It’s a New Year and time for some new news and rumors. Let’s take a look at what has tickled our ears and eyes over the past few weeks.

Single speed specific Inbred 29″er (Image courtesy of On One)

On One Revamps Steel Inbred Line Up: Recently in an e-newsletter, On One’s Brant Richards, (yes- he has come back to On One, in case you had not heard), announced that On One was not going to continue with the “Swap Out” design on their Inbred 29 inch frames. Swap Outs were a modular, bolt on drop out system which allowed conversion from single speed to geared set ups by removing and replacing the “swappable” plate drop outs.

From here forward, Richards says their will be three versions of both 26 and 29 inch Inbreds: A geared only, vertical drop out version, a “slot drop out” geared or single speed version, (for those who can not commit to one or another 🙂 ), and as Richards says, “hearking back to our roots“, a single speed specific frame in white. Time for availability is said to be February.

Richards also states that new frames in steel will revert back to On One’s top tube routed cabling with full housing runs, which are typically seen on U.K. based companies bikes. Also, no more cantilever brake mounts will be seen on the new Inbreds.

In other On One news, the long awaited “Lurcher” carbon fiber rig, a longer travel carbon hard tail than On One’s “Race 29”, is now slated for a mid-March appearance with pre-orders scheduled for opening in mid-February. No word on whether the Swap Out design was held over for this model or not.


Proposed long travel 29″er full suspension design for Titus: (Image courtesy of www.shedfire.com)

New Titus Full Suspension 29″er?: Of course, Planet X, who is the parent company of On One and Titus, is wanting to get Titus back in full swing and has been furiously designing new things since the onset of their take over of the company. Now some of the first fruits of this are being teased here with this proposed “long travel” 29″er. Not much is known about details for this yet, but we’ve heard it may have up to 140mm rear travel and be compatible with 140mm travel front forks. A rather obvious tapered head tube appears in this rendering, along with a through axle rear end. The frame shows lots of hydro-formed tubing. We also noted the forward placement of the seat tube in relationship to the bottom bracket, which hints at shorter stay lengths. Interesting to see how the chain stay pivot placement is retained, which was always a feature of older Titus full suspension designs.

No news on geometries, availability, or final look, but so far, we like what we see here.

650B Long Travel For 2013?: We keep hearing rumblings from very credible sources about interest in 650B wheels for longer travel applications where 29 inch wheels seem to be a hindrance to designers. Is 650B finally going to find its niche in longer travel All Mountain type mountain biking? Apparently, some very big bicycle company, (or more), seems to think so. We’ve seen a long travel 650B specific fork from a major manufacturer slated for 2013 model year production. It wouldn’t exist if some bigger bicycle company hadn’t footed the bill for it. So, it is a very safe bet that sometime in 2012 you will start to see this fork and bike(s) with it showing up.

Interestingly, this fork hints at travel at and above 150mm. Is 29″er long travel suspension bike design going to see the 140mm travel as its limits? This new development seems to point to this. Maybe we’ll even see 650B become the long travel hard tail wheel size of choice. One thing is for sure- this fork is not an XC/trail fork!

Of course, tires would need to be developed to go with this, but we hear several new models are on the way to satisfy the big travel needs of these new rigs. Stay tuned for further developments.

Speaking Of Tires: We also have seen a new proposed design for 29″er tires from an unlikely source. These will be aggressive, trail type tires in 2.25″ and 2.4″ sizes. We can’t say who it is yet, but these tires should be pretty big and voluminous if the final production hits the target set by the schematics we saw. Stay tuned……

That’s it for now. We’ll keep our ears and eyes open for more on these and other stories coming your way soon.