Weekly Stuff!

Welcome to Weekly Stuff, where I run down things that I found most interesting in bike news!

Fancy New Drops

This is technically from the week before but I wasn’t writing this column then. Frankly, this is exciting and I’m really surprised that it didn’t exist already. I’m going to have at least one of these in the parts bin ready for whenever the whim strikes me to reconfigure one of my bikes. I’ve put drops on my mountain bikes before but wasn’t really satisfied with the rigmarole around getting the brakes set up and, because I’m lazy, I always just ran them singlespeed to run around the gearing problem. I’m fairly sure these will be spending an amount of time on my Karate Monkey.

They note, numerous times, that you don’t get all of the hand positions you’d expect from a more traditional drop bar setup but I can assure you I do not mind. Looks like they’re slated for a September 2021 release. They state it will come with a set of shims for your convenience (thoughtful!) and it’s made out of chromoly (because of course it is).

Revel Wheels

This is particularly interesting to me. I’m not currently in the market for carbon gravel wheels but that might change with something that is allegedly more durable. Anything that makes the ride quality better while cruising around on gravel is fine by me. The fact that these are more environmentally friendly and recyclable is quite a selling point. I’m pretty interested to see how these turn out, even though my usual gravel rigs are a couple rungs down the technological ladder comparatively.

Grow Cycling

I had an email come in talking about Grow Cycling and I had to check them out. They look like a great cause and I thought I should definitely pass this along this week. Plus, I happen to think pump tracks are just a great idea in general!

The Olympics

Off-road to Tokyo — the Olympic mountain bike course

My news feed has been just full of Olympic information and this absolutely piqued my interest. I’m pretty excited to see what kind of XC course has been designed for this, especially as XC bikes have been slackening up a bit in the past few years.