- Welcome to Ask GMBN Tech this is our weekly Q&A show.
You get to ask the questions,
I give you the answers.
If you want to ask any questions
get them in the comments below
use the hashtag #askgbntech,
and of course you can send them into
the email address right there,
it's HELLOTECH@GMBN.COM.
Now on last weeks show you guys
all asked me a whole bunch of more
personal tech related questions
with stuff I've done over the years,
and there were so many,
we're going to continue right now.
(Booming music)
Alright next up,
I'm gong to expose myself here on this one.
This is from Gareth Bertolani,
and he says, "What's your least favorite
bike maintenance job?"
Um.
Actually I don't like doing bike maintenance.
Any routine maintenance,
the stuff stuff that I have to do,
can't stand doing.
Give me a set of forks to strip for fun,
give me some cheebus wheels to set up,
a set of wheels to lace and build up,
did that the other day for fun.
But as soon as it's like, I got to clean my bike
I got to change a cable,
anything I have to do I lose interest.
Probably the fact that I do this stuff
every single day of my life.
It does make you lose interest after a while.
But what I've actually managed to do
is just sort of come out of my own system
that I do little and often,
so I never really actually maintain anything.
I use my right to work to iron out
any small problems on the bike,
you know, any journey on the bike
I'm technically fixing it or figuring things out,
or cleaning it, or doing stuff.
So I don't have to spend anytime
maintaining my bike, because I can't be
bothered to be honest (laughs).
And on that note if you're interested
and you want me to make a video
on how to maintain your bike without,
barely any effort let me know
and I'll make it and I'll show you
exactly how I do it (laughs).
Okay now it's over to Sid who wants to know,
what is the first bike I built.
Well the first bike I really built was
a Giant ATX-970 so I always hardtail
with the the bike before it was a
Saracen Kili Pro Elite which
is made from Tange Prestige,
that I actually picked up from
a Malvern Hills Classic, and Rob Warner
who was doing a wheelie on it at the time
when I went to collect the bike.
Random trivia for you there.
The next bike I got was a Giant ATX-970.
I couldn't afford a 990 which was the one
by the Animal Team which was yellow and blue,
and the later one which was yellow with the red back end.
So I got the nice 70, the same frame
layout, just made for cheaper aluminum basically.
Same geometry and stuff,
and the day I got that bike my riding
changed forever.
So going from a hardtail with
not much travel upfront to a bike with
three and a half inch travel front and rear,
I was jumping off anything I could jump off of.
Jumping out of anything I could jump out,
gapping anything I could gap.
But as a result the bike kind of suffered so.
And this is where everything started my sort of
playing and tinkering with bikes really started happening.
Now the first thing that happened was those forks on it
had RST Mozos and they weren't the pros
they were just regular Mozos, three and a half inch travel.
Had to last them with rubber,
basically as the springs in them
so they were awful to start with,
but it had the worst top out, proper dunk.
Felt like the lowers were going to fall off.
So taking a pair of onza u lace handlebars grips
I made some top out bumpers,
because they were one of the softest rubber grips
you can get at the time and put
top out rubber bumpers in them basically
and they felt amazing after that,
well as amazing as a crap fork could feel anyway.
And then two weeks later
I cracked the down tube on the bike
and I remember,
literally I was so scared.
So someone was like,
"how long you got that crack in the down tube?",
and I was like ha ha, yeah very funny,
and they're like, "no really, how long have you
had that crack in the down tube?"
And I kid you not, this crack was
all the way around the down tube
it was like just wasn't separated yet.
I saw it, literally my heart was in my mouth.
I knew my dad would be just so angry with me.
So I went home and he literally out the bike
in the car without even speaking to me.
He goes, "get in the car boy".
We drove straight down to the bike shop I worked in,
took it in there to see Malcolm Fryer
in fact who you're going to see soon,
and said to him, "yeah this bikes broken",
and he said "yeah that's fine, Giant got a great warranty."
So he rings up Giant and he's like,
"They offered to if you want to pay a bit more money
upgrade you to the 990 which is the better frame."
And I'm like a win-win situation,
I've broken a bike and I get a better one out of it.
My dad is like, "is it any better?"
and the guy in the bike shop is like,
"yeah it's better."
"Has it got the same warranty?"
"Yeah it's got the same warranty."
Of course then the frame turned up,
then I built that frame up so technically
that was my first build,
I broke the shock on it because I had
to have the original shock which was on the 970.
I then upgraded to the shock that was
fitted on the 990 which was a Rock Shock Deluxe,
one of the first ones with the red springs,
and then I belled out a head tube
by basically doing massive jumps to flat.
Here's a couple of really old,
terrible quality photos on the screen now.
Used to do like flat table tops sort of thing,
and air to flats, six foot to flat
when you're quite tall and quite heavy.
Wasn't really the best thing to do on a
bike made of soft aluminum.
I think I did two or three frames like that
the head tube would bell.
So if you took out the fork the head tube
would just drop out of the frame,
and then you'd need to push fit this thing in.
So I kept changing that, then at some point
I got a set of Zzyzxs, that's Z Z Y Z X forks
by Bullet Brothers on their.
They didn't last very long, they
were on their for three or four weeks,
wore out the anodizing on the stanchion
and cracked the crowns.
So warrantied, got rid of those,
and bought a set of Bomber Z-1's.
In fact I did a deal with a local bike shop,
I swapped them for the Z-1's and they were like,
"Ha ha, we've got these Zzyx forks,
they're worth loads more then the Z-1's.",
and I was like, you're never going to sell those,
and in fact they were still in that bike shop
for about eight months afterwards.
So I definitely did better on that one.
Then after a while they stopped doing the 990
and they had the ATX 1000 which is
the weird sweeper one with the banana shaped linkage.
Had one of them, did the same thing to that.
Then they gave me an ATX 1 and they basically said,
"don't ever ring us ever again,
don't want to hear form you."
So they gave me this really good frame,
and it was a Rob Warner designed frame.
So I got that frame, went up to
Re-Cycle in London and swapped it
for a Canada Charles bike, basically.
Yeah that was pretty good when it turned out that way,
then I copied Martin Ashton for a few years,
and I bought myself a Kona Stinky 5
from Mountain High in Wintersworth,
and I was always chopping and changing
everything really.
So it wasn't particularly the
first bike I built, it was just like
lots of stuff going on, lots of my bikes,
mainly sort of crisis management,
you know I'd break something and
need to go riding the next day
so I'd swap something out from
another bike and do that, sort of juggling around,
and then never really looked back,
and everything has been building bikes since then really.
Alright next up, this is a cool one.
So this is from C.HIGGINS_MTB, "What's the one
bit of bike tech you wish existed?"
You know, if I could have any single product tomorrow
it would be a way of inflating and deflating
my tires on the go.
Something you see on off-road cars
like on the Hummer H1, so when you're doing
rock climbing and off road driving
you can actually change and pressurize
each individual tire on the go
to give yourself more traction,
or to pump it up so you can decrease rolling resistance.
A lot of the riding I do now,
and a lot of the riding I've always done has involved
sections of on fire road or even country lanes
to join up the sections of trail,
and as a result you end up either
compromising with a faster rolling tire
that doesn't grip as much, or if
you're running a softer compound tire you end up
running them really firm to try and
get the maximum rolling speed.
If that ever happens I'm sacrificing traction
at the expense of rolling resistance.
So in an ideal world if I could
change the tire pressure on the fly
I'd be a very happy person.
Now I'm aware that some people have done it
and the one I've seen seem to work well,
but they're not exactly the cleanest looking devices.
Now my idea would have had instead of a spoke
having a hose that goes straight into the tire
and you have your inflation device inside the hubs,
so you can stash these things away,
but I'm not sure if that would ever work.
I think that's what I would have,
if I could have anything.
Alright so this one's interesting,
This one comes from Ethan Merklien,
"What's the geekiest most tech weird
thing you know about bikes?"
I don't know to be honest.
It's like, I know lots about random stuff
that I never really think is that geeky
until I sort of start randomly reciting stuff
which I quite often do to Dan,
Dan the cameraman when I'm sort of just
telling him about where things came from.
I could tell you the story of where,
some really amusing stories to do with
Kona Bikes and what Kona means in Portugeuse
and all that sort of stuff but I Probably shouldn't.
Let's talk about how the mountain bike scene
in the UK essentially stemmed from wind surfing.
So the story is wind surfing was huge back in the 80's.
Obviously it's still pretty big globally,
but in the UK thy used to do it on lakes,
and a lot of those lakes suffer on days
were there's no wind.
Obviously you can't wind surf when there's no wind.
Now some of the top pro guys started
bringing back mountain bikes from the USA,
which had just become a new thing over there.
They'd ride them around the lakes and and around,
because they were often in old field and quarries,
they'd ride them in these quarries
while they were waiting for the wind basically,
and some of the people that were there in the original days
had the idea, "well why don't we
do more with mountain bikes, because these
things are pretty cool."
Now at the time there was Stiff,
which was a still is a really fine bike shop in Leeds,
it used to be Stiff Sailboards,
and there was Leisure Lakes which is
a really cool chain, independent chain
of bike shops in the UK.
Leisure Lakes, use your lake,
that's where that came from.
There's a whole bunch of things
in fact Orange Bikes was born from
the wind surfing thing as well.
So Lester Noble, he used to work
for a sail maker called Tushingham,
and the first, arguably, British mountain bike
was the Tushingham basically designed by him,
and pretty amazing went on to be Orange Bikes.
That's a very short version of that story,
and even in the US, Jeff Steber
used to make sails, and booms, and stuff like that
for sail boats and wind surfers,
and that led him into making mountain bikes eventually.
So quite a lot of the bike industry
weirdly stemmed from wind surfing
so that's a geeky fact for you.
Oh, and also Jeff Steber he makes guitars.
Check out his Instagram handle stebber_guitars,
very cool and his guitars are beautiful.
So he basically buys a body and sort of
makes them look like rough vintage guitars
and strings them and puts the necks on them and stuff.
Really, really nice I like the Steber Blues Master.
(Whistles)
Lovely bit of kit that.
Alright next up this is from BOWSAAARRRR,
so this is someone form work.
"What's your favorite custom pro bike paint job
of all time? Only one!"
There's no such thing as only one mate,
there's far to many nice ones out there.
This year, I don't know.
Ali from Fat Creations knocked out some
incredible looking bikes but I got to say
this year the best individual looking bike I've seen
has got to be Bryn Atkinson's Norco
with that snake sort of look.
I'd say that looks amazing like a viper
or whatever it was I forget the name,
the particular name of snake,
but that just looks mean, it looked
really, really cool.
In previous years (pause)
Dylan Dunkerton from the coastal crew
he had a specialized demo of his downhill bike.
It had kind of real tree camo wrap to it,
now that was awesome I loved the look of that.
But I think the one I liked the best
is actually an old retro one unsurprisingly,
and it wasn't a custom one it's publicly available.
It's a Klein Bike so it had S tube which is amazing
but Adroit which is a later bike
which is even lighter and high performance.
They did bikes with a linear fade
so when you look at it form the front
it was one color, and from the back
it looked another color,
and they had one called Gator Fade,
which was like a lime green into yellow.
That's like the coolest
and the nicest looking paint job I think ever,
and if I had a custom bike sprayed up
that is what I would have.
Alright, so this one's tricky.
So this is from RHETSIS, I recognize that handle
I think I know this man,
"what is is the worst modern bike you've ever ridden?"
Do you know I worked from 2001,
mid 2001 to 2017 really in one of
the leading Mountain Bike magazines
and over the years I tested so many
different bikes and some of them are just,
I don't even want to waste my breath on to be honest.
Some of them are awful, and a lot of them are amazing,
but these days it's actually
really hard to find a bad bike.
I did ride a Merida not that long ago,
probably two or three years ago
and that thing was pretty awful,
it had a really high pivot on it,
felt like you were peddling a rugby ball,
but thankfully they've sorted that one out,
and actually the newer version of it
is really actually a fantastic bike,
and I think as a result of reviews,
companies like Merida do change their design point
so it's really cool that that does have an effet.
The new bike, I think it's a 4 bar
or linkage activated single pivot,
but it's actually quite good geometry on it as well
from what I remember,
I can't remember the actual name of it.
It was a 160 ml bike but it was particular year version,
I was like seriously? Not good.
There's a lot of bikes that have minor issues
like the Kona Process 111,
still to this day one of the most fun bikes
I've ever ridden, absolutely loved it.
So 111 ml travel out back it had 120 on the front,
the newer version then had 130 on the front.
Absolutely fantastic but mud clearers,
there's nothing you can get,
so there's no room for riding in the UK.
The one I rode had hardons on it.
It didn't even have a big gnarly
time to deal with muddy terrain.
So pretty useless for UK weather,
but a fantastic bike and it rode so well
I was willing to forgive it so little points.
It was also quite ugly as well,
it had a paint job that looked like one of those
Ikea carry out bags,
but again I just loved the bike just fantastic.
A bit gutted that they
stopped making that one actually.
They're focusing on on their bigger travel
like the 29 Process 153's which is an amazing bike,
but would love to see the return of that 111,
because that was a magical bike.
The original comment on Merida Bikes,
they were pretty ropey but actually
really good at the same time,
so the had insanely low bottom breakage on them
which on one side is fantastic,
it gave them immense stability
when you're cornering, the down side is
you literally would bash your feet
almost with every pedal rotation
as you're bobbing up and down.
So they weren't the best and they were also
really, really flexy, I mean like insainly flexy.
Kind of like, imagine driving
a rear wheel drive forklift truck for a wet warehouse
the day after a Christmas party, something like that.
A little bit baggy is what I'm trying to insinuate.
I've still got two of those actually,
and I've been meaning to show you at some point,
because I couldn't get rid of them,
because they worked so well,
and there's so much flex on the back end
you could ride them through a really rocky way
and they'll kind of thread their way through
like a slippery noodle.
Really odd analogy I know, but they were amazing.
Obviously these days they're knocking out incredible bikes,
but is still rated those old bikes,
despite how flexy they were.
There was also interestingly,
working on MBK so that was probably
lets just say 2006 or 7 a New Zealand brand
called Kiwi Bikes who makes some
really, really good bikes, and for some reason
they came to see us and the brought
this downhill bike it was a 4130 steel dano bike,
and it had a high pivot, and actually
if you made that bike now and put an idler wheel
on it would be bang on point,
it would be the like the most on trend bike you can get.
Except it didn't have in idler wheel on it.
So you'd pedal this thing and it was just like,
words can't describe how badly this thing handled
and pedaled, and basically we snapped a rear mac off it,
just under compression because of the amount of
chain growth on the thing.
But literally if you just put a idler wheel on it
this thing would have been incredible.
The next generation of that very same bike
had a low pivot and it was amazing.
It was bomb proof, it was steel,
it you're into bike parts and stuff
it would have been fantastic,
and in fact its almost exactly what Starling
and a lot of those other sort of UK steel manufacturers
are trying to do is actually what Kiwi did way back then.
So a lot of props to Kiwi for making some fantastic bikes
just that on particular one which was a prototype,
just didn't quite cut the mustard unfortunately.
So there we go, that was a bit more
of a random ask GMBN Tech.
If you got anymore questions
let us know in the comments bellow,
or you can fire them in at the
email address at the bottom of the screen right here.
And for a couple more suggestions for some more
tech content to watch over here is a banging video,
so that's going to help you sort your bike out,
and over here is our essentials playlist,
and that's all the really good,
like the D.I.Y. basics that you need
to look after your bike.
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