JCW’S CANNON DALE HABIT CARBON 1£5,999
It’s not been JCW’s month, with a dodgy knee and lost pivot part
I’d been looking forward to hitting dry and dusty trails with gusto, only for a gammy knee to leave me limping into summer and the Habit gathering dust in my garage. Come the start of August, with the X-ray results inconclusive and a lengthy wait ahead for an MRI scan, I decided to throw caution to the wind and join the rest of the MBUK gang on a trip to Queen Elizabeth Country Park in Hampshire (look out for a Wrecking Crew article in an upcoming issue).
All was going well and I was having a blast throwing the Habit through the flowy berms of the blue run, trying to chase down Jimmer and Olly Wilkins, and feeling more confident on the bike than I had in a long time. But something didn’t seem quite right. The back end was
dealing with the cornering loads and the occasional root nicely, but felt rough over smaller trail chatter and there were a couple of times when I lost rear-wheel traction unexpectedly.
I put this down to my higher than normal summer tyre pressures, let out a couple of psi and carried on down the hill. It wasn’t until we stopped for lunch at the bottom that I happened to glance at the bike’s upper link and saw that one of the pivot bolts had worked its way loose. Fortunately, the seatstay bridge had blocked the bolt from falling out, but I got that sinking feeling as I realised that the alloy insert in the carbon stay that the bolt had threaded into was missing, lost forever somewhere up on the hill. That was my ride over then. While I kicked back at the cafe with an ice cream, waiting for the rest of the crew to finish riding the red trail, I cursed myself for not checking the bolts more regularly.
With some time on my hands, I took the opportunity to whip off my saddle and add some air to my OneUp post, which wasn’t always returning to full height after being dropped part-way. I hadn’t checked the pressure before installing it, and figured – correctly – that inflating the spring to the recommended 250300psi would increase the return speed and sort this issue out. www.cannondale.com
SPEC CHECK
OneUp V1 dropper post US$218 (inc. remote, exc. shipping) OneUp EDC stem US$115 (inc. top cap and preload kit, exc. shipping) https://int.oneupcomponents.com