It’s easy to buy a bike from a shop (or online), hit the trails and assume everything is how it should be – but there’s always room for improvement. Regular maintenance, once you've got your setup sorted, is essential too.

If you’re new to mountain biking, then the following tips will help you improve your bike setup and keep it working smoothly, without spending a lot of money on doing so.

1. Adjust your gears – they should shift, not skip

Naturally, the gears on cheaper bikes won’t shift as smoothly or quickly as those on more expensive options, but they should still shift accurately. If your gears aren’t staying in the right place, t...

After the unveiling of the impressive looking Air/TTe, Boardman saved the best news for last and announced its 2014 Elite Series. The Elite Series is Boardman’s top-tier performance oriented bike designs that adopt its very best and latest in-house developed technologies. The new bikes from the Elite series have been meticulously designed using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and FEA (Finite Element Analysis) with the aim to further improve on handling, aerodynamics and power transfer.

The 2014 Elite Series feature 6 completely redesigned frame platforms. You can check out and/or enquire about these beauties at Integrated Riding.

Ae...

Lots of things conspire to destroy bike frames of all kinds but the one that we cyclists worry about with steel bikes is rust, so that's we’ll look at. most modern frames are some variant of "Cromoly" steel. That means that the steel (iron and carbon) has been alloyed with Chromium and Molybdenum. Older bike frames (say, from the 1970s or earlier) tend to be "Hi-Tensile" or "Mild" steel, both of which are just basically iron and carbon. Chromium helps steel resist rust (if you alloy with enough Chromium, you have stainless steel) so modern frames are a lot less sensitive to moisture than older ones.

That said, if cromoly gets wet and stay...

When it comes to mountain bikes these days it seems like everything is getting more complicated and technical. While these new complications are often for the better, because they make our parts stronger, more adaptable, and often lighter weight, they can bog us down mentally and take some of the simple fun out of riding. This is where 1X or single chainring drivetrains come in. The concept isn’t totally new, but these days there are quite a few modern products that make running a single ring drivetrain a lot more easy to set up and ride efficiently.

Why would I want to run a 1X Drivetrain?

Lightweight – By getting rid of the front shift...

Painkillers Charity Cycle in Support of Habitat for Humanity: 
Rebuilding in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines 

0730Hrs, 15 December 2013, Sunday 
Car Park B1 East Coast Park

(Note: All participants in the Charity Cycle are requested to bring their own bikes and helmets must be worn at all times on the ride for safety purposes)

Painkillers is a small group of avid recreational cyclists in Singapore. We love our camaraderie, rides, runs, and triathlons as much as our Chicken Rice in Singapore. Above all, we love to contribute towards a good cause and, where possible, to help the less fortunate.

Working closely in conjunc...

But first we must step back and realise that the bicycle itself is a fairly complex machine in its own right. The first bikes were created thanks to the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, and with their steel frames and rubber tires they simply couldn't have been developed a century earlier. 

Bicycles have continually been moving forward, with better materials appearing and improvements in components such as gears and brakes seemingly endless. Recently, high-tech electronic components have changed the way we ride as well. This has put cyclists on a type of hamster wheel, always chasing the new.

Just as people line up for the next iPhone...

Aptly named TTE or Time Trial Evolution, the bike is no slouch, in fact, far from that it is quite possibly the most advanced TT bike in the market right now. The Boardman Air/TTE represents over 3 years of hard work from their engineering design team. To obtain the best possible aerodynamics design, the team at Boardman made use of state-of-the-art Laser Body Scanning technology and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) design. These are technologies normally employed in the Formula 1 racing industry and for the very first time, used in the cycling industry for the design of the TTE.

The frame features ultra sleek lines, screaming aerodynam...

(Source - E-Walker)

It has been quite a while since I last spend some quality time with my trusty CarryMe aka “Gentleman”. Having recently acquired a CarryBag specially made for transporting CarryMe’s; I thought to myself, why not test out the usability of the CarryBag with Gentleman! I figured out that it might be a good opportunity to test and showcase the ease and portability of travelling via subway with the bike and bag combo.

Gentleman with CarryBag attached to saddle all ready to roll.

One of the main reasons that made me purchase a CarryMe was to cover the “last mile gap”. It is extremely portable, surprisingly fast for a s...