Early September means Eurobike and so after a 1am start I found myself walking in through the front doors of a humongous ex-Zeppelin hangar for the annual showing off of shiny bits. Immediately I realised that I’d forgotten just how big the show is, it’s ridiculously massive with more exhibitors than I can count.

The exhibit most people seemed to be flocking to (and the most widely publicised with posters everywhere) was the new Truvative Hammerschidt geared crank. It contains a set of planetary gears which are either engaged reducing your gearing down by 1:1.6, or bypassed giving a straight through 1:1. Weirdly it also contains a freewheel mechanism inside the crank. I haven’t figured out why that’s necessary yet but I’ve tried to upload a movie so you can figure it out for yourself, click here and hope it works. You might need a codec or something. Anyway it seemed to work slickly and although I wouldn’t describe it as “light” it isn’t as much of a solid lump as it looks so form an orderly queue for turning your singlespeeds into 2-speeds, your DH bikes into 18-speeds, or your Rohloffs into 28 internally geared monstrosities (someone’s probably already done it).

One of the most interesting things from our point of view was a load of new stuff from American Classic. They have really pushed the boat out this time with a complete re-design of all their graphics and a big pile of new hubs including 15mm and 20mm bolt thru front hubs, and 10mm and 12mm rears for DH bikes. The current XC hubs remain unchanged apart from the graphics and the small steel inserts you’ll see below which prevent the cassette digging in to thefreehub body. Don’t hold your breath, these hubs won’t be available for quite a few months.

One of our other major suppliers, NoTubes, didn’t have much new stuff to show but there was a new Raven tyre (like the Crow but with a bit more tread) available in all sorts of sizes - 2.0 and 2.2 in 26″, and a 29er version, and a skinny cyclo-x version which actually looked pretty knobbly with the scaled-down tread.

This year it seemed like everyone was bringing out lightweight disk rotors, slightly ironic (or maybe opportunistic?) since NoTubes have just discontinued theirs. Some of the rotors looked like they might just work, while others (especially the carbon / aluminium hybrids in massive 260mm!!!) looked plain scary. Here’s a few:

More to come tomorrow….