Posts by james

        Select racers on the Australian Downhill circuit, the Thredbo Mountain Guides and some Diamant fat bike owners put it all on the line for the Thredbo Top to Bottom Race.

Fat-Bike.com has got one of our bikes for testing. Their initial impressions of the Diamant F1-LTD are on the Fat-Bike blog https://fat-bike.com/2016/05/initial-impression-diamant-f1-ltd-by-euan-pennington/ Initial Impression – Diamant F1-LTD by Euan Pennington by Gomez on May 23, 2016 in FatBikes Porn.  It’s all over the Interweb.  If those on the moral high ground are to be believed, it will distract you at work, cost you money, erode existing relationships and create unrealistic expectations.  I received some porn recently on the Internet, in the form of an email from Uncle Gomez, Baron of all bikes of fatness.  It was seemingly innocuous- would I like to review a bike from an Australian importer?  Sure Gomez, it’s what I do.  One thing, it claims to weigh less than 9kg.  19.5 pounds in old money.  WTF! OMG!  (Any other relevant acronyms that allow you to swear without swearing can be left in the comments section).  Distracting.  Unrealistic.  Expensive.  This was porn.  I said yes. Thanks to the … efficiency … of the courier company, I had to collect the bike from a depot across town, and yes, loading the box in the car did seem suspiciously easy.  Not heavy.  Getting it home to unpack was like Christmas, but better, because you get what you want.  As the pieces came out it became apparent that this was not a bike that was going to, say, set off a metal detector.  This was carbon at it’s finest.  I weighed the seat and seat tube together.  270g.  11 oz.  That’s BS.  (Another useful acronym). When it was built I realized this was a fascinating bike.  It had been designed solely as a bike to win races on, and the mantra being chanted in the background was “remove weight, add speed”.  Nothing else mattered.  These days most bikes try to offer versatility – extra rack mounts, additional bottle mounting points, flexible wheel and hub configurations, but here it was not so much what might the customer want as what can the customer do without?  As a result it is one of the most focused bikes I’ve seen for a long time, even to the point of running 4” tires on 80mm rims.  So small, many might say.  Why?  Most race courses are groomed enough to not need the full float option of big rims and tires, and smaller ones are, you guessed it, lighter.  Faster.  You can do without the extra inch of rubber.  You can do without metal.  You can do without lots of things, which makes this bike just awesome. So you get a carbon frame with internal cable routing, carbon fork, and both appear to have...

Nine Reasons Why a Fat Bike Should be Your Only Bike Put a non fat bike believer on a fat bike for few months riding, pretty much to the exclusion of all other bikes. The results may leave you almost lost for words (which, in this age of hype is no small achievement). Flame retardant suit at the ready, here are nine reasons why I reckon a fat bike should be your only bike.   A fat bike as your only bike? That’s a step too far, isn’t it? They’re too heavy / slow / cumbersome / fugly / the preserve of the “look at me” extrovert / utterly pointless (delete as appropriate), aren’t they? Who in their right mind would consider having one as their only bike? You’d have to be a stubbie short of a six pack to go down that route. Next thing you know, you will be taking up a sport where you wear cardigans and have to mow the green… Ok, I’ll admit, it seems like a pretty tall claim to make but having committed to riding mostly fat bikes after discovering them four years ago I’m converted. Since taking delivery of a Diamant F2 fat bike with a 120mm Bluto suspension fork as my long term test bike it’s definitely opened my eyes up to what makes for a great mountain bike. Don’t believe me? Read on and I’ll try and explain. 1. No other bikes climb as well. Think of a hard MTB hill climb. One of those long, draggy affairs that seem to go on forever and really push the boundaries of what is rideable. Do you think of the rocky pinch climb out on Manly Dam ? The unfeasibly steep gravel road at Thredbo providing temporary access to the new All-Mountain trail which seems to get steeper and steeper the further up you ride it? Or some steep zig zaged single track in your own neck of the woods.  To my mind, these are climbs to be relished. Steep and unyielding climbs that you have to grind and grunt your way up, pushing body and bike to the limit in search of that elusive clean ascent in order to get the rush of the downhill. I have used every trick in the book over the years in my quest to clean them – a twenty tooth granny ring, deflating the back tyre, adopting the arse on nose of saddle / Quasimodo style hunch over the bars that looks like you are about to have the squirts, soft pedalling on the less steep section to regain composure – all have yielded success but at the expense of looking like a boiled lobster and feeling...