CAD and prototypes tweaking the pivot locations and brake caliper position to get the ride characteristics he wanted.

Two rockers are available for the Hemlock – these are the shorter ones, giving 105mm of travel, the longer ones yield 150mm. Currently we like the idea of short travel at the back with a big fork up front – a bit like a hardtail, only less hard.