Like their road business, SRAM had only minor updates and news for their mountain bike groups and brands, including Avid, Truvativ and Rockshox, but Interbike was an opportunity to see a few recent intros up close.
Starting with the full groups, XO had their triple 3×10 crankset, shifters and front derailleur on display. You lose the specific 1.5:1 gear ratios of the double cranksets, but all of the ramps and pins and ring shaping are still in place, so shifting should be about as smooth under load.
For the 2×10 systems, XO gets some new gear combos: 24/36 and 26/38. The good news on these is that you can mount these new rings to the triple crankset’s spider, allowing you to put a bash guard in place of the outer ring.
Jump past the break to see the highlights from their booth…
To run the triple, you’ll need the triple-ready front shifter (rear shifter doesn’t change). Unfortunately, there’s no little switch to let you limit it’s movement to two gears, but we’re guessing the limit screws on the front derailleur would accomplish the same thing.
Dropping down a group, the X9 has all the BB options, including BB30. It has double and triple ring options and short, mid and long cage rear derailleur options. As SRAM’s X9 brand manager puts it, this is the “every man’s group.” The X9 group has hubs with all the axle options, setting the table for SRAM to move their wheel program from the road to the dirt (yep, it’s unofficially unsubstantiated, which means you should expect to see something in the next year).
At this point, all of SRAM’s mountain bike groups from X7 through XX are 10-speed. X7 is the only group still offering a 9-speed option, but only with a triple crankset (meaning there aren’t 2x chainrings sized for a 9-speed chain). Despite being at the bottom of the group hierarchy, X7 also has the full range of BB options including BB30. The Storm Gray color option matches their Truvativ Holzfeller parts, so you can mix and match while keeping a coherent group look.
Officially announced just before Interbike, the Descendant DH/Freeride crank was on display.
Rockshox debuted the Monarch Plus shocks this summer. It adds a piggy back chamber to increase both air and oil volume while retaining the same size canister, and you can see the see the internals in this technical drawing. The result is a shock that should have better small bump performance. Also, the adjustment knobs are now easier to reach and use. Other Monarch Updates include:
- Monarch RT3 – New lever and knob, smoother internal finishes.
- Monarch RC3 Plus and R – Sets three levels of compression that can get pretty form, but no lockout.
- All rear shocks are tuned for specific leverage ratios, and they have an online guide for their distributors to help you get the right size, tune and hardware for your bike. They’re working on a consumer version of this guide, but it ain’t ready yet.
Revelation World Cup – The new top of the line 150mm travel Revelation gets a carbon crown with tapered steerer tube only, with either 15mm or 20mm Maxle Light. Internally, it gets BlackBox Motion Control, Dual Air and can be had with air Two Position settings to lower it for climbing. The Keronite coating is the gray color, which is a magnesium treatment that eliminates the need for paint and saves 20 – 25g on this fork.
Boxxer – Their DH fork gets sag gradients and new knobs at the top with better edges for easier turning with gloves on. Internally, it gets a new compression tune and opened up the rebound damping with more ports to reduce the amount of oil compression that occurred during movement, which smoothed out the rebound. On the air spring side, the World Cup gets solo air and a new valve system, which we covered here.
Argyle – Not pictured, the new Argyle slopestyle fork now comes with all travel spacers to run it from 80mm to 140mm travel…you can cut them down to set it any length you want. Technically, you can do that with any of their spacers on any of their forks that use them, though they don’t necessarily promote that fact.
Wrapping up Rockshox’s department, a few photos of the Reverb. The news? They went into production the week before Interbike (finally). One of the early delays was caused by stiction from clamping the seatpost binder too tight, but production versions have small refinements and better tolerances than the preproduction versions we’ve ridden and seen. Weight is claimed at 515g and two sizes: 30.9 and 31.6 diameter, and two lengths: 380 and 420. $295 MSRP and your local bike shop’s distributor should be able to order one now.
The Reverb’s remote will be available with both left and right stand-alone and MatchMaker X clamps. Yours won’t be blurry like this. In our first rides at their X0 press camp, they were pretty sweet and should a pretty high standard for the new posts coming from Fox and XFusion, among others.
Not entirely new, but worth mentioning in case you didn’t know about it: Avid has Centerlock rotors for both their standard and XX level disc brake rotors. Mmmmm… options.
