It’s easy to tell that the bicycle trade show season has started. News of new products are filling the internet! Here are some products that are 29 inch related.

Salsa Cycles has always produced the mighty fine Delgado rim which has become a 29″ classic. Now they have announced plans for a totally new, designed for 29″ use, disc specific rim. It is slated to be 29 millimeters wide, (but of course!) and is reportedly going to be right at 500 grams! This is fantastic news as the current crop of 29 inch tires will benefit from the wider footprint these rims will produce. Look for the rim to hit the shops around spring of ‘06.

White Brothers Suspension has been secretly field testing it’s new damper for ‘06 for over a year now. After being thoroughly thrashed by endurance star, Mike Curiak all over North America, it has been declared tough enough! The new damper unit is a true oil bath setup with air spring. The “platform” internals are controlled by an ingenious magnetic valve that only activates when trail irregularities activate it. Pressure from the rider is resisted by the valve, which helps eliminate bobbing, or any unwanted suspension movement. This will bring any 29 inch wheeled devotee up to par, suspension-wise, with all the modern 26 inch forked rides available today. The internals will also be retro-fitable to previous White forks by the factory. Forks should be available soon.

Finally, a bit of irony! Specialized, which has publically denied it would ever produce a 29″ wheeled bike, has a 29 inch tire coming out! Yeah, go figure! The company was purportedly going to produce a prototype bike or two for a former World Mountain bike Champ before the last Olympics. They, of course, produced a small run of their own tires for the effort. When said champ was caught cheating, and released from his duties, Specialized was caught out with this small batch of tires and no use for them. So, an ingenious fellow at Morgan Hill decided that he would “raffle” them off to the first 20 folks to get him a post card! He posted the contest on the 29″ bike forum at MTBR.com, and the rest, as they say, is history! The response was so overwhelming, that now you will be able to order Specialized Fast Track tires in a 29 inch size from your local Specialized dealer in ‘06. However, you won’t be able to get a bike to mount them to from Specialized! How wierd is that?