Kona BASS

The bike park world is changing. Slowly over the last few years the long travel, heavy dh bikes have morphed into 8” racing machines, and the 7”all around bike have gone to single crowns. Immerging in the mists of all the changes was a slope style specific chassis that has been gaining momentum in the last year via support from several different brands. Intense has the SS, Norco has the Empire and Kona has the Bass.

The Bass is essentially modified Cowan DS from yesteryear. Featuring gyro tabs on the head tube, eccentric bottom bracket and sliding dropouts the bike has many different setup options from geared to single speed, without the need for a chain tensioner. Because the main pivot is based around the bottom bracket there isn’t any chain growth when the bikes moves through its travel, thus rendering a single speed dual suspension rig.

With the sliding dropouts making changes to how the bike acted was pretty easy. We tried pushing the wheel all the way forward for a tighter, snappier feel. That was great for technical riding and jumping but for opening it up and letting the bike go we preferred to have a little longer footprint.
The Bass features a DHX Air shock in the rear with a Marzocchi DJ1 in the front sporting custom graphics that matched the rest of the bike. We pumped up the DHX making the bike very firm and acting more like a hard tail, but still had some squish for the larger landings.
Handling. The Bass was super fun to ride, with the short chain stays it showed us new lines on trails that we hadn’t seen before. Being able to pump it through doubles on Crank It Up then switch it up with transfer lines in the dual slalom course. It was a blast on tight and technical trails like Ninja Cougar & Karate Monkey, but with being a short travel bike you could feel the larger bumps go through your body.
ref[whistlermountainbike]

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Merida Bike Carbon FLX

5 European Championship titles, 15 Worldcup victories and 5 World Championship titles are an impressive record.
It shows that it is not only weight that is a determining factor, but the perfectly realised composition of weight, stiffness and comfort.
The CARBON FLX was a winner right from the beginning. Every year it improved further, and every year new victories came along.

The German design studio i-PDD, with whom the design of the CARBON FLX frame was worked out together, is prize-winning as well. With the current generation of the CARBON FLX, not only was the design optimised, but also the weight becomes lower and the rigidity is improved at the same time.
New in 2009: the „surface bonding“ bottom bracket shell and unidirectional top-layer laminate help to decrease the frame’s weight to 1100 grams on a frame-size of 46 cm / 18".

The tapered shape of the seat- and chains stay in combination with their special fibre-mix provides surprising comfort at high-frequency vibrations - and this is measurable, finishing second in the comfort evaluation in a test of the best Carbon-Hardtails („bike“ 12/07)

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