Building up a new hardtail mountain bike... again!

Welcome to another episode of Berm Peak Express. And today we're going to build a hardtail, again. This is the same hardtail I had before. It's a diamond back sinker carbon size small. I broke the old one. I broke the frame. When the documentarian was here, I was doing all the features here over and over and over again on the hardtail. Jumped the driveway, landed nose heavy, had a sort of whiplash thing and broke the seat stay right there. Carbon bikes are very, very strong and you can beat on them all day and they won't break. But if you impact the actual frame into a rock or something repeatedly, you're going to compromise it. I can't for the life of me, remember where I might've impacted my frame into a rock repeatedly, but I'm going to do some detective work and see if I can figure it out. So another thing about that frame was it was pre-production. I had that a year before it was available to the general public. It's kind of high time I moved on to the actual production version of the Sinker Carbon. When Diamondback sent this to me, they didn't send me the highest spec build of it with all the nicest parts because they know I'm going to take them all off and put my own parts on it. Nevertheless, there are some interesting things on it. For instance, we have SRAM Eagle GX. Now on my main trail bike, I run box one prime nine and I've never ridden a bike with GX Eagle. Like I've never owned one. So we're going to test it on this bike and compare it to prime nine. See how it goes. The cranks it came with are nice, but I have the carbon ones for my old bike. So these are going to go on there. And the fork is a Fox 34. It's not the most high end fork Fox makes, but it's pretty good. So I think I'm going to leave it there. In any case, let's get to the build. First, I have to take a number of things off this bike so that I can put my parts on it. And the first thing I'm going to take off the crank set. These cranks being kind of entry level. If you take this bolt off, you can't just pull it off with your bare hands. And I'm going to show you how we do that. This is a crank puller tool and it is designed to pull cranks off. As we screw it in, it's actually going to push on the spindle and pull the arm out. And there we go. It pulled it right off the spindle. This bearing piece in here that the spindle goes into, that is the bottom bracket bearing. We are going to replace that as well because we're putting a different type of crank set on there. This bottom bracket tool is going to fit into this spline right here. So you're going to actually tighten it to make it come off. And there comes the whole thing. And this is heavy. The new one that I'm putting in is really, really light. It weighs a fraction of what this thing does. Doing anything involving a bottom bracket is usually a point of confusion for a lot of new riders because there's so many different sizes, spindle sizes, bottom brackets, shell widths. There's a company wheels manufacturing group and whether it's a derailleur hanger or a bottom bracket, you can just go on their website and there's like a finder tool and you can get the right one. So this is supposed to have the correct bearing, spacer and everything for my bike. So I shouldn't have to double check it. We should just be able to install it. Let's put this guy in. We want to put a little bit of grease on the threads so that it doesn't seize up. We're going to screw that in. We got our spacer on here. We will put it in here. Remember it's reverse thread so we got to go loose to tighten it. And then once it's on here, we have to torque it down pretty tight and there's no way to grab that. This I also got from wheels manufacturing. It's the actual tool that fits over the bearing and I'll show you how it works. So this piece, the splines are going to fit right over it. So we're going to get that on there. We're going to hold it in place. And there we go. Move on to the other side. This side is not reverse thread. There we go. I taken some things apart and cleaned them up. So I'm just going to put my old chain ring back on. That same tool I used to remove the old bottom bracket, I'm going to use to tighten on the new chain ring. And I have a little trick. I just put this in the vise. Cinch lock ring is going to go on top of it. I'm going to make sure I have grease on the threads. We will wind this up how we want it. And then we can just tighten it on. I can just push this way and keep my hands free and clear of the chain ring and get it really, really tight. There we go. And then our tool comes out of the vise. All right, we're just going to put this all together now. Okay, dust cap goes on first. Then we got a couple of little spacers they included. Something funny about these splines, you can actually line up the crank arms the wrong way. So you could go like this and you could have a crank set that's completely not right. And when you get on the bike, you go, oh, whoa, what is going on? With this one, pretty hard to mess up. They're nice, big, chunky splines. So you can line it up pretty easy. Looks good. So next up, we're going to work on the cockpit. That's the handlebars, stem, everything up front for your steering and kind of operating the bike. I'm going to take these brakes off and put some TRP brakes on from scratch. Let's start by taking all this stuff off of here. And then we're going to install the new cockpit. Check this out over here. On my main full suspension trail bike, right here at the stem, this comes out. And now we have a multi-tool, a chain tool, spoke wrench. And inside of here, we have a tire plug kit and master link removal tool, all built into here. To make this go hollow all the way down, I have to actually thread this fork over here so that there's little threads to screw into. There's a way to do it without, but they were out of stock on the kit. So we're threading it. Here we have our fork. In the top, this little star nut pushes down into the fork. And then when you're tightening down the top cap, it threads into it. But if the top cap is in the way, we can't put our tool in there. We're going to put this tool on top of the fork, thread this, and then we're going to get a big old Allen key and we're just going to yank on it until that star nut comes out. There we are. So the star nut's all mangled, came out, but the other half of the star nut is still freaking in there. Our EDC tool is not going to go in here with the rest of that star nut in place. So I think we can put the fork upside down on the bench. We can get something in there and we can just hammer on it until it comes out. And I don't think we're going to damage a thing. Okay, so I've successfully banged a 10 millimeter Allen wrench through the star nut, but still no luck getting it out. This is not good. So now I'm faced with trying to get this Allen wrench out of my fork. Almost there. And it's out. So same company who makes the EDC tool makes the stem one up. So we're going to just thread the fork tube like they did in the old days. So we're going to put a tray on the floor to catch all the filings. This is the tap that's going to tap into my fork. Then this guide is going to make sure it remains straight. Then you just take a big eight millimeter Allen key, put it through here. You start threading. Now, once it gets started, once it bites, you'll feel it. And when it goes in a little ways, you want to actually back up a little bit to give the chips a chance to evacuate. And that's why I have this tray down here is because I don't want these sharp metal filings all over my floor. And look at that. Now the inside of that fork tube is actually threaded. And what that's going to allow us to do is take this top cap to tighten the bearings and actually thread it into the top of the fork. And with that in, the EDC tool is going to fit right into the top of the fork. All right, so now that that's threaded, we can put our fork and our stem and our handlebars on. And we can start working on the rest of the cockpit. All right, so first we'll line up our shifter. That gets slid on. Then our brake levers are going to go on. And what are we doing for grips? Well, I got a little story to tell you. I'm still testing the Rev Grips. Rev Grips was actually presenting at Sedona Mountain Bike Festival. So they had a booth and everything. I was just walking by and they were like, Seth, Seth! And I'm like, oh, here it goes. Here it comes. They expressed disappointment that they had not released a certain revision sooner because it didn't make it into the video. If you remember in the video, one of my biggest complaints about the Rev Grips was these little rubber things that keep popping out as you try to install them. And each one of them can actually come out individually. See now, as I'm taking apart this Rev Grip, those little rubber things were the most painful part of the installation. So the Rev Grip guy handed me this little bag. And guess what they are? It's what they should have done from the start. All the rubber things built into this one ring. So you just slide this ring on and push the grip together and you're done. Let's see how they work. Much better. It's good that the company's sitting there listening and making improvements and things. That was way easier. So another thing that I learned from talking to the Rev Grips guys is that you can over tighten them and it doesn't change the way the grips perform. So I'm gonna tighten these on really good. So I'm gonna undo the shifter cable and then I'm gonna put the brake hose and the shifter cable into heat shrink tubing. It looks like we got our lengths right. So that's good. So now we can take the heat gun and we can make this heat shrink tubing hold all this together. Takes about 10 minutes or so. So on your front brake, you wanna leave a pretty good amount so that your bars can spin all the way around. So we're gonna cut it right here and our cockpit is looking pretty clean. That little twist drives me nuts though. It just eats away at my soul every single time I see it. We're gonna put the front wheel in. When I put these on the hard tail, I couldn't say anything about them. Now I can, they're available to the public. Crank Brothers made some wheels a few years ago and nobody liked them. They got terrible reviews. Then the next year they worked really hard and they made a set of wheels called the Synthesis Carbons and those ones were really good. They got really good reviews. And this is the alloy version of the Synthesis wheels so they're more affordable. Now what makes these wheels different is that they're tuned. The rear wheel has tighter spokes than the front wheel. The front wheel actually has some compliance so when you're going into turns, it actually flexes a little bit and gives you some kind of side suspension. I thought it was kind of a marketing ploy and then I rode it for about a month and these wheels feel different to me. I would actually love to run these on all my bikes. These Synthesis wheels came higher spec so they actually have industry nine hubs on them. That glorious cassette sound. So we have to install the cassette on here. So as I said, we're gonna be throwing GX Eagle on there and try it out. It's like SRAM's mid-range 12 speed. I don't particularly need more gears. I just need a really low gear and a really high gear but this gives you more in between. Anyway, we can throw this wheel on here, line up the gears, throw on the pedals, throw on the saddle, bleed the brakes, and then we can ride. Truman from Park Tool sent me a universal bleed kit. It's good that Park finally released a bleed kit because I think a lot of people have been asking for that. That works nice. I like having a clear funnel because look, you hit the lever and you get the bubbles out and you can see them come up through there. Once you're done doing what you're doing, you put the little plunger in there and then you can take this out and put all the remaining fluid right back into the container from whence it came. Okay. Brakes feel dialed, seat's dialed. If I'm not mistaken, I think this bike is ready to ride. So this is the same hardtail as I had before but it's got a number of different parts on it and it actually feels a lot different. For instance, the stem is shorter. The bars are five millimeters wider, which isn't much. And then the handlebars themselves have a slightly different shape to them. They have a slightly different sweep and rise than the old ones. So shifting obviously feels different. It's taken me a little bit of time to get used to SRAM. It's like you press the slightest bit and it shifts. It's very, very light. There's a different fork on it and the Fox 34, Fox in general just feels different than the MRP forks. For the last month, I've ridden nothing but my full suspension bike. So the backend feels super light and everything just feels super snappy. I'm a little bit nervous about hitting the whale tail. I have not hit the whale tail yet on my hardtail. I'm excited to see how it feels. Now, one thing about the whale tail that's good is it's a relatively safe feature because you jump off of this setup jump, you land on it. Now, if you catch this transition perfectly, you are perfectly set up with the perfect amount of speed for the double that comes after it. If you don't hit it perfectly, you actually have time to stop. You can just lay on your brakes and you can stop before you go off the jump. On times where I've gone on this and didn't feel dialed, I've always been able to stop. I'm gonna give it a try. I'm gonna drop in, I'm gonna see how it feels. I knew I would make it. I didn't come in with quite enough speed. On the hardtail, generally you don't need as much speed for stuff. I tried to do without a crank. I'm gonna take one crank before the jump. Luke, you found us. When you get off a full suspension onto a hardtail, when your rear end comes down, it's like kaboom. When you ride a full suspension a lot, you get complacent and you stop trying to compensate for those impacts. That didn't feel as smooth as I know I could make it, so I'm gonna go back up. All right, buddy, you're gonna get run over. Ah! Okay, time to go home. So it took me a couple of tries to dial it in on the whale tail, but at the end of the day, it's easier on a hardtail. It always is. So while we were putting this all together, I was in a rush. We were trying to beat the sun. And now that we're out here, I'm thinking more clearly. This twist in the freaking heat shrink tubing is driving me out of my mind every time I look at it. And I just figured out it's a very simple solution. So I'm going to fix it right now on the trail with my one-up EDC. So we'll get this out. Now we have a multi-tool. We can take the lever off. The EDC tool is not the easiest, most ergonomic tool in the world to use, but it's always with you. And the multi-tool you have is the best multi-tool in the world. So what we're going to do to fix it, we're going to flip the brake cable to the bottom. We're going to move this around. Then we're going to put it right there and everything's perfect. I amaze even myself at how much my brain can just stop working. Going for a ride makes you feel awesome. Now it's just simple. So I hope you enjoyed this video, even though we built the same hardtail again. It's actually kind of different each time I get to try different parts. It probably looked like a breeze, but actually we started a little late. So we were rushing. Things like the twisted up heat shrink tubing really just threw me for a loop. So I'm glad we got that figured out. But we got in a ride, bike felt amazing. I'm super pumped because I just hit the whale tail on the hardtail, which I haven't been able to do before. I'm really glad that you guys got to share it with me. If you enjoyed this video, subscribe to Berm Peak Express and thanks for riding with me today. I'll see you next time.