Mountain Cycle has had its ups and downs as a brand, but for the past year it’s been in new and enthusiastic hands who are working to get it back on track. As well as popular models like the Fury and Shockwave, this slopestyle-specific bike is approaching production readiness.

Lots of machining work, oversized quad-bearing swingarm pivot and beefy back end should make for plenty of stiffness. Something more UK-trail-oriented will be along at some point.

Ellsworth is also branching out into wheels, with XC, all-mountain and FR/DH hoops on offer, all with straight-pull spokes.

The wheels are reassuringly free of wackiness at the rim – no weird spoke arrangements here. Road wheels are also available.

A tandem variant of Ellsworth’s Ride cruiser would have been very eyecatching were it not parked on top of the booth.

Also new is the Roots cyclocross frame, with a carbon fibre rear end.

We saw Crank Brothers’s new wheels at Eurobike but didn’t get around to reporting on them. So here they are again.

These might look like spokes, but really they’re very long nipples – the hub half of the spokes are aluminium, with stainless steel spokes running from them to the rim. Truing adjustments are made in the middle of the spoke assembly.

The rim sections have a “spine” to which the spokes attach. This is the Cobalt all-mountain wheel – there’s also an Iodine XC model that looks broadly similar but has a narrower rim, lighter construction and is blue.

Crank Brothers’s Directset headsets (available in about a thousand different types) use an integrated design. Rather than the bearings sitting in cups that press into the frame, the cups form the outer race of the bearing itself – the headset is effectively two bearings with flanges attached to locate in the head tube. This allows bigger bearings in a same-sized package and lower weight, but once they wear out you need to replace the whole thing.

Yet another string to the increasingly-crowded Crank Brothers bow is this remotely-adjustable seatpost. If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s essentially Maverick’s Speedball gas-lift post, the design of which Crank Brothers has bought – it’ll now be solely a Crank Brothers product.

Having taken a little while to get the ISIS drive Cobalt cranks into production, Crank Brothers has now caught up with the rest of the industry with an outboard-bearing model. This is the Cobalt S singlespeed variant, weighing a claimed 815g complete. Versions with more chainrings will also be available