- Today, the Kent Trouvaille is gonna meet its gods.
(upbeat mystical music)
We're gonna be fair to it.
I'm not sending it up the creek without a paddle.
I've actually given it some upgrades,
upgrades that I feel would give you
the most bang for your buck should you
find yourself the owner of a Kent Trouvaille.
(upbeat guitar music)
So firstly, a lot of you suggested
we get a derailleur with a clutch.
See the derailleur that's on here is actually not bad,
but you can see that when you hit bumps,
the cage moves very easily.
Put slack on the chain and allows it
to come off the front chain ring.
Oh, I just dropped the chain.
A derailleur with a clutch has some resistance over here
so the chain can't move as easily.
Now the problem with that upgrade is that we get rid
of a perfectly good derailleur and then spend a bunch
of money on a new one that sort of puts us
up to the price of like a better bike.
And I do not think the derailleur
is the weakest link in this drivetrain.
I think it's the front chain ring.
So on a good bike with a one by drivetrain
you have a single speed chain ring.
A single speed chain ring has alternating teeth.
One is narrow and one is wide, just like a chain.
This way, it provides the most contact
with the chain possible and helps it stay in place.
Now the chain ring that it came with
is sort of like that but not really.
Now to further complicate matters,
you can't change out this chain ring,
but the bottom bracket blew up on this bike.
Ooh, what's what's that?
That wasn't a good sound.
And it might blow up on yours and still
I've come up with a solution for $55 on Amazon
where we have a much better externally mounted
bottom bracket and a machined aluminum
chain ring with new crank arms.
And this is gonna provide much better chain retention,
hopefully fix the bottom bracket issue,
and for $55, I think it's gonna give us more benefit
than changing the derailleur
because it's killing three birds with one stone.
(upbeat music)
Now the next upgrade I did, I honestly don't think
is as necessary, but I'm gonna be going fast on this
and so I put hydraulic disc brakes on it.
$68 hydraulic disc breaks off of Amazon.
Now you probably shouldn't mess around with brakes
because they're the one thing standing between you
and let's say a tree, but there's some redundancy.
We have two of them, and I honestly think
they're safer than the ones that came on it.
They had these big levers.
You had to squeeze 'em so hard.
These, they seem to operate like really expensive
hydraulic disc brakes.
They feel good, can bring the wheel
to a stop with one finger.
If they hold up, these are cool.
But like I said, that's a risk
that I'm willing to take here.
So if you were to buy a Kent Trouvaille
from your local Walmart for $398
and install these parts on it, you would have
spent 521 US dollars for a bike
with a one by nine and hydraulic disc brakes.
And so if these upgrades provide some benefit,
we're gonna have a pretty good bike here
but I'm getting kind of impatient
and so we're not gonna take this on a cross country trail.
(suspenseful music)
Predictions.
Well, I think we're still gonna drop a chain,
but the chain retention's already
way better this time than last time.
I think the fork is also gonna start showing its limits.
The new brakes we put on are gonna perform perfectly.
And as long as we don't crash,
I think the wheels are gonna be okay
but we're gonna keep an eye on the spoke tension.
Other than that, it's a heavy alloy frame.
I don't see anything happening
to it if we stay rubber side down.
So let's push our new and improved Walmart bike
to its limits and yeah, see how that goes.
(funky music)
So far, so good.
Does not feel like a department store bike that's for sure.
(bike thuds)
Ooh.
I am clapping this fork a lot.
(bike thudding)
This is very bumpy.
Oh my God.
Forgot about that.
Made 'er.
This bike is oddly pretty decent
at steep technical terrain
and I don't think it would be without replacing the brakes.
We do have to remember that this has a lot
of the characteristics of a cross country
hard tail, it's got short travel,
tires don't have much tread.
Keeping that in mind, it descends pretty admirably,
especially over technical terrain.
Having a lot of rubber around the wheel definitely helps.
We would've been pinging the rim with anything smaller.
I'm impressed.
Here we go.
(suspenseful music)
Jesus.
(suspenseful drum music)
(bike thudding)
And a lot of those technical moves would be next
to impossible if I didn't change the brakes.
Jesus.
So I did a little drop test on the bike
before we move on and it's not a good sound.
Front wheel is loose, which is strange,
I mean, we closed the quick release.
This is a Suntour fork.
It's not like a Walmart fork.
Let's chalk it up to I didn't close it
with enough tension and we're gonna keep a close eye
on it, because that's not good.
You know, honestly the only thing holding this bike back
from a climbing perspective, tires.
Not a lot of tread.
These are fast rolling, like kind of cross country tires
and that's okay.
If you had this bike and you ever wore these tires out,
wanted to add some ability, you'd get ones
with more grip by oof.
Yeah, there's an example.
(bike thudding)
Eh, that was my fault.
(upbeat music)
Okay, I did drop a chain on that.
That was a little much.
Like you guys said, we need a derailleur with a clutch.
I just think if we would've done that,
we would still drop chains with the chain ring we had.
Let's do a little welfare check
before we go any further, shall we?
You can see when we rock it back and forth
the seals are moving.
There's a pretty good amount of slop in here.
But with that said, you will regularly find this same fork
on $900 bikes.
Brakes are incredible.
Like they actually have a lot of power
and I'm not having to work very hard
to keep the bike at speed.
They modulate well.
Prank set has been just
(blows kiss)
just freaking perfect.
And while I'm not riding as fast as you could
on let's say, a more capable bike, I'm not going slow.
(serious drumming music)
This bike is getting a fair feet down.
(serious drumming music)
Okay, I kind of saw that coming.
Angled route.
Straight down on the derailleur side,
hopefully we didn't mess anything up.
Ooh, probably got a little cocky there.
(funky music)
A little more.
(funky music)
Survived.
So, our Kent Trouvaille did not Trou-fail today.
It's still running.
It's still peddling.
It's still working.
We could take it on another ride.
Needs a tuneup, but that was a big kid trail.
Let's take a look at what's actually wrong
with the bike at this point.
They're all kind of minor things.
So first of all, I crashed.
And so the derailleur hanger is a little bit bent.
We would just need to put that back
into alignment and the shifting should be fine.
Our bottom bracket is perfectly fine.
That was a huge upgrade for $55.
It definitely feels more robust.
The bearings have a wider stance,
effectively making everything stronger.
And we had no failures.
We beat on it really hard today.
We didn't get a flat tire.
The tires held up.
I did complain that they don't have enough tread
but that's not really a complaint against the tire quality.
That's just the style of tire.
Both the front and rear wheel
have a little bit of wobble going on.
I think after we true 'em
they should become a little bit stronger from it.
The fork is a little bit sloppy where the lowers kind
of meet the stanchions where this wiper seal is.
It moves around a little bit, more so than before.
I don't think to a dangerous extent, but it's worth noting.
I would be interested to see how one
of those $150 Amazon air forks works.
We should torture test one of those.
Now the real winner today, these zoom breaks.
These hydraulic disc breaks I got off of Amazon.
I'm honestly flabbergasted at how well they perform.
They felt amazing.
Now how would they perform
after sitting in your shed for the winter?
I can't tell you.
I can only tell you that on this ride, they felt as good
as a set of inexpensive Shimano hydraulic disc breaks.
The reason people find this so fascinating
is because they're looking for a hack.
They're looking to beat the system.
You go to Walmart, you buy this really cheap bike
and then you change out a few parts
and you end up spending less
than a really good bike and you get the same performance.
That's what everybody wants to think.
We've kind of accomplished that.
That was the most impressive cheap bike I've ever ridden
in terms of how it felt, how it climbed, how it descended.
And it's only a little bit over 500 bucks.
So let me know what you wanna see next time.
What kind of economical upgrades can we make
to the Kent Trouvaille?
What type of test can we do to it?
I think we might have found that hack.
We might have beat the system here.
This felt good.
I don't, I feel a little bit sick.
Thanks for riding with me today.
I'll see you next time.
(bike thudding)
Actually, the fork feels the worst
when you go to bunny hop something
and you pull up on it and it tops out.
No bueno.
(bike thudding)
Whoo.
(bike thudding)