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Sram’s Pink and Red Bits – 2010 Bling is Here!

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Sram are launching their 2010 products from the Rock Shox, Avid, Truvativ, and of course Sram components. There’s loads of techinical info on the new kit on their site, but here’s some bling shots of the bits you might most like to drool over.

 

forkrangeHere are the 2010 Rock Shox fork range. As you can see, there’s a lot of white. In front is the Boxxer World Cup, fully redeveloped with 35mm upppers, power-bulged lowers, a Maxle Lite DH axle to keep your wheel on without using pinch bolts, and a whole lot of adjustments knobs to fine-tune your ride. But, it’s been out since late last year, so are we ‘two thousand and late’ or are brands just bringing out new season gear earlier and earlier? Either way, the new Boxxers are hot, and you can now get a matching Truvativ direct mount stem in Sram red, black, or white.

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2010 Totems are a thing of beauty, if beauty can come in the form of a beefed-up freeride fork. This shot shows some of the detail from the fork legs, including the Sag Gradient diagram that is printed on many of the Rock Shox range this season – the lower mark is 20% sag, and the upper is 30%. It will make setting your forks up right for you slightly easier, and will make keeping an eye on how they’re functioning simpler as well.

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This year is the first that Sram are co-ordinating tech development across all the brands that they own, and one of the ways they’ve done that is with Select. These Truvativ Noir cranks come in ‘Redwin’ red, ‘Cash’ green, ‘Nugget’ gold, ‘Tango’ orange and…

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…’pinkslip’ pink. Each colorway has different combinations of  colored and black parts, to keep things interesting. There’s no blue, however. Wonder why that is? Have a guess, something about a rival company’s color, maybe.

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This is where things get really color co-ordinated – Sram’s x0 derailleurs and shifters come in the same five colours as the Noir cranks, so you can totally color-match your bike. The pink is not hot pink (these photos are fairly close to the real color) but it’s very nice and would match well with quite a few pink bikes  – Ellsworth and a certain Rocky Mountain spring to mind. Hell, the pink bits probably look cool on any bike!

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The full Select set in red.

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Here’s some of the 2010 Tango Orange Sram Select on a bike, that also happens to have Crank Bros Iodine wheels for extra orange flavour. Nice.

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Avid Elixr CR now comes in black and white, and is a super adjustable brake lever that also includes a pad adjustment barrel at the bars. Great if you have small hands (or perfectly normal sized lady-hands…) and like your lever close to your bars, and then have difficulty when the pads start to wear and the lever starts to come in too far and hits your knuckles. With this system you can just wind the barrel adjuster out to fix that. Avid are phasing out most of the Juicy brake models as well as the dh/freeride Code brakes for 2010, and moving entirely to the range of Elixrs. Hot, but they don’t come in pink. Yet.

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This crankset with press-fit bottom bracket is part of the new Sram XX range, which is the ultimate colaboration between all the Sram brands. XX includes forks, brakes, shifters, chain, cluster, rear derailleur, and even front derailleur – Sram have avoided doing an x0 front derailleur, and since XX is a step above again x0,  that’s a big advancement.  XX is for xc and trail riders, but the Sram guys stressed that it is NOT for DH/freeride – the brake calipers are magnesium and may explode if misused!

 

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The Sram XX clusters are amazing things , they start life by being CNC machined out of 3.5kg blocks of steel in a process that allegedly takes nearly 24hrs.  The final product is by far the lightest MTB cluster ever made, at under 200gm for the 11-32t. That’s a third lighter than rival lightweight clusters. Nicknamed the ’salad spinner’ during its development, the XX cluster features a replaceable aluminium  inner cog that is fixed to the CNC’d body. And although it won’t explode if you huck it and do skids all day, it may explode your wallet when you go to buy one…

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This is Sram’s Match Maker system. The theory is that your brake, shifter, and awesome new Rock Shox XX hydraulic lockout (that’s the rubber knob thing sticking up off the bars in this shot) can all mount on one bar clamp. I was very sceptical at first, thinking that this would be a one-size-fits-all approach which would only reward riders who complied with Sram’s ideal layout a small benifit in reduced weight. But in actual fact, they don’t have an ideal layout and instead offer a huge range of flexibility, more so than traditional multi-mount setups. The Match Maker clamps can be configured in a range of ways, with the gear levers closer or further from your hands relative to the brakes, and the shock control in an up or down position on either side. Paired with the Elixir’s adjustablility, Sram are bringing in some good stuff that will enable those of us who aren’t ‘Joe Average’ to get the ergonomics of our bikes just right.

 

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Rita Langley plays air-guitar.
Photo: Martha Hucker

This morning’s tech seminar was for bike mechanics, and as one of only a handful of certified female wrenchers in NZ, Martha Hucker writer Rita Langley got to go along, and was unfortunately the only chick there. In this shot, Rita is demonstarting that the 2010 Boxxer World Cup not only has Air Volume Adjust, but also features Air Guitar Tuning, by busting out some “So whaaat? I’m still a rockstar…”