Joy to Your Inner Boy
In praise of cranks, cogs, and all things bike

Clay Ellis

* Glossy titanium handlebars are nice, but one wet ride and your grips may be twisting like throttles, turning a brisk descent into a terrorfest. Serfas solves this problem with its Fasteners ($15), tacky, low-profile, rubber grips with mini Allen bolts on either end. Hit the bars with a blast of hair spray (it forms a bond when it dries), slip on the grips, crank the bolts, and forget about 'em.

* Long-travel forks with 130 millimeters of crushed-velvet plushness make technical downhills as smooth as Billy Dee Williams and a six-pack of Colt .45. But all that extension exacts payback. The front end typically feels like a chopper when you're climbing, making it next to impossible to negotiate hairpin switchbacks. No more: The Marzocchi Bomber Z1 MCR ($549) has an extension-control cartridge that lets you lock the fork out low. Turn the lever on the left fork leg, compress the fork, and you're climbing. Works every time.

* Magnesium is light and naturally damps vibrations. So why aren't more bike components made from it? Well, there's this little matter of combustibility: Magnesium burns white-hot, making it tough to work with in a factory setting. Easton tamed the beast with its feathery 6.5-ounce extruded MG60 Magnesium XC stem ($159). While the MG60 won't soak up big hits, it does smooth out high-frequency stutter bumps on washboard dirt roads.

* "It's not you, sweetheart, it's my saddle. Honest." Most saddles designed to help men reduce soft-tissue damage from prolonged riding (read: loss of mojo), do so by cutting out an oval in the middle of the seat. That's OK for road riders, but mountain bikers gain climbing traction by sliding forward on the saddle, and thus onto solid leather. Which is why the Koobi Au Enduro saddle ($90) is split down the middle. So, no matter where you sit, you're in the sweet spot.

* V-brakes have amazing stopping power. Perhaps too much: One season of hard riding and your rims are concave from wear. Two seasons, and you may have to rebuild your wheels. Hayes Full Hydraulic disc brakes ($250­$300) stop you faster, reduce forearm fatigue on big descents, and—because they're located in the the center of the wheel—won't become clogged with mud and slush. At 418 grams, the setup is still heavier than V-brakes, but knowing you can stop with alacrity means you'll brake less and go faster. Which is, after all, the point.

* With 22 tools, including seven Allen wrenches, three box wrenches, and two tire levers, the Topeak Alien ($40) comes equipped for any trail- or curbside repair. This year they've added a mini pedal wrench so you can swap pedals (and bikes) with a friend, or pull the pedals off and box up your bike at the airport with one tool.

* Bike computers have been around forever, but they've always been more calculator than computer, spitting out speed and mileage but not much else. As the name implies, the Cat Eye OS1 ($70) is an operating system; it remembers how far you rode last week and last month. It graphs up to 12 months of mileage, and keeps track of six years of total mileage. It's also a sarcastic little bugger: Blow off riding for a few weeks and it'll ask where you've been. Just what you needed—more grief.