- Today is a pro bike check with a bit of a difference.
I'm talking about a bike that takes long,
low, and slack to a whole new realm.
As you probably noticed behind me,
is Martyn Ashton's insane Nicolai custom tandem.
Look how long the thing is.
(heavy rock music)
Now you've probably seen
mountain bike tandems floating around before,
but this one is unlike any you're likely to have seen.
First up, it's got a massive Fox 40 on the front.
Second up, you'll notice
it's got Martyn's custom seat on here.
Third up, you'll probably notice
it's got two e-bike batteries on it
and an e-motor on the back
for that essential power assist that's needed.
Now this bike is a complete one-off,
it's a prototype at this stage,
so the geometry and the angles
are a little bit touch and go
because it's all work in progress,
but we're gonna get to that when we chat to Martyn
and Chris Porter, who helped him develop this bike
with the help of Karl Nicolai.
As with any bike check, the heart is all about the frame.
As mentioned, this is a Nicolai bike,
so these are handmade in Germany.
If you go on their website,
they've got various different models of bike available
including a regular tandem.
For all of their bikes, there are custom options available.
But this one is something very special
and it's not been done before.
Now for that reason,
the geometry is a bit touch and go at this stage
because there's various improvements
that are gonna be made to get the best out of it.
But as it stands, it's got a 2140 millimetre wheelbase
so it's a fairly sizable bike.
Head angles in the realm of 65 degrees currently
but that is all stuff being experimented with.
Of course Martyn is essentially bolted to the bike
with the way it works so the handling
on the rear of the bike is absolutely pivotal.
When you ride any tandem bike the stoker,
which is the rider on the back, has a massive effect
on what happens with the bike.
If the rider up front wants to lean to the left,
if the rider out back leans to the right
you're more than likely gonna go right
because of the shift of weight.
There's a lot of things that we're still trying to develop
to get the best out of it.
As it is, it's got a coil shock on the back here,
it's got an EXT shock and it's completely custom shimmed
and in fact, later on today you're going to see this
in pieces on the workbench
because they're actually going to be putting
a higher compression tube on it
to keep it up at the back end a little bit more.
Now as with all Nicolai bikes you can adjust the geometry
of those chips in here,
and there's various different things you can do
to the back end of the bike.
As it is it's running somewhere
around 180 millimetres to travel,
it does depend on the settings.
More importantly though, it has been about geometry
which we're going to chat to Martyn and Chris about.
In the meantime let's have a look
at the spec on this very special bike.
Okay so let's look at the cockpit first,
this is where the all essential handling
comes from for Martyn.
Now of course it's got his custom seat on here
which Martyn's actually going to talk about
because there's a brand new seat
being custom-made for him at the same time
as I'm talking right now.
So we'll look at the bars first
and it's got a Nukeproof 38 mil rise,
full 800 mil width carbon downhill bar on here.
He's running Ergon GD 1 grips,
he likes the thinner variety for his preference.
He likes a really high front end.
'Cause you think Martyn, back in the day
he was into moto trials and trials,
it's all about that high position.
He's also running hand guards,
he's running AVS guards on here.
It's got Hope Tech 3 brakes on there.
Stem is something quite interesting,
something I really like is
one of the original Mondraker stems
so it's ONOFF Components
which is Mondraker's in-house brand.
It's a 10 millimetre stem that sits on top
of that steerer tube.
This gives him that direct control that he likes.
And really needs to make sure
this bike can be as manoeuvrable as possible
on the sorts of trails he needs to ride.
Now, up front is a Fox 40 fork on here
and you'll see it bears the Mojo Rising graphics
'cause it's really Mojo that are to thank
for this project being possible in the first place.
Now the fork's air sprung
and it's running a very specific compression tune on here
that's been done by the Mojo Rising guys
to make sure that it can actually hold the bike up enough.
You think, it's got two riders on here,
and Martyn's riding some really aggressive terrain on it.
It's running 200 mil travel as you'd imagine
and the brakes, the four piston design,
they're running 203 mil rotors,
he needs all the braking power you can get.
Wheel-wise it's running DT FR 1950
so that's their freeride wheel,
they're really really strong.
They've got a 30 millimetre internal width rim
on the front here and the same out back.
Martyn's running the front and rear tubeless
and he's running the Continental DeKeyser
downhill spec tyres.
They've got incredibly thick casing
and of course running a bike this heavy, this long,
and this aggressive, you need really high quality tyres
that can withstand a beating.
So, downhill casing all the way.
Now, transmission-wise,
it's running Shimano XT on here with 11 speed.
It needs something durable
and XT has forever been the workhorse in the Shimano range.
Crank-wise, it's running tiny little 150 mil cranks.
You need all the ground clearance help you can get
because you need to be able to power through
anything on this to keep it upright.
It's running the huge Stamp pedals on there,
they're obviously available in two sizes from Crankbrothers.
Really for the stoker, it's up to them
if they want to clip in or not
but having ridden this bike myself,
I would be on flat pedals all the way.
Power assist comes from Bosch at the moment on here
and it's running the Performance CX Line motor.
75 Newton metres of torque.
As you probably noticed there's two batteries on here,
each of them kicking out 500 watt hours.
Now usually I tell you about the finishing kit on the bike
but of course there's a whole lot more
going on in the middle here.
So out back you've got Crankbrothers Highline dropper post
with 150 mil dropped currently
although that is swapped around
depending on who's riding the bike on the back.
It's currently got an Ergon SM E3 saddle
on the back there too.
Handlebar position for the rear rider
is running a 630 mil Hope carbon fibre downhill bar
mounted in a 35 millimetre Hope stem.
Now this is where it gets a little bit different
and a bit more interesting,
so you've actually got a shifter
for the gears for the stoker.
That's normally the duty of the rider up front
and it's running Ergon GD1 grips on the back here
and it's also got a dropper post control
and it's got the actual battery control
for the e-system on here
so the rider can monitor what setting,
turbo, walk, eco, sport et cetera.
Now you might also notice
there's a little tow peak frame back here
it's quite enduro spec,
this is where all the microphones are housed,
where Martyn's videoing
and recording all the action on the trails.
Now the seat on here is Martyn's current one
but he's actually working with Fabric
at the moment to develop a whole new system
to sit on the front of this bike and probably another bike
that's going to be coming down the line.
I just wanna show you
my favourite little bit of the bike actually,
little weird thing,
is Martyn's custom pedals he's got down here.
Check it out, he's got the Crankbrother Mallet DH
with his name on them.
What you have to do
to get your name on a set of pedals around here?
Well very clearly the only person
we really need speak to is Martyn
because he's the man that had this crazy idea
in the first place!
- Well, kind of.
It actually came from a conversation
me and you had in the office.
- When you say the office,
was it the office or was it?
- Yeah, the office.
(can opening)
- [Both] In the office.
- And, yeah it's been an amazing experiment so far
and it's working really well.
- [Doddy] I'm staggered that this thing even exists,
the workmanship that goes into it
and I guess Nicolai are probably one of the only people
in the world could actually do this project with you.
- Yeah, well that's why we did it with them
because obviously they can just start
from, literally, from the ground up,
just make us something that has never been made before,
it's never been tried before,
and there's so much about this that is very unique.
Just from the e-bike tandem side of things
but then also once you add in the fact
that you're putting someone whose legs don't work
on the front end, it starts, geometry-wise,
to get pretty interesting.
So it's been a real technical challenge
but I mean as a first prototype effort
it works unbelievably well and I'm being surprised
by it every time we go out, I really am.
- I've been out on it with you once
and I was very surprised!
So surprised that I probably don't want to volunteer
in much of a hurry!
- Yeah, well, it's surprising on the back
'cause it is quite scary
when you haven't got those brake levers to grab.
- I'm a control freak, I need my brakes.
- Everybody says the fact that there's no brakes there
has just been terrifying, but.
- Brake, brake, brake, brake, oh my God.
I've never had such a strong will of brakes in my life!
- Once someone's been on the back
and they've got used to how it steers
and they've been down a few trails
and start to get comfortable,
you can start to really push it.
And we're starting to find, now,
that there's things we want to do
that maybe we're gonna need to make some changes to.
Because we think it can perform better than,
better than we originally thought.
- Yeah.
So obviously you're working with arguably
one of the most interesting and in-depth geometry finders
in the bike scene, Chris Porter from Mojo Rising.
- Yeah. - How did that come about?
- Well I've known Chris for a long long time,
he's into motorcycles like I am
and we go way back in the sport of mountain biking
but he's one of those people who will just take on an idea
and just run with it.
And when I first wanted to get back mountain biking
after my accident, Chris was the first person I called
'cause I knew he could realise the idea.
'Cause sometimes, problem-solving is what's in the way
of just making something happen, you know?
And someone like Chris just won't give up
until he's worked it out.
And he did that with my first bike
when I came back, that was a Geo Metron as well.
And then, yeah, the tandem was just like,
it's a natural progression.
But it's really starting to become my weapon of choice
because Chris has got it working so well.
Still a work in progress but we got it pretty close
on a first go.
- So when I first rode it with you,
in fact, across that field, screaming
like a little girl. - Down this hill.
- It had, correct me if I'm wrong,
it had a 29 inch front wheel on it didn't it?
I think your cockpit position might been different.
And I'm pretty sure it had longer cranks
which were changed fairly soon on.
So I guess there's quite a lot of, not issues,
it's just things that you would never think of
until you try it. - Yeah, there's been
some chopping and changing and as you do with all bikes
but it's literally been chopping and changing on this bike.
So, we took the front back down to 27.5
'cause the 29, I was finding a bit too much flop
on the steering and I wasn't enjoying that
and changing it back to 27.5, just gave me
a bit more stability.
And we're gonna increase with that change,
we're gonna start making a few more changes
to that in the future.
We shortened down the bars for the stoker
because when they've got a normal width bar on
they've got so much control over the stability of the bike,
it's almost too much.
- Well I remember one of those first runs with you,
across the field here,
the bar was full width on the back
and I felt that I could tip the bike over.
- Yeah, it's scary. - And I think we were holding
the back of your chair at the time.
- Yeah, the narrower the width at the back,
the more control I end up having
which makes it, because of the particular situation here,
that's a little bit more comfortable.
And we also, yeah, like you said,
shortened those cranks down to 150s.
- [Doddy] That's tiny, that's so short, isn't it?
- [Martyn] It's tiny, and the power that motor can put out
and what it can handle is remarkable.
- Well I think the only thing now,
I think we need to chat to Chris.
And see where we're gonna go with this next
- Yeah, well Chris is full of ideas,
he's got all sorts ideas of stuff we can do at the front end
but he's also really keen to try and sit that back end up
by doing some changes to the shock.
Because we're still, even with those short cranks
we're still getting some pedal strike
on some of the climbs, and yeah he's got a few ideas
for that, as he always has when it comes to suspension.
- Let's go and chat to Chris, then.
- Let's have a look.
So, Chris Porter here we are again.
How do we keep getting ourselves in these situations?
- It's 'cause no one else is mad enough
to work with you mate.
- That might be it, right now me and Doddy,
we've just been looking at the bike,
I've been showing him all over it,
looking at the details of it
and we were talking about how we're so surprised
that we feel like we can push the bike more
and we want to start trying to improve it even further.
So there's a couple of things I want to ask you about
and get your opinion on.
One of them, and I think this is really crucial
to what we can do on the bike,
is getting the back end to sit up a little bit more,
so BB height, and what changes we can make there?
And how you would go about looking at something like that?
- Well,
first of all when we first built the bike,
we had in mind a very different type of riding
than you've ended up doing.
We had in mind more sort of flowing blue and red trails.
And you've got flipping,
good riders on the back all of a sudden.
- Very good riders.
- Nearly said who, didn't I? - Yeah, keep that quiet,
keep that quiet.
- And you're pushing the bike beyond
what we envisaged, so we're definitely gonna have
to lift the rear, and we'll do that dynamically,
we're gonna put a much stiffer spring on.
We might put some stiffer valving in,
the stiffer spring will actually just sit it up.
We can't physically raise the rear of the bike
because of the design of the e-motor,
we can't actually tip the swing arm any further forward.
But what we can do is we can hold it up in its stroke
with suspension and luckily, that's what we do.
- Right, luckily, yeah, that's what you specialise in.
And that means that we'll get less pedal strike
when the stoker's driving us up through rocky ascents,
things like that. - Exactly that.
'Cause we completely envisaged not being able
to take this thing anywhere difficult.
And we'd envisaged keeping it low for stability.
And actually, what we need to do now
is create a bit more ground clearance
so you can actually ride up stuff
that you wouldn't have thought possible
when we first built this mad thing.
- That's one place we've been really surprised
is that it climbs incredibly well
and there is something of a technique there
to riding it on those climbs.
Me and the person who we had on the back recently,
we were finding that
if we kept the pedal drive continued
through the turn on a climb
and then I controlled it using the brakes,
almost dampening down that power,
we could ride incredibly slow on the bike.
- I think that's great, that's you,
you've overcome many things recently in your life
but when you were riding bikes,
you overcame the limits of the bike
with your riding skill and style.
And you've done it again with this
and found, you know, almost echoes
of your old trials motorcycle riding.
- Echoes, little bits.
- Echoes, little echoes.
With the techniques that you've used to steady the bike
going up the climb so you can steady out those power pulses
that whoever it was, was giving you
by your controls, rather than the rider.
So you're fully in control of the thing.
- I've turned them into my motor, Chris,
that's what I've done. - Exactly.
- The other thing, so we're gonna have a little play
with that rear shock,
and you're going to show us how we're gonna do that
in a moment, but also, we're gonna start thinking
about what we can do to change the angle
on the front end as well is that right?
- Well, angle?
We'll have a look at angles and we'll have a look at offset
because-- - 'Cause that's two
very different things. - Oh, yeah, very.
But what we're looking at, what you're finding
is that when you're actually now dropping
into quite steep stuff or making quite abrupt
changes of direction on rough terrain,
you're ending up unable to fight the flop.
- Yeah, it's kind of flopping me into the corners.
- With the amount of weight that you've got on this bike,
as soon as you get it off the centre line
it'll wanna pull.
So what we've gotta do is we've got to try
and either reduce the offset or reduce the head angle.
If those things work, but then the steering
of the bike suffers as a result
then maybe we'll even think about a steering damper.
So that we can have something that'll allow you
to drop into these much lairier sections
and not have the,
stoker and your weight flop in that handlebar.
- Into those turns, yeah.
So there's almost some incremental steps we can take
to test that as we go forward.
And try some different things.
- Obviously, Mr. Ashton won't be riding it,
so we're gonna have to have a stunt pilot.
- Stunt double, Doddy!
(both laughing)
- And this stunt pilot will report back
whether the flop improved, or whether the stability improved
or whether the steering suffered as a result.
and we can get it working.
- I like the reporting back.
Can I sit somewhere and be reported back to?
That's good. - Awesome.
See if that helps as well.
That looks smoother already.
- I did use a little bit of back brake
but not like previously.
That felt way better that time, yeah.
Well, that's a bit of an eye-opening experience
getting to actually try Martyn Ashton's
mental crazy tandem myself.
And even just today here at Mojo Rising
just getting to see the difference it makes
by playing around with suspension settings.
On the rear they've gone up, I think,
to a 575 spring on the rear from what was standard on there.
Supporting the back end of the bike
and then they flipped the crowns backwards
so it's giving it, basically, an insane offset difference.
But what they've translated to to actually riding
was Martyn, one the problems he had
was how the bike wanted to sort of tip itself over
at low speed, just the effect basically,
of having such a slack head angle which he kinda needs.
By flipping the crowns backwards
I could just rest my hands on the bars and steer out.
I'm absolutely staggered
at all these little incremental differences that can happen.
So you have to make sure that you keep tuning in
to GMBN to watch what Martyn does
on this mental tandem.
I'm blown away by it, it's such a cool tech bike
and a really cool project.
We're definitely gonna do a follow-up video
where we manage the next sort of fundamental things
we're gonna do to it to change the way it rides.
I'm gonna throw you to Martyn's first video
right down here, that's the one he did with Rob Warner.
Rob literally screaming like a girl,
if you haven't seen it, stop what you're doing,
watch that right now.
And don't forget please tune in,
and give us a thumbs up
if you like what we do here at GMBN Tech.
I'm off to have a beer now.