Awesome ride with
@T-Rex,
@Haakon,
@Litenbror and
@bear the bear from RB and my mates Dave and Owey, and Dave's mate Kirk and Bear's mate whose name I've forgotten. T-Rex has the band pic.
I rode one of these, short story is Owen got his bike (older low end Anthem) stolen, so he's riding his son's bike and looking for a new bike so he rode the Bronson:
Tubes, plastic flats with plastic "pins", narrowest bars I've ridden since the early 90's, a bit loose in the rear end, stem way too long and stacked (owner is taller than me, bike way too small), juicy brakes, no index click on the upshift, big fat saddle, literally it had the lot.
We avoided Magpie Rock etc. so I wouldn't get a flat but still got one on Pork Barrel. Cracked this shits because we didn't pack a 26 tube, but
@Haakon had a 27.5 and between us all we got it fixed.
It was fun to get on an old bike, and with a bit of tuning it would rail pretty hard, it was way lighter than I expected and I forgot how effortless it is to lift 26ers into the air over jumps. But all the bad things happened, skating across any gravelly or sandy lines (tubes), floppy on the climbs (stem and stack) , droppped the chain (3x), a couple of pedal slips, and I wore my thickest nix which exaggerated the seat. I think the most noticable thing was the bars though, wide bars, remove the spacers and shorter stem would make it much better.
I still ran it round some good tracks for 18km and it worked ffor the most part, but I don't miss any of those headaches. Also stayed in middle ring all day which kinda proves for all but the worst climbs we were wasting space, function and weight with granny gears.