The Radavist

One helpful tip for getting a good night’s sleep while bike touring is to mimic your home sleeping experience as closely as possible. Cotton pillowcases or fleece sleeping bag liners can ease your mind by tricking your body. But you should apply that logic to your entire pre-sleep ritual. Have some dessert, brush your teeth, and once you’re all tucked in, do some light reading. Travis Engel is here with a bike hack that may make that last part a little easier to do in the wild.

When modern wide-range cassettes first hit the market, it was the giant 50-tooth (and now 52-tooth) cogs that grabbed all the headlines. But 1X drivetrains arguably wouldn’t have taken over if it weren’t for the 10-tooth cog down at the other end of the stack. That’s how brands can claim their 500, 510 and 520-percent gear ranges. Still, it wasn’t enough for e*thirteen. They introduced a lineup of cassettes with 9-tooth cogs, allowing for lighter, more compact setups with as much as 556-percent range.

And then, earlier this year, they introduced a 12-speed cassette that spanned from 9 teeth to 52 teeth, netting a 578-percent range. Travis Engel had to get his hands on one, but not for his mountain bike. He wanted it for his multi-headed beast of a gravel, touring and bikepacking bike. Range is king if you can’t (or won’t) run a front derailleur. But is one less tooth worth bowing down to?

Before you even hit the parking lot to test ride a suspension bike, most shops will walk you through a careful sag and damping adjustment. But few of them will tell you that there is a whole other dimension of control inside your fork or shock’s air spring. By inserting or removing volume spacers, you can make your suspension more or less resistant to bottom-out. In turn, that may allow you to run more or less preload. This deceptively simple adjustment has gotten a reputation for being only for racers, or nerds, or nerdy racers. But Travis Engel believes everyone can benefit from volume tuning. So, he has this quick explainer on what it can do for you, and how you can try it for yourself.

Totally no big deal if you’ve got better stuff to do, but if you wanna read about “Powertrain,” SRAM’s first-ever E-MTB motor, Travis wrote this post. Like, he didn’t ride it or anything, but it’s big news, and we figured you might want to know about it. He talks about stuff like the different modes and how the buttons work and a thing about auto-shifting. No rush, though. The post will just be sitting here. So if on, like, Friday night you’re, like “Oh yeah, that SRAM e-bike thing…” and you haven’t read Pinkbike’s review or whatever, just come on back. But again, not a huge deal if it slips your mind…

MicroSHIFT, SRAM, and now Shimano all offer gravel brake levers with built-in dropper post remotes. And there are ways to hack most left shifters to work great as dropper remotes. But if you aren’t currently in the market for a new drivetrain, or if you run a front derailleur, there aren’t many good plug-and-play options that work comfortably from both the hoods and the drops. Travis Engel found just five of them, from ENVE, Crankbrothers, PRO, Easton/Fox, and Wolf Tooth. It turns out they’re all very special in their own little ways.

Amid the circus of Trojan hangers and load-bearing derailleurs, few of us paid any mind to SRAM Transmission’s humble front chainring. All it got was praise for its two removable bash guards, and scorn for its eight-bolt interface. But the T-Type chainring reflects some fascinating choices. Choices that prevented you from using any competitor’s chainring, and by extension, any competitor’s crank … until now. Wolf Tooth recently released Transmission-compatible chainrings that can be paired with many common cranks. Travis Engel talks about why that matters, even though his Cane Creek eeWings aren’t exactly common.

The new 2023 Fox Float rear shock is not any flashier than its predecessor. In fact, it’s less flashy. Fox abandoned the blue lever’s not-too-hard, not-too-soft “Middle” setting, leaving riders the simple, classic choice between “Open” and “Firm.” Travis Engel loved the idea, and could gush all day about its implications for the future of trail bikes, and how it relates to their past. Now, he’s finally ridden the new Float so he could make sure of it. And he’s talked to some folks at Fox so he could make sense of it.

There’s a classic, time-honored technique to help you evenly position your drop-bar brake levers by using a ruler or straightedge. If you know, you know. But handlebars have changed, and the ruler method sometimes won’t apply. So, Travis Engel is here to share a bike hack to help keep the brake lever positions symmetrical on today’s shallow or oddly shaped gravel bars. There’s no ruler involved, but you will make use of some items you may already have in your home office.

This isn’t as much a product review as it is a public service announcement: Every cyclist should have an assortment of 3M Nexcare waterproof bandages at home, and maybe even a couple in your pack. They’re pretty special. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, Travis Engel is here to explain why they’re nothing like the band-aids you used as a kid.

MicroSHIFT’s new Sword group came into Travis Engel’s life at the perfect moment. He had been noticing that his Ratio-12-speed-converted SRAM Force shift quality would degrade quickly, as the cable housing wore and friction increased. It’s a sad side-effect of the Ratio conversion’s decreased cable pull per-shift. Also, the hydraulic brakes had too much dead stroke for Travis’ discerning index fingers. He was looking for something new. That’s when, like the sexy stranger disrupting a rom-com protagonist’s unhappy European vacation, microSHIFT Sword bumped into Travis with a very timely meet-cute.

A brand new tubeless tire is just as vulnerable to punctures as one that’s two days from retirement. It’s one of cycling’s many injustices. And nobody wants to throw away $80 (or more) just because of a slice that’s barely too wide for a traditional plug. Travis Engel happens to be in that very predicament. He has a nearly new tire with a terminal injury, and it’s been on ice waiting for science to find a cure. The Lezyne Tubeless Pro Plugs just might do the trick.

In today’s installment of our ongoing opinion column, The Dust-Up, we bring you Travis Engel’s thesis on why full-suspension bikes offer the most inviting, user-friendly experience to people trying mountain bikes for the first time, and why the commonly held “hardtail-first” doctrine is flawed and outdated. Please read in full before commenting, but please comment.

We covered Forge + Bond’s house-brand, U.S.-made, recyclable “Fusion-Fiber” carbon wheels when the brand launched back in April. Today marks the first update to their lineup; the new cross-country 25 XC, and the lightweight all-mountain 30 AM, which Travis Engel will be putting through its long-term paces on his personal and test bikes over the coming year. But there are also new builds, and new price points. The exact details of today’s news serve as a bit of a status report on this disruptive new tech, and how today’s volatile market is reacting to it.

The Maxxis Assegai is one of the most aggressive front tires on the market, but you don’t necessarily have to be aggressive to enjoy it. Its adaptability to multiple riding styles and multiple terrains has gained the Assegai quite the following, including from competing tire brands. American Classic, Delium, and Bontrager have launched lower-priced tires clearly inspired by the Assegai, and Travis Engel is here to tell us how how they stacked up against his favorite front rubber.

No, we haven’t devolved into publishing clickbait articles. And no, we’re not saying a hip pack can be made into a reasonable replacement for a handlebar bag. But Travis Engel has a very clever, very temporary way to get the weight off his back for long boring climbs, and then easily put it back on for quick fun descents. The trick is kinda just for the uphill, it’s a little ugly, and it won’t work on every pack or every bike. But what do you want from us? That’s why they call it a hack.

When you review bike products, sometimes they arrive with some swag. T-shirt, stickers, sure. But sometimes there’s a cool memento, like an Abbey Tool laser-etched by whatever brand has partnered up with them for the launch. Or an artifact from the product’s manufacturing and development, like a piece of the innovative raw material that made it possible. But what came with my GX Transmission kit is by far the most moving party favor I’ve ever received.