Hakkalugi's arrive at Ibis next week

Ibis tell me that SOME Hakkalugi's will be ready next week. Currently they will be avaiable in Frame and Fork option. More info here

Best you order your one now before the NZ Cyclocross Champs; We'll be cutting it fine, but I'm up to the challange, if you are.

Distractions

Jeep Cherokee, a great vehicle.


Crash+testing+a+Jeep+Cherokee

New Syndicate Video with Steve Peat's 50th Podium

New Santa Cruz Syndicate video from Mont Saint-Anne.

Worth a watch, even if you've used all you 10GB of broadband allocation and now have dial up speeds........like me.

Peaty's 50th Podium, nice, I think I might into double figures now, but I probably shouldn't count all of mine.

MT. STE. ANNE 2009, PEATY CELEBRATES 50th CAREER PODIUM from santa cruz bikes on Vimeo.

Dirk Peters 2nd at World Cup - Mont Saint Anne

Dirk's first world cup U19 XC race this season and he pilots his Blur XC carbon to 2nd place. That's a great start to his world cup racing.
Bromont next week and then he'll be ready for the World Champs.

Well done Dirk!

Bad scan from the Daily Post, Rotorua, the only picture I could find, sorry.

Results can be found here; http://tinyurl.com/m77zxf

Mojo HD, Ibis's secret project.

The cat's officially out of the bag, there has been rumours (and maybe Lopes let it slip via twitter that he was testing a new bike). Just got this in my inbox this morning. You guys know as much as I do now.

Introducing the Mojo HD

Before we tell you about what nitty gritty details we're willing to divulge, we want to let you know that we've already been putting this bike through the paces, some of them rigorous.
Already a Race Winner
Brian Lopes spent the last week in Vars France, getting ready for and then competing in the Enduro Trophy des Nations. This is an enduro style race, becoming quite popular in Europe these days, where riders compete in a number of stages over a two day period with "beaucoup" downhill. This particular event had 10 stages over two days and featured over 10,000 M of descending. If you're bad at math (or don't like the metric system) that's 32,808.4 feet of descent. Or 6.21 MILES straight down, measured vertically! This race also had a bonus stage at 10PM on saturday night that didn't count for the overall time, but the winner got an extra 500 Euros of party money.Brian teamed up with WTB's Mark Weir and Jason Moescheler to form Team USA 1. Brian notched the first win for his prototype Mojo HD on its first day of racing by winning one of the stages on Saturday, propelling the team to second overall on Saturday night.
Brian is very happy with the bike, and told us a couple things in text messages received over the weekend.
"bike is awesome"
OK, we understand typing is not that easy on a Blackberry.

Brian's Sunday Night Report

Seriously though, here we we have an extra long Blackberry missive from Monsieur Lopes:
"The Enduro race was a lot harder than I expected. The toll it took on everything: wheels, tires, brakes, suspension, the body, and of course the frame were beyond what I imagined. The new "HD" Ibis never missed a beat. For only getting the frame one week ago & with only one ride on it before packing it up for this race, it couldn't have gone through any more of a test than the abusive one I gave it here in France. With 10 demanding races, 3 of which ended with flat tires, the French won all but one race (which I won!). It was hard to beat them on course they knew better than all the rest, basically they were on their home track at times, where knowing the course saved them time. It's hard to believe that this bike isn't much heavier than the standard mojo, as it was eating up courses that were worthy of full-on DH rigs. The added travel, stiffness, clearance for larger tires and a 8" rotor allow you to take on the toughest terrain you can throw at it, but it's still efficient and light enough to pedal up any hill. Another weapon is added to the ibis line up...
Wow, so there you go. The only non-French winner of any stage was Brian. We think that's pretty impressive. Without further fluff, here's a bit more about the bike.

Mojo "HD" Prototype Specifications
· Price and delivery date are both to be decided.
· 160mm of rear wheel travel.
· DW Link Suspension.
· 26" Wheels.
· Target weight for the frame and shock: 6.2-6.5 lbs. (we're not there yet but are fine-tuning the layup).
· 67 degree head angle with a 160mm fork (Brian was running a 170mm fork this weekend, you can also run a 180mm).
· Chain Stay Length: 17.125".
· Top Tube Lengths are the same as regular Mojos.
· 12 x 135mm Maxle rear axle.
· Post mount magnesium left dropout, carbon right dropout.
· Compatible with the new tapered steerer standard: 1 1/8th hidden upper, 1.5 traditional lower.
· Compatible with both Chris King InSet and Cane Creek Frustum headsets.
· If you want to run your current straight 1 1/8" fork, we've got you covered too. We will have an adapter available, and you will be able to use a King headset top and bottom.
· 2.35"-2.5" rear tire depending on brand and height of cornering knobs.
· Dual row angular contact bearings in the front of the lower link that have less play than standard sealed bearings. Preload adjustment is not necessary. Large 28mm x 15mm x 7mm radial bearings in the rear for stiffness and long wear.
· The leverage ratio, like the Mojo and Mojo SL is designed for air shocks. The Mojo HD comes with a 8.5" x 2.5" Fox RP23. A DHX air will work on all but the small size. A coil shock is not offered because the linkage rates weren't designed for it. We lowered the top tube to get slightly better standover than the regular mojo while having a higher BB because of the longer travel (we managed to retain the DHX air compatibility in 3 of the 4 sizes).
· The Bottom Bracket height is 13.8"-14" depending on tires.
· Chain guide development is well on its way, we'll announce compatible brands soon. The frame will not have ISCG mounts so it will not be Hammerschmidt compatible.
· The HD runs full cable housing. Rear brake and rear deraileur run on the down tube, with hidden swingarm housing for the rear derailleur.
· Front derailleur (if you use one) and adjustible seatpost housing (if you use one) run along the top tube.
· And once again, just to make sure you got it, price and delivery date are both yet to be decided. Stay tuned for more.Ibis

Nude Tranny's on the Couch!

Well that heading should get my google search count up, so if you googled to my blog expecting to see something else, sorry.

Only pictures of Ibis Tranny frames with the naked carbon finish.

These look so nice, only got a hand full in, so if you have been thinking about one of these, best you contact me or your friendly Ibis dealer fast!

And while we're thinking about Ibis bikes, in the 'be like Lopes' category, you might also want to rush out and get one of the new WTB Lopes signature series saddles. Released today.

Basic Bike Ride the Blur LT Carbon

Ewen and the guys at Basic Bikes didn't waste anytime when they got one of the first Blur LTc's in NZ.

They built it up and took it for a ride! Read about it here;

I'm still waiting for mine to arrive, at least I have a bit more time to decide how I should get it built. I assume you guys all know that the Santa Cruz bike builder is up? Click here

Decided how to build your one up yet?

Bos Ndee at Bike Culture

For those of you who were paying attention, yeap, I did bring in two sets of Bos forks to evaluate. The Bos Ndee's are on Rob Smail's Bullit.

So if you are making a trip into Bike Culture, you should go an have a chat with Rob about these forks.

He is already telling me he's not giving them back, so I'm not sure when I will get to try them.

Santa Cruz Tallboy - More News

Tallboy on the Horizon
We've been hinting about a 29" bike on our blog for a while, and now that we're getting the thing closer to finalized, we're ready to show a little more skin. So to speak. We have photos that are absolutely how the bike will look in final trim, and we've got geometry charts, and we've got some final prototype mules that we've been kicking around. The basic nuts and bolts of the Tallboy have been getting massaged into place for over a year now, and the big wheel beast has taken shape into something we're really happy with:

Carbon fibre frame - This'll be our third carbon fibre bike, and the more time we spend working with the material, the more we are able to push into new definitions of stiffness and strength. Following in line with what we were able to achieve with the carbon Blur XC and LT models, we're kicking around Tallboy frames that weigh right about 5 pounds (with shock) and are so insanely flex-free and fun handling that they blow all our earlier assumptions about big wheels and chassis flex right out of the water. Tapered head tubes, massive but super light chainstays and rear triangles, absolutely rock solid frames, and they're still around 2 pounds lighter than most of the similarly targeted competition. Super stiff, super strong, super snappy.

VPP suspension - The Tallboy will have 100mm of travel. The lower link features the same 15mm aluminum pivot axles, titanium hardware, angular contact bearings, grease ports, durability and ease of maintenance as found on our Blur LT. There's also a carbon fiber upper link, with the same trick hardware and angular contact bearings on the big axle. Clean, neutral pedaling without bob or feedback, and plush bump eating suspension performance across the board.

Dialed geometry - Big wheels work well for a lot of people, but are a godsend for the big and tall set. As such, we're sizing the Tallboy all the way up to XXL - which comes with an appropriately Andre the Giant approved 25.9" top tube and 45.6" wheelbase. All Tallboys otherwise feature the same short and stiff 17.5" chainstays and sweet handling characteristics. They're designed to excel in the "fun to race, really fun to rip singletrack, go for a big huge ride and come home with a sore face from grinning all day long" spectrum of riding.

We're stoked with how they are progressing, but they aren't going to be ready for prime time for a few months yet. Pricing is still being finalized, bikes will be showing up ready for delivery in October, and we'll begin taking orders around the middle of August. Not quite there yet, but real close...bikes will be showing up ready for delivery sometime in November.Until then, keep an eye on the blog to see how things develop.

Bos MTB Forks - First Impressions.

I've only been able to get a few rides on the my new Bos RaRe forks, I plan to get to the local Nelson DH race in the weekend, for some true performance testing.

But I did get out the Emano Street DH track (a few minutes away from my house, handy eh?).

10 minutes push up, maybe a couple of minutes down. Good for setting the forks up.

My initial thoughts are;

1) Build Quality, the forks are an amazing piece of kit. Well engineered, no plastic bits, they look really nice too.

2) Usable tuning, for example, some forks offer rebound tuning that has 20 clicks of tuning but in all honesty you only use 2 or 3 clicks, because the rest of the tuning is way too slow or too fast to use. The Bos fork is small incremental adjustments that are not too stupid fast or slow at the outer ends of tuning

3) Open oil bath and a coil spring, for those of you who have never ridden an open oil bath, coil spring fork. You don't know what you are missing.

4) Really low stack height. 1 1/8 steerer tube means I can run a zero stack headset and gives me more options for the ride height of the bike. Most of the time you can't get the front end of the bike low enough (that's why those DH guys run flat bars).

5) Reliability, well after a few hours riding, I can't prove that. But I did email Nathan Rankin about what he and his team thought about the forks (Nathan is sponsored by Bos), he said the team all loved them and they were super reliable. The forks are handling their world cup racing easily. Low maintenance is a good thing.

Driver 8's ridden in NZ!

The Lime one is mine, just installed my new Bos RaRe forks, can't wait to try them out. They look fantastic too.

The yellow one in my brothers bike, this is the first of the 'off the shelf' Santa Cruz built bike. The sea bright Driver 8 is Richard, a customer of Bicycle's in Wellington.

Nice eh?

Who's the Bos?

Ok, remove thoughts of Tony Danza or that guy in a white t-shirt singing born in the USA

This is a blog about mountain biking (mostly); we here at Hyperformance Hardware have been talking to the guys at Bos MTB Suspension about getting some of their lovely forks to NZ so we can introduce them to the NZ market (that's YOU, mostly).

So far there is just a pair of Rare's and Ndyee's so they can be tested in NZ conditions.

They look bloody amazing too, I just can't wait to get them on my Driver 8.

One of the rules here at Hyperformance Hardware is that 'We won't sell anything they wouldn't use ourselves', so the next few months we will be riding these Bos forks as ofter as we can.

We hope to have a Stoy rear shock soon too. These are custom tuned to the riders weight and bike. Cool eh?

So best you do you research, check out the Bos website http://www.bosmtb.com/MTB2/en.html

If you don't know the names Fabien Pedemanaud and Nicolas Vouilloz, you better brush up on your world cup DH history.

The new names using Bos suspension are Nathan Rennie and Nathan Rankin, you may of heard of them?

Driver 8's and Carbon Blur LT's are here

The one and only seabright Driver 8 in NZ (actually only seabright Santa Cruz in NZ).

This one is already spoken for, the customer is probably drooling over it RIGHT NOW (otherwise I've lost a bet to Campbell and Bicycle).

Don't let my crappy photography fool you, you NEED to see one in the the flesh. The attention to detail is amazing. The new Blur LT carbon is a work of art and if you haven't ridden one yet, best you kick yourself.

OK, some arty shots of a large grey BLTc on the front lawn. Nice eh?

Medium Ano green Nomad, mmmmmm, I think I am keeping this one, got a new Nomad project in mind. WTF are those forks? Where did they come from?

You don't like seabright? Well maye a red Driver8 would suit you a little better, probably look good with a set of black forks. That would be my pick.

Maybe you're still into the 'all white' thing, well I can help you there too. Will go nice with your white handle bars, rims and saddle.

Sweet as.

Unlike that Ford bloke that came out his first production car, Santa Cruz are offering more than just black, but won't exclude it.

Driver 8, Yes I have Ridden it.....honest

YES, I have ridden my Driver 8, spent a weekend shuttling in Rotorua, nice.

The plan was also to race the local Nelson DH race last weekend, but the courier company decided to keep the bike in Auckland for a couple of days longer. (What have I done to anger those courier gods?).

Anyway, I love it. I feel quicker than I did on my Bullit (sorry can't prove it yet) and more confidence inspiring. It also feels like a bigger Nomad, which is a good thing.

I'm no hucker, but I just couldn't get enough laps down Huckle-Berry, so much fun.

No pictures of me in action, my camera's battery decided that it was flat (and YES I did put it on the charger honest). Anyway, last thing you want to see are pictures of me in 'action', honest

Next week a quick trip up to Auckland to collect the first shipment of Driver 8's (if you ordered a medium, it will be here). There might be a spare small frame, but that's it.

First shipment of the carbon Blur LT's, just some large frames to keep those shop guys happy.

Also, for you fussy naked Ibis Tranny customers, they are almost here.......don't know what's wrong with the lovely orange colour.

The Santa Cruz blog has still been distracting, I recommend you check it every day too.
http://www.santacruzbicycles.com/104bronson/

For those of you who are still reading (wow!) these are my new forks for the Driver 8

http://www.bosmtb.com/MTB2/NewIdylleRarefiche.html

Want to know more, better send me an email

Santa Cruz Bike Builder - Heckler working

Missing the Santa Cruz Bike Builder? Well it's working for the Heckler, check out Seabright Blue, change the forks, change the groupset....go on, you know you want to,

http://www.santacruzbicycles.com/heckler/index.php?builder=1

Oh yeah, Santa Cruz will be doing complete bikes. Just doing the numbers, haggling with my dealers and trying to screw the prices down from my freight companies etc, so YOU the customer can get a Santa Cruz off the shelf for a great price.

Complete BLT Carbons, on the floor of your local Santa Cruz dealer, how would that be?