The Cinelli Mash Bullhorn is unlike any other bar out there, mainly because it has been designed for fixed gear riders by fixed gear riders.

Bullhorns are my favourite kind of bars to use on the fixed gear and I’ve used a fair few over the years, all of them pretty much the same: round and bullhorny. There’s not a huge amount of variety out there unless you want to get silly and put pursuit bars with a ridiculous drop on which results in a reduction in overall functionality and comfort.

The most obvious difference between your standard bullhorns and the Cinelli Mash is the shape of the flats, where most bullhorns (and other kinds of bars) are round these are wide, VERY wide. As far as I know there really is nothing else like this out there, of course there are wacky TT bars which are wide but they are also wacky.

I find that it’s not really possible to ride on the flats with my thumbs underneath the bars which is fine by me because I’m used to that, I use the Cinelli Vai Palm bars on my road bike which are a similar shape. Riding with your thumbs on the top of the bars probably reduces the vibrations shooting up your arms and into your neck letting you ride for longer with less pain because your grip is never at the point of ‘death’, I have no proof for this other than experience.

I’ll admit that I’m not a huge fan of the enormous Cinelli logo across the entire width of the bars but it’s all good because I taped them up and now I can’t see it anyway. Everyone else I’ve spoken to digs the graphics so maybe it’s just me.

There is a slight drop along the flats from the clamp area to the horns, it’s pretty mild but is absolutely spot on for me, my hands sit comfortably and naturally from the centre right the way out to the edges.

The point where the flats join the horns is particularly special on these, it’s a great place to ride but on other bullhorns isn’t really comfortable. On the Cinelli Mash Bullhorn this curve is really wide so your palms sit on there perfectly and you can maintain a good grip with minimal effort because of the increased surface area.

These bars really shine when you slide your hands forward onto the horns and get out of the saddle. It’s like when you hear a Ferrari roar or thunder right over your house. There is next to no flex AT ALL, when you put the hammer down to sprint or pull up to climb you really feel the difference between these and other bars. They are made from hydroform moulded Columbus alloy but they feel as stiff as carbon to me.

They only come in one width, 40cm, which feels fine to me. Because of the shape you have a lot of hand positions at your disposal, each one as pleasing as the last. The clamp is 31.8 so they’ll fit on any standard road stem, weigh only 290g and come in both silver and black.

These bars are special, nothing else even comes close and therein lies the rub. A hell of a lot of R&D must have gone into them and they are made from a top quality material so they don’t come at a cheap price. The RRP is £128.99 which is enough to make anyones eye open wide but you get what you pay for. The Cinelli Mash Bullhorn is far and away the best fixed gear specific bar out there and you get a hell of a lot for the money: incredible stiffness; high end material; unparalleled comfort; and you’ll be supporting one of the classic Italian brands as well as the Mash boys and they deserve to be supported.

These are the ultimate bullhorn, if you already like this style of bar then you’ll really love these; if you’ve never used bullhorns and fancy trying them then you might as well jump right in and start with the best, the Cinelli Mash Bullhorn.

As with almost everything these days you can get these cheaper than the RRP online, at Urban Cyclery (where I work) we offer a price match guarantee and they are currently £102.95 which is an absolute bargain. Click here to visit the product page.

Disclosure: I was sent these bars for review purposes, this has in no way influenced my review, they are awesome, simple as that. Although I only link to Urban Cyclery the bars are available elsewhere, Urban Cyclery is a rider owned and run independent shop and you should always shop with companies like this.

I’ve been running a set of Condor Cycles’ Uno Race wheels for quite a while now, they are great value and hand built in London…

Unlike most sub-£200 wheelsets the Uno fixed and singlespeed wheels are hand built to order, you choose what you want from a selection of options and they will be built up just for you at Condor’s workshop.

The rims are available in silver, black or white; with or without a braking surface and with either 32 or 36 holes. They are made in Europe and unique to Condor, they are not a rebadged  model from the far east.

Like the rims, the hubs are Condor’s own design. Much debating has been done on ’the forums’ about what they are but it was all in vain because they are an exclusive. I like the solid flanges, it keeps them looking nice and simple. The sealed cartridge bearings will keep rolling fast and smooth for a long long time. Again, 32 and 36 hole options are available.

The rear hub is available as either fixed/fixed or fixed/free. Both the front and rear come in a few different colours: silver, white, gold, black, red or blue.

Nothing can come close to a well made hand built wheel, it’s great to know that every single spoke has been tensioned and tested by someone that is passionate about their craft. These wheels were true and stiff out of the box and many months later feel as good as they did at the start, I’m confident that I’ll not need to pull the old spoke key out any time soon.

At £195 for the set there are some cheaper alternatives out there but just because someone is selling ’hand built wheels’ doesn’t mean that the person building them is very good at the job. Condor wheels are well respected by London’s couriers which says a hell of a lot about the quality and when you buy from them you are supporting a business that gives back and has done for years, not just someone selling colourful ‘bespoke’ bikes with daddy’s money. You can watch a video of Condor’s wheelbuilder at work here.

The rims and hubs are available separately from £24.99 as are a huge selection of fixed sprockets and lockrings, which I have been using and loving for years.

I’m a huge fan of Condor’s products and everything the brand stands for, these wheels are great and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Some more info can be found here but to order a set you will need to contact Condor directly where you will be able to chat through what configuration you want.

Disclosure: I was sent this wheelset for review purposes, this has in no way influenced my review. I only post stuff I’m into, you know that.

I used the Kenda Kwik Roller EZ Ride tyres on my trick bike before I finally accepted that I was completely useless, I absolutely loved them.

One thing I really hate is sluggish tyres and the bigger you go the more you need a quick rolling tyre. These are only 38c so they won’t appeal to everyone taking on fixed gear freestyle but they are a great tyre if you want to do a bit of commuting on your trick bike too.

The first thing that struck me with these tyres is just how badass they look. They have a really aggressive looking tread pattern and an all round air of toughness. They are the tyre equivalent of a 50’s teen in a leather jacket turning up at the local burger joint with his arm around a Pink Lady. They aren’t just tough looking though, they feature Kenda’s Iron Cap puncture protection strip which lives up to it’s name, I didn’t get a single puncture the whole time I was using these and I never once worried about getting one either.

So, these tyres are scary looking and built like a brick shithouse so you’d expect them to be heavy, right? Wrong! They are really light, I would describe them as ‘surprisingly light’. They also live up to their ‘Kwick Roller’ name, they have minimal rolling resistance, the difference with other tyres of the same size is noticeable.

Like I said at the start, these are 700x38c so won’t be what every FGFS rider is looking for but if you’re after a bomb proof, fast tyre for your commuter bike that you bash around the place then these are perfect. You’ll be able to skid them today, tomorrow and every day for months too, in fact they laugh in the face of wear.

Most local bike shops will be able to order them in through Moore Large, although the guy delivering them may turn up with a box of fags in his t-shirt sleeve and slicked back hair…

The threaded track sprocket has done the job perfectly well for decades but now we are pushing our fixed gear parts to the limit. The threads on our hubs are one of the most vulnerable yet important areas of our bikes and brands are looking at ways of making it more reliable; some have gone for a bolt on cog but Halo’s new HG spline system is even better.

The traditional threaded system works, of course it does, but when it fails it really fails. Some brands have gone down the bolt on route but it didn’t really catch on, fixed gear freestyle is where it’s at now and the smallest bolt on cog option is a 16t which is a no-go for compact gearing. Halo’s HG spline system is so obvious and brilliant that other brands must be kicking themselves for not thinking of it first: it can’t slip or thread; it’s way easier to fit/swap and will take down to 12t cogs, it’s genius.

I know for a fact that I am not the only one that has experienced a stripped thread on a hub, it’s a royal pain in the arse. One second you are changing your gearing and the next you are swearing and trying to kick the last breath out of your formally fine back wheel, not just because it has broken but because of the inconvenience of having to buy a new hub and (more than likely) pay for your LBS to re-build it onto your rim. That will never happen with a Fix-G, there is nothing that can go wrong, in theory the groves could wear and the cog loosen over time but the tolerances are so tight that I really can’t see that happening and even if it did you would still be able to use it and it would be perfectly safe. There is also no settling in period when you fit the cog, sometimes a newly fitted threaded cog will slip a few times before it’s possible to tighten it right up and make it solid, I very nearly ended up sprawled across the front of a BMW because of that once.

I can see this hub making waves in the fixed gear freestyle community, not only does it take cogs right down to 12t for compact gearing but it will also run just as reliably for people that want to run a left hand drive. People are Loctite-ing their cogs onto their hubs as a precautionary measure because on the left the cog is, technically, loosening with every pedal stroke. There are no rotational forces being applied to a thread in any way with the Fix-G so forwards, backwards, left, right, it’s all the same.

Another great thing about this system is the ease with which you can fine tune your chainline, it uses spacers on either side of the cog so you can shift your cog left or right in 1mm increments, my bike is quieter than ever, the only real sound is from the tyres. You can also run two cogs next to each other which means that when using a Double Fix-G hub you can run four cogs on one hub!

The bearings in these puppies are badass, they go like the clappers. I noticed a huge difference compared to the ones in the Formula / System Ex which I was using before these. The all over finish on the Fix-G hubs is very nice, it looks and feels like a premium product as well as performing like one.

You’ll need a Shimano freewheel tool to fit your cog onto the hub, I bought my one for about £3 on eBay so that’s no hassle and it’s much cheaper than buying a decent wide lockring for a traditional hub.

I’m finding it really hard to come up with a negative point to balance this review out. I suppose having to buy a special cog for it could be seen as a bad thing if you have a good supply of normal ones but there is a Fix-G/Threaded option so you could use your normal sprocket on the other side if you wanted to.

These hubs are amazing, your life will not be complete until you get one! For the spec check out the Ison Distribution website. They have an RRP of £69.99 for Fix-G/Free or Fix-G/threaded and £79.99 for the Double Fix-G featured in this review.

If you have any questions pop them in the comments and I’ll get back to you asap…

The BIGxTOP straps have been on my bike for a couple of months, so I thought it was about time I shared what I thought now that they’ve seen some action.

They are extremely well made, much better than you’d expect for a debut product. They are handmade in Bournemouth by Jordan Trent but they don’t at all feel like they are anything but professionally produced by someone with much more experience, it’s a bloody good start and a good sign for things to come.

The buckle has not once slipped even a millimetre, I thought it would be a weak point but clearly not. Fitting these is so easy, much easier than Hold Fast straps and a million times easier to remove after a lot of use, Hold Fast drive me up the wall when I try and get them off. The excess bits of the straps are kinda cool sticking out too, a bit like super hero wings.

They have remained stiff, very stiff, it’s like webbing on viagra; I can’t see them ever becoming flaccid.

BIGxTOP straps are available for £29.99 with free worldwide shipping and available online from the BIGxTOP webshop and Charlie the Bikemonger.

I first became aware of Espresso Wheels a few months back, I’d come across them online somewhere and my initial impression was that they were just another set of cheap wheels that would fall apart in a few weeks. When they contacted me about reviewing a set I was very interested in trying out something that seemed too cheap to be good.

At just £109 for the set my expectations were not too high, my first fixed wheelset (Omega Mach 1) cost about £130 and they sucked, everyone I know who had a set experienced them falling to bits within no time. There are a fair few options out there for pre-built fixed wheels these days with varying degrees of respect in the scene, demand for them is through the roof but does the price represent the quality of these?

The wheels arrived from the factory and the first thing I noticed when removing them from the box was just how solid they felt, the double wall rims are 45mm deep so they should feel stiff and they really do. I used to have a set of Dodici rims which cost more than the built up Espresso wheels and they felt just the same in the hand. The paint on the rims is as expected, it’s not as smooth or thin as more expensive rims but I only noticed because I was inspecting them. Wheels are for riding not looking at all day so that’s pretty irrelevant.

I gave them the old ‘spin in the air’ and they felt pretty good, the bearings aren’t super duper smooth or as long spinning as my Halo’s but they are fine. The 32 hole rebranded Joytech hubs are a nice addition, I was expecting the usual Formula/System Ex jobbies. The rear comes bundled with a 16t fixed sprocket with a pretty decent wide lockring and a 16t freewheel on the opposite side, both chrome.

One of the major issues with pre-built factory wheels is spoke tension and truing and that was my main concern, who wants to buy a wheelset then have to pay a wheelbuilder £50 or whatever to make them useable in a couple of weeks? I took them over to Urban Cyclery in Swansea to have the boys look them over and they agreed that they were true, well tensioned and as stiff as a board, we were all surprised.

They weigh just as much as you’d expect a double walled deep section rimmed wheel to weigh, they aren’t overly heavy compared to similar wheels, nor are they noticeably light. No weight weenie would use wheels like these so I don’t think the weight is particularly important, a 45mm deep rim like this is designed to be stiff not light so it’s all good.

If there’s one thing I hate it’s people who spend more time talking about and analysing bike parts rather than actually riding them so I popped them on my Brother and hit the road. They feel great on the bike, you really notice how stiff they are, you can feel every bump in the road. It’s exactly what I want from riding a ‘track bike’ out on the streets, I want it to be twitchy, and I want the vibrations to shake my bones. These would be great on an old conversion because they would offset the flexy frame somewhat and give you a taste of the good life.

I’ve been riding them on and off for nearly two months now and doing all I can to push them to the limit. I’ve ridden in rain and shine; I’ve skidded them to see if the hub thread gave way; I’ve been bunny hopping up and down curbs and all that shit and they are still as good as new, rolling true and stiff.

So, would I recommend these wheels? I certainly would, I found no real problems with them so you really couldn’t go far wrong, whether they will stand up to years of abuse being ridden every day is unknown but I reckon they’ll do a great job until the time comes when you want to spend bigger bucks on something lighter or shallower.

Espresso Wheels are usually available in white, black, silver and aqua but are currently sold out across Europe, a good sign surely? The next shipment is due at the end of August, you can pre-order a set by e-mailing info@espressowheels.com

N.B. Espresso also sell affordable decent quality cranks, grips, saddles and brake components, be sure to check them out on the site too.

Now that the winter has kicked in getting up those hills is a lot harder, muscles are cold and the freezing air hurts more with every breath. I like to get home as quickly and as easily as possible at this time of year so it’s out with the track drops and in with the bullhorns.

Horns are without a doubt the best kind of handlebar, everyone has personal preference but nothing is as versatile except drops with brake hoods but we’ll ignore those because we are denim wearing urbanites and not lycra wearing sportsmen, yeah?.

For the last few weeks I’ve been using the EighthInch Bullhorns and I love them, they are nice and light (280g) and stiff as a board, I’ve not felt any flex in them when annihilating roadies on hills. They are your basic flat topped bullhorn shape with 0 drop and at 42cm wide are just right. They have a fair bit of length on the both sections of the horn allowing you to get forward or REALLY forward. Mine are the chrome ones, the finish is excellent and the logo on the right hand side is nice. The clamp size is 25.8/26 so will work with your standard road quill stem without the need for a shim.

“EighthInch is the fixed gear division of Wheel and Sprocket located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a family owned bicycle shop since 1973 with six retail locations!” They make loads of great fixed gear parts from pedals to wheelsets and polo mallets. Until recently their products weren’t available in the UK but they are now, exclusively through Fixed Gear Frenzy. Check out the bullhorns and all the other EightInch stuff on their site.

I’ll use the rest of this space to educate you about the finer aesthetic details of bullhorn angle choice. Twitter followers will be used to my regular naming and shaming of hideous bullhorn wielding Fixed Gear Gallery bike submissions. I may have got an ‘E’ at GCSE Maths but the angle of your bullhorns has less to do with Pythagorus and more to do with art anyways. DO NOT point your bullhorns upwards, seriously, it looks absolutely ridiculous and why the hell would you want to ride with them in that position? If you think I am wrong on this one then maybe you should make an appointment with the doctor…

Getting hold of a top quality vegan friendly saddle that didn’t look like a spaceship until very recently was nigh on impossible but San Marco have stepped up to the oche with the release of the new Concor Supercorsa X which is fully synthetic.

There are a lot of synthetic saddles out there, I could pretend that us vegans are hard done by and that the bike companies don’t care about us but that would be far from the truth, there are loads to choose from. Unfortunately most of these leather-free saddles are ‘technical’ and generally look pretty far out, way too zany for my liking and more at home on a carbon road bike which is what they are designed for.

My hunt for a genuinely good vegan saddle started a few months ago and I didn’t really uncover anything that I would regard as high end so ended up going for a BLB Fly (which looks good and fitted me well). Prior to the Fly I had ridden a Charge Spoon (which I found to be too wide for my bum) and a Charge Bucket (which I liked but was a bit too neon for my grumpy ass). All three of these cost less than 25 quid and that is reflected in the finish, they are all perfectly nice and do the job but none of them make you feel proud as an owner.

Today the Concor Supercorsa X came into my life (thanks Stuart!) and right away the difference in quality was apparent. The Microfeel covering is pulled very tightly over the dense padding making it feel extremely solid and the stapling underneath is clean, something that you just don’t see on a cheap model. The shell is made from recycled material which ties the ethical package up nicely.  The Concor is, without a doubt, my favourite looking saddle, the silhouette is absolutely unmistakeable and just screams “classic!” which really is the icing on the cake.

The cherry on top of the icing of course is the fact that this high quality piece of sex on a seatpost is that San Marco have purposefully produced a product for people that want to live a life free from animal products. In their own words: “A vegan saddle that eventually became the Concor X. The X as an alternative symbol. Dedicated to people that are looking for products made with an alternative material to leather, but keeping the characteristic aesthetics of the Concor unchanged.” I have it on good authority that the San Marco brand manager is straightedge and really pushed for this saddle to be made, virtual high five for that guy!

Talking about comfort is pretty much pointless because everyone’s bums are different, as is illustrated by this equation: saddle+arse=heaven/hell. All I will say is that the distinctive sweep at the back feels really nice and more like sitting on a chair rather than perching on a fence.

Now, I’m not one of these pushy vegans but before you buy another leather saddle just stop and remember that this thing is totally badass and a leather covering will serve to achieve nothing more than a temporary relief from your suppressed kinky gimp outfit fetish. The San Marco Concor Supercorsa X is available in black and white with an RRP of £64.99. It is distributed within the UK by Madison so you should almost certainly be able to order one in to your local bike shop to have a look. Leave those poor cows alone, haha.

If there is one thing that drives brakeless fixed gear riders mad it’s tyres, mainly because you pay for something that you instantly go out and destroy, it’s a losing battle right from the second you hand over your cash money. MMA Sports very kindly sent me a set of Maxxis Re-Fuse to try out a couple of months ago, this is an account of what I thought of them.

The first thing that struck me was that they were foldables, I felt like a real pro when I opened the box cause I’d never had a set of ‘posh floppy’ tyres before. After a bit of unfolding, wiggling, shaking and squeezing they were nice and round and went onto my rims pretty easily. I hate super tight tyres, I’ve got a Vredestein on the front that sent me into a blind rage once cause it was such a hassle getting it on, these are just right, they don’t go on so easily that you worry about them coming off but also don’t make you look away in fear of your levers snapping and piercing your cheek when trying to get them on.

I just put one on the back to test and pumped the sucker up to 120, there’s nothing like a nice rock hard tyre. I hit the road, nothing was out of the ordinary and then ZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE I did a skid, what the hell was that? I did another and ZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE it happened again, ‘what an interesting sound’ I thought to myself and went about my business. That night I was chatting to Dan from MMA and told him about the wacky skidding noise, he went on to tell me that it was a feature designed by Maxxis as an early warning system that let people know you were performing an emergency skid. I couldn’t wait to write my review and tell people about this, unfortunately Dan was just taking the piss and left me feeling like a total sucker, haha. After a few days riding the noise stops when the ‘Diamond knurled slick design’ wears in a bit which is a shame cause I kinda liked it.

I did a lot of riding in the rain during the test month and I was really impressed by how well the Re-Fuse gripped in the wet, my brakeless commute is often a pretty scary affair, I ride with great caution when its wet but skidding often results in very little reduction in speed even at low speeds. The excellent gripping was really  noticeable and filled me with confidence when commuting to and from work. Although grippy they certainly aren’t ‘sticky’, they skid well in the dry and better than normal in the wet, don’t ask me how they just do.

On to wear. As I said at the start, when you ride brakeless your back tyre doesn’t last, for me a shitty tyre lasts two weeks and anything around about a month is worth buying again. These very much fall into the ‘buy again’ category. I usually employ the rotating trick to make my tyres last longer, which, for anyone new to this means that I take the chain off and rotate the wheel a few teeth then attach the chain again which moves the ‘skid spots’ and lengthens the life of the rubber. For this test I didn’t rotate, I wanted to push this tyre to see how well it stood up to the downhill skid onslaught I would be giving it every morning on my way into town. It took three weeks before the top layer finally wore through and another week again before it reached the state you can see in the photo below. There was life left in the old dog, it was nowhere near through to the tube but I was going on a long ride so I decided to whip it off and fit the second of the test tyres just in case. I am only two weeks into using that one and will be rotating to see how long it lasts under my normal maintenance routine, I will update this review in due course.

Most other reviews of the Maxxis Re-Fuse tyres talk about how great the puncture resistance is, I haven’t had any punctures yet but I also haven’t had any on the front which is the Vredestein so I can’t really comment on it. The general consensus is that it is one of the most puncture resistant tyres on the market. I have mostly dealt with grip and wear in this review because that’s what I feel are the key points for a fixed gear rider, for a more bike geeky mini-review check this out on the London forum. The one negative thing I have to say is that the graphic on the tyre is pretty crappy but thats just personal preference.

In conclusion, the Maxxis Re-Fuse tyre is very grippy in all conditions and pretty hardwearing even if you skid a lot. They are available from as little as £17.99 which is a lot less than a months worth of petrol or bus tickets. Full technical data can be found on the Maxxis website.

Finally, MMA would like your opinion on which coloured Re-Fuse tyres you’d most like them to stock, check out the colours below then post in the comments which ones you like the most, I’ll pass the message on, cheers.

I’ve always used your run of the mill nylon straps, we all love to complain about how they fray, tear, slip (especially in the rain) and just generally SUCK. These Pake straps are made of nylon too but they are coated in a nice thick rubbery urethane which means that they suffer from none of the problems that their poor weany cousins do.

Let me warn you that getting the straps through the holes in my pedals resulted in a lot of growling and screaming like a 5 year old girl as I tried in vain to get enough of them through the hole to grip with a pliers and pull, do not try and fit these if there are any young, impressionable kids around. The flip side to all this misery is that when they are in they wont keep moving around and fucking up your bikes fen shui. They are pretty rigid when they are fitted and sit in a nice wide arc that makes it easy to slip your foot into which is always handy.

I went for the black ones because I’m the type of guy who likes to ride in a good old fashioned black Bruce Springsteen t-shirt but they come in all sorts of colours to match your own shirt: Yellow, Pink (which will go lovely with your cut off Tegan & Sara top), Orange, Duct Tape Silver (for all you punks), Maroon, White, Green (which would set off your eyes as well as your Fairport Convention tee), Yellow, Goldenrod, Bright Blue, Navy Blue and Red.

So to summarise: they are made of nylon with a strong, non slip urethane covering that resists the rain; they are nice and thick; are available in loads of snazzy colours and have a nice buckle too. I have absolutely no reservations in recommending these straps to you.

They are available from a few places but I got mine from Velodrama cause they are lovely and provide a great personal service.