chinamtb 08

With a desire to encourage a healthy life style in China, Nordic Ways is starting up a weekly MTB training camp in a ski resort close to Beijing, the first date for the camp will be Saturday April 5th.

Bikers from all walks of life are invited to ride every Saturday in Yuyang ski resort, which is about 1,5 hours drive from Beijing. Nordicways have a simple arena set out with start and finish, time-keeping service (if you want to ride against the clock), and a registration desk . The start times will be between 10.00-12.00 am, basically you start when you arrive. Nordicways have also prepared buses for you and trucks for your bike to Yuyang in the morning for a reasonable price.

There will also be an option to race at the training camp with a choice of 3 distance races available. A 10k, 30k and for those fit enough 50k race will be arranged (all using the 10k track, but lapping for the longer races).

One bottle of water will be provided to all participants, but take your own also, since you due to the nice spring weather probably will require more than one bottle. The price to participate is 50RMB (student price RMB 30).

For full details on the Nordicways MTB camp visit the Nordicways website.

Here’s a better look at Xpedo’s new platform pedal.

The Mx-11 or ‘Face Off Transform’ have removable cages so you can match them to your bike better and also adapt them to suit the style of riding your doing.

Mere hours after our first post about the ‘Revolutionary’ Truvativ HammerSchmidt transmission we came across more intriguing information and tidbit’s.

Laird Gogins, founder of Infinity Transmissions has designed an ‘improved transmission’ at his office in Salt Lake City.

The (again) ‘Revolutionary’ design took him decades to fine tune, but he has finally made two working prototype models. One is a larger unit designed for cars, the other is a much smaller, compact model designed for bicycles. There are currently 23 foreign patents pending on the transmissions design which is said to improve fuel efficiency in automobiles by up to 20%.

Now here’s the clincher Sram have signed an agreement with Infinity Transmissions stating they will get ‘first dibs’ on the product when it finally hits the market.

You can read the full article here at the Desert Morning Post.

Now you would think mystery over this is the Truvativ HammerSchmidt, however we’re not convinced that Sram will put the Infinity Transmission in to full production by Fall this year. Unless of course they’ve been in cahoots together for a while, the transmission will still need to go under alot of testing and development before it can be released to the general public.

Another rumor going about is the HammerSchmidt will be a planetary gear system built in to the crank, much like cranks currently being made by Schlumpf Innovations in Switzerland.

This one has to have my vote, its proven and in production now (albeit by another company) its a crank, and it has a silly sounding name (like most of Truvativ’s cranks) Plus its probably the closest thing to an actual universal fitting ‘gearbox’ system.

Still we have to wait until the end of the year to see the real thing, I wonder if our suspicions are correct?