Chris King at Interbike Outdoor Demo New Products
I called Chris King Components yesterday to order some hubs for a wheel build. They had a booth at the outdoor demo. I didn't attend the outdoor demo, but here are the new products this year from my favorite headset maker and one of my favorite hub makers. Oh, and they've added a new color to their product offerings, brown. Think coffee with not much half and half in it.
Chris King has come out with new Shimano-style outboard bottom bracket cups in anodized colors with King bearings inside. These will be available in a couple of days. And they have a grease injection port, so you can keep them running smoothly.
If you ride a mountain bike, Chris King has a new 135mm x 12mm through axle and a 135mm x 10mm through axle for you. They've also come out with new bike jerseys and new technical fabric t-shirts.
In the headset area, they are going to a new style of logo branding on the actual component. The style, they call sotto voce is Italian for "under voice" or "soft voice". (You see this marking a ton in classical music when the composer wants you to play more softly or decrescendo.) The Chris King logo is rendered tone on tone color wise. So you can't see a high contract logo. Instead you really see the color of the headset.
My suggestion: I would really like some Chris King skewers. They are a small company making excellent products. But I am building up a set of Classic Road hubs for customer Simon's Independent Fabrication Crown Jewel SE, and I would like to be able to finish off the wheel set with Chris King road skewers, not skewers from an unrelated manufacturer. If you like this idea Chris King skewers, send a respectful email to Chris King. And if you write an email, and they do end up making skewers, stay true to your word, and support the design and manufacturing efforts of this small and excellent bike component company by buying the skewers.
Photos lifted from the Chris King site: New bottom brackets in anodized colors and new sotto voce tone-on-tone logo style on the headset.
I'd love King skewers, too. But, this is King we're talking about... the R&D, FEA, GIS etc for such an undertaking would take decades, especially given
-CPSC thinks the q/r's days are numbered
-partially because of "inferior" clamping methods of most modern skewers (anything light with a delrin cam)
-all this new QR15 and Maxle stuff coming down the pike
It took King 20 years to bring the BB to market-- and that's basically a GreaseGuard headset on its side. Perfection being such a lofty goal, it'd take him half a century to bring q/r's to the market!
Not saying they wouldn't be purdy as can be... I'd still want some.
Posted by: sam | October 20, 2008 at 03:10 PM