Tuesday, December 01, 2009

BMC (Bicycle Manufacturing Company)

I recently had the pleasure of testing out the swiss made BMC Speed Fox (120mm of travel on both ends). Sent to us from the kind folks over at QBP who have turned North American distributor for the company. We've had the SF01 for almost 2 weeks now and since it's arrival i've ridden it pretty much exclusively on trail. Upon building the Sram X0 equipped bike and other top shelf Sram components it was appearent that fashion and style are important to these folks. They went to the measures to have all suspension linkage hardware to be anodized the same exact color as Srams Cash green ano on this years X0 gear. Everything looked fantastic pulling the bike out of the box. Also looking fantastic were the use of hydroformed tubing and boxed upper rocker construction, all which are anodized black. They also utilize a simplistic monocoque bottom bracket shell and main pivot area that appears to be manufactured to shave weight. Light it is....the bike came complete at 26 3/4 #



After setting the suspension up using BMC's unique sag adjustment indicator that cleverly assisted with initial set up and after throwing a set of pedals on the machine i tore off for a quick spin.....three hours later i had a pretty good grasp of what the bike could handle. In a nutshell the bike is very relaxed (thanks to 68d HA), yet very quick and efficient handling bike. Even with the Fox Rp23 turned to the off position the shock was only active when you hit a bump, meaning no pedal bob. The bike craves speed and regardless of how slow and out of shape i am the bike just wanted to go fast....up or downhill. Coined as an endurance race machine i think they did a very nice job of delivering exactly that. A bike that does well on either end of the slope.


BMC Speedfox 01

close up of linkage
for more info click here

1 comment:

Anders Lund said...

Hi,
How does it compare to a Yeti ASR-5?

Best regards,
Anders