Fresh Goods Friday 779: The Where’s Benji? Edition

Yes, Benji has left the building earlier this week to head to a secret product launch. All we know about it is that it’s currently chucking it down with rain and Benji sent us this photo of the deluxe hotel preparing the deluxe lunch for the deluxe/sopping wet bike journos. Where’s our tiny string quartet?

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Focus Secret New Bike

• Price: Waterboarding on a press trip
• From: All in good time

Benji went to such trouble to smuggle this photo out of wherever he is, that we figured it needed to go in. While it’s not in our hands right now, be sure that Benji’s taken his special Patented Expandable Suitcase in order to sneak this sassy new bike back with him to Calderdale.

Before we get on with the other Goodies of Freshness, how about this Lachlan Morton video about riding this year’s Three Peaks. If only we could have his enthusiasm for doing anything on a bike, eh?

Park Tool Cone Spanners

• Price: £104.99
• From: Freewheel

Some jobs just need a cone spanner, and this set from Park Tool is pretty comprehensive for most hub cones, and other fiddly nuts. Did you know that Park has a trademark on the colour blue for tools?

Green Coffee beans

• Price: €13-35 a kilo
• From: 88Graines

Anyone who’s been here for ten minutes knows that we love our coffee. However, in France-land, Chipps has become disillusioned with the quality of the coffee and has taken things into his own hands and is now roasting his own. And in true STW fashion, it’s already cost him more than it’ll ever save him.

Shimano XTR PD-M9220 XTR trail wide platform pedals

• Price: £179.99
• From: Freewheel

Apologies if you’ve seen these already, but they’re super exciting for ‘never-flats’ riders like me (Chipps) as, unlike the new XTR race pedals, these include the new CL-MT001 cleats, which are Shimano’s first new cleat design for many years (we’ll say ‘around 20’ as Shimano’s 858 pedals are conspicuously absent from its company timeline…). Comparing them (right) to the regular SPD cleat (on the left) they seem virtually identical, apart from a mystery slot on the bottom edge and some bit chamfering on the top. Is this going to be one for the home angle-grinder hobbyists to have a go at? I’ll get testing these, Kesteven style, with a different setup on each foot and get back to you.

Pro Gravel Comfort Tape

• Price: £39.99
• From: Freewheel

If it’s not camo, is it even gravel, bro? Here is Pro’s gravel-specific, no hear us out, drop bar tape. It’s gravel (or other off-road, drop bar sporty riding bike) specific due to being a very comfy 3mm thick. It’s sticky, but not sticky-backed, which is good if, like me, you take a few goes at wrapping handlebars as it’s easy to unwrap and re-do. In addition, it’s extra long so that you’ve got length for that pro-mechanic figure-eight round the hoods, or if you have mahoosive flared bars.

HoverAir X1 ProMax (AGAIN)

• Price: £639.00
• From: HoverAir

As already featured in FGF749 and here again because this is a replacement for the one we had that made a break for freedom and flew off from the top of a ridge above Revelstoke last month while we were researching for our upcoming Revelstoke Destination Guide in the December issue.

The Hover is a small autonomous ‘flying camera’. It weighs in under the magic 250g limit that makes it available to the general public to use without jumping through legal drone regulations stuff (Although we understand in the UK this limit will be reduced to 100g in the new year, meaning pilots of this and other drones above that limit will need to register with the Civil Aviation Authority).

Essentially this drone will lock onto the subject and follow them while recording in up to 8k so you can get that amazing footage of you landing to flat from a middle sized step without needing your mate to be a pilot.

Original Hover last seen heading into the Canadian wilderness.

Megasack is Coming(!)

• Price: Depends how good you’ve been
• From: The length and breadth of the country

Bonkers isn’t it? But in a month or so, we’re going to start decorating trees and dressing up funny while we wave an assortment of fantastic prizes at you. At least we won’t have to pretend to be warm, like we used to in the old, unheated studio across the road. Our new FGF/workshop video space actually has heating! Anyway, stay tuned on this lot…

Remember that only our subscribers are in it to win it when it comes to the MegaSack. Daily prizes are up from grabs to anyone but the grand prize at the end is just for our subscribers. Not a subscriber yet? Scroll down for details.

Thread of the Week

Our esteemed panel of judges has awarded Thread of the Week to @scaredypants for his brave attempt to ask a sensible, grown-up, male-grooming question in our forum. Please contact editorial@singletrackworld etc and we’ll see what we can find to send you. Probably some Bum Butter 😉

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And that’s all we have time/space/products for this week. Expect a slightly more normal service next week. In the meantime, we wish you a fab weekend, whatever you’re up to. I’m going to be helping organise the village apple festival, so get me, eh? Hopefully there’s still time to squeeze in a 50km loop on Saturday though, storms willing…

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