E-bikes! Love them or hate them. Or both. For me, it depends whether I am riding one at the time. When I am doing that, I love them. When I am clawing my way up the far side of the accurately named Hill Road in the local patch, out of gears and on the pointy bit of my saddle, and I get passed my a midlife mother and her lovely teenage daughter, I have to admit to a bitter hatred of anything that plugs in. Especially if one of them is halfway down her cassette and doing about fifty rpm because she doesn’t know any better, and the other one is wearing a hoodie and cutoff jeans and isn’t even...
We get a lot of emails asking various questions, and among the most frequent is “what should I order, Dobies or Sifters?” The question usually includes a fairly detailed explanation of the living habits of the prospective customer. We sift through the information and try to make a good guess at which product would work best. Obviously a sensible person would order both, but not everybody has that much sense, or cents. If we had any sense we would have produced some sort of ‘pros and cons’ list we could cut and paste. So far we haven’t, so here are the sweeping generalisations, which you can tailor to suit your lifestyle requirements:Dobies are an outlier. When we thought them up there...
Mountain biking is one of the few sports where the participants can create their facility. In many places, they have to. At the beginning, trails were mostly existing routes created for some other purpose, like hiking, riding motos, or getting to and from trees that needed cutting. Today’s lucky punters can roll up to a trailhead and do their thing without a second thought: the sport is approaching its fourth decade and many places round the world have trail networks ready to go. They will find a ridiculously varied mix of trails handbuilt by volunteer working bees, scratched out by lone wolf enthusiasts, machine built by contractors, and almost unbuilt freeform things created by people riding down a line that...
If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere — right? I was pretty stoked to hear from an Nzo fan in the states recently, telling us how much he loves his Sifters. He took them out on the trail for a test drive, too! Here’s what he had to say. Hi Gaz, Hey there! I’m Bill, and I live in the states. I recently purchased a pair of Sifters for a hiking adventure in New York’s Catskill Mountains, and they did not disappoint. I don’t often write to companies about how great their products are, but I have to say your Sifters are next level awesome. I hiked the peak to peak trail at...
Hi there! There are a few things nicer than getting back in the trails after a month of abstinence, but only a few, and not much nicer. A perfect storm of bicycle failure, house moving, deck building, and some actual storms had meant an enforced mountain biking lay off. The failure was a long time coming. The mountain bike got a good hammering during the long autumn we had around here, and I attributed the odd noises that started coming out of it to a list of possible things. They were a sort of twanging sound when under whatever force my legs can muster at full throttle. Also, a soft squelchy kind of noise a bit like a leaky shock, but...
