Cycle 2007 - Bike Magic

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**Reviews

Cycle 2007

Heading for Earl’s Court for the Cycle show this weekend? Here are a few highlights to whet your appetite.

Charge

Attentive readers will have noticed that all of Charge’s bikes are named after things you may find in a kitchen – Stove, Iron, Duster etc. So what better environment to display them in than a kitchen? To highlight the shiny bikes, said kitchen was artfully distressed by Charge’s professional set designer (no, we’re not making this up), complete with cobwebs, grime and even some manky beans in a pan on the stove. Yum.

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.

Hope

This 24in-wheeled bike was made for the son of one of Hope’s CNC programmers, but they’re planning to actually make some for real. We’re always impressed by how quickly Hope work – at Eurobike this frame was just a nylon mock-up.

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.

Enigma

Fancy a custom-made titanium MTB? Enigma’s latest offering is the Ego hardtail, also available in three stock sizes if you’re a conventional sort of shape.

Riding High UK

At last year’s show, RHUK was a smallish start-up. This year, it’s got a sizeable stand and a whole bunch of brands. Latest addition to the roster is Canfield Brothers – this is the chromoly front/alu rear Balance.

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?

2Stage

New Zealand company 2Stage reckons that two shocks is the way to go for mountain bikes. This is the Elite 9 downhill bike.

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.

Cotic

Cotic’s Hemlock has been on sale for a while now, but this was our first chance to have a look at a production bike. All we have to do now is wait for a demo bike that fits us to become available for a full test…

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.

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