Interbike... Grab Bag

This post will give me some space to post images that I haven't posted in previous posts. This will also wrap up my coverage of IB, but Jon might have more to share later.

One of the more surprising bikes I rode was the Iron Horse MKIII.

I've always thought of them as a budget brand, but budget or not, the bike rode very well.

I also spent some time on Giant's Anthem -- Giant named their demo bikes so that they could keep track of them. Most other companies numbered their bikes. That's the reason for the "Allison" on the bike's top-tube.

I actually rode the Anthem twice... I liked it that well. The shorter travel worked very well on the smooth-ish trails at Bootleg Canyon. In fact, I preferred the Anthem to it's longer legged sibling, the Trance.

Cane Creek had this Data Acquisition system set up on a Morewood -- the red arrow is pointing to a potentiometer.

The POT feeds data to this PDA using a serial interface.

This enables the engineers to look at shaft speed, position, damping profiles, etc. helping them fine tune the shocks for the best performance -- and back it all up with hard numbers.

We got to ride Cannondale's Super6 road bike. I normally ride a Cannondale aluminum frame and I found that the fit was different on this bike. The top tube was noticeably longer. Longer TT notwithstanding, this was one fast, responsive bike. I cannot comment on it smoothing out the road because the course they had us on is some of the smoothest road around. It's not very enlightening.

Fox was showing off it's F29 fork. As the name implies this is an air fork with longer legs for the bigger 29inch wheeled bikes.

Giro was sporting this new look for it's popular Xen helmet. The cover is fabric and the beak/bill/visor is covered with a rubbery material. Very trick.


Look was showing off it's new Quartz pedal line up. Not only is the design very, very open -- good for getting rid of mud -- but even the cheapest ($99) is pretty darn light, at 230g per pair.


And that's -- as they say -- a wrap. Check back in later this week for more light-related news, and, hopefully, a preview of some upcoming reviews.