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Sunday 12 May 2013

REVIEW: Enigma Ethos Steel, Custom Build
£3,000

Visting Enigma, swimming in the sea afterwards
I know this is a big roaring debate currently, whether you should spend any money on your commuter/hacker/winter trainer. But for me, it was an easy decision because I've clocked up c.20,000kms in three years on my trusty Focus Mares, mostly commuting, and spent far more hours on this, my humblest ride, than on all the others put together (the cross bike, the TT bike, the road racer, the fixie and the trainer........).

I decided I wanted a Rohloff hub gear build from Enigma, the titanium and steel specialists down in Sussex, Southern England, but in the end I opted for an Ethos-based custom build, much lighter at the rear end with a derailleur.

Jaco Ehlers did a great job measuring me up
How it unfolded

First Enigma. Jim Walker sold his distribution company and founded Enigma a few years ago, buying the then-bankrupt Omega. Today he's doing 700 bikes a year and targets 2,000 as a comfortable but still highly bespoke business.

Graeme Raeburn, Rapha's chief designer and a friend, had a Reynolds-based steel racer and spoke highly of it. I decided to investigate further. Enigma is an impressive company leading the charge back to British, hand-made bikes. I decided I'd pay a visit.

Ti or Steel?
I decided for steel over titanium

The Test Bike - I almost wanted this one, right away
I visited Enigma in September 2012, with a maximum Bike-to-Work voucher of £3,000 in my back pocket. I rode a ti bike and then a steel one made of Reynolds 853. Steel won the day. The titanium was a racier bike but I wanted one for city life and audaxing would be its fastest outing. I found the titanium to be tighter and less comfy than I had anticipated. Steel frames, mated to the right tyres, roll beautifully. There's a nobility about the progress and bump absorption. With panniers on the back on a daily basis, weight wasn't my number one concern, but I wanted to match my 25lb, alumnium-framed Focus Mares Cross/commute bike.

Getting the fit and build right
Jaco Ehlers, a South African, sorted me out brilliantly and was very generous with his time. Lots of fitting led to a quite different-from-stock build, with a taller head tube for city work, but on a tight, road-bike derived geometry. I ditched the Rohloff idea as soon as Jim showed me one. It weighes a tonne and costs even more. The build was coming out at a fantastic sum of money. I got nervous. In truth, I'd only had my derailleur bent once in three years of London life. It's not that difficult to fix and you can easily replace it.
I opted for classic script, instead of 'modern'

Enigma moved to a larger facility early in 2013
The money goes into the custom frame. We decided on Reynolds 853, which is more comfortable than 931 or 953, which are both very stiff and for racing. Enigma's renowned frame builder Mark Reilly was on hand and he told me that 853 was the best tubing for stiff/compliant, given the intended use. I wanted a steel fork with bosses for a low rider, to accommodate light touring. With all the boxes ticked, the rest of the build was Shimano 105 with tweaks, and a cheap but strong set of stock, Mavic Aksium wheels. Smart in black, and my favourite fast commute hoops, very cheap to replace and just 1,700 grams the pair. I got a smaller large chain ring, an FSA 46 toother instead of the 50/34 compact. In my view the 16 tooth drop of the compact is far too much, and for commuting, the 50 is simply too high. In the city, it means you barely ever go on the big ring and effectively waste half the transmission, accelerating the wear on the inner ring. These are the sort of details I wanted addressed. Another consideration was avoiding toe overlap with the front mudguard, even with size 44 shoes, clips and straps. This was achieved by extending the front fork out by 40mm, and has solved one of the big bugbears of the Focus. To keep a lid on weight I ordered a Tubus Logo Titan titanium rack, and checked the box for a carbon seat post. For a touch of bling, I ordered the Chris King headset.For a touch of real world, I ordered Cane Creek cross-top brake levers, which I swear by on a
5
My Bike: battleship grey and black
commute. They give you hair-trigger braking.

Colour dilemmas
It's one of the great things about a six-month wait for a custom project. You can still change your mind. I'd specced Ferrari Red but had a sudden change of heart. Battleship grey - one of the sexy, avant-greys that are circulating right now on certain Bentleys and Porsche 911s, retro but modern - had come into view and was subtle, less likely to attract thieves but gorgeous to my view, especially with the matched, painted handlebar stem. I called up Jaco and I was lucky: they were due to get the bike painted a week later.

Picking it up
One of the oddities was seeing the bike for the first time at Bespoked, Bristol, where Enigma had asked me if they could feature it on their stand. I was very happy with what I saw, but I couldn't ride it or take it away. A week later I drove down to Sussex and Enigma's new facility at Hailsham. There were a few last minute adjustments and off I went.

Riding it
I've laid down 300kms in little over a week, which included an audax, and a tonne of commuting. The bike is leggier and livelier than the relaxed Cross-bike geometry of the Focus. It is faster but I feel less inclined to cowboy about, partly because of the Schwalbe Double Defense 700x25 tyres (versus Schwalbe 700x28s on the Focus, which were necessary to soften the harsher alloy frame). There is no toe overlap. The titanium rack is exceptionally stiff. I use the whole transmission and switching between chain rings no longer leaves me grabbing a handful of compensating sprockets at the back. I'm happy to return to road brake calipers instead of MTB V-Brakes. They are slightly softer, but the V-Brakes required constant adjustment. That sucked. I love the looks and the grey/black combo is a success. My neighbour is a graphic designer and he is envious to a silly degree.

Final Thoughts
I was treated exceptionally well by Enigma and recommend them to anyone, unreservedly. There is one obvious comment applying to custom builds. It helps to know what you want but to be flexible as well, and better to be fairly involved than passive, otherwise what's the point? Above all, you have to be reasonably patient. You know if you are or aren't. If you get the colour 'wrong', you can take the bike back when it's all scratched up and get it done all over again. That's the magic of a proper, old-school build in the country where you live. You can even meet the guy who made your frame, in my case Joe Walker, Jim's son. It took him three days of painstaking labour. I am not against factories in Taiwan. Not at all. But I am firmly in favour of doing things properly, and provenance, as in the food chain, is just as deisrable when it comes to the most important object in one's life: one's bicycle.

Final, Final thoughts
After a fortnight of hard use, my only upgrades so far: black alloy dust caps on each inner tube valve, from Brick Lane Bikes (£2.00); Brooks Swallow saddle (£129.99). The saddle is my 4th Brooks (the rest sold off quickly) and so far it is the only one that is comfortable from the off - I had investigated buying a well worn-in B17 from eBay, but objected to the prices, while the 'worn-in already' range that Brooks sell is only available in tan! The Swallow is a racing cut but a very supple piece of leather with plenty of give. We'll see in six months whether it really is here to stay or yet another disastrous episode of Lofthouse-weakness-for-beautiful-object followed by a loss-making eBay expedition.
The only fly in the ointment with the Enigma, is that the Pitlock seat collar bolt doesn't fit the supplied seat collar clamp, so I am terrified that someone is going to allen-key their way to £200-worth of carbon seatpost and Brooks. This makes me think that bespoke bike builders should be making a much bigger effort (this includes Enigma!) to integrate a full suite of these security products into the original spec, if desired by the owner. There is nothing more annoying than taking delivery, only to have to replace every bolt and skewer with after market additions, and then finding, surprise surprise, that some of the parts don't translate over. That's the bike industry for you. It can be a very annoying place. Salvation might be at hand. I am talking to a simply brilliant new company called Atomic 22 (www.atomic22.com). The fantastic couple behind it, Patrick Wells and Ayantika Mitra have a fully fledged suite of beautiful, light weight and very secure bolts and skewers for every possible bit of the bike from brakes to saddles. That might be the next upgrade - but if I do it, I'll do it big and work over the whole bike in one go, so that I end up with one universal 'key' rather than a mix of Pitlock / Atomic. I'll pay a visit to Atomic in the process and report back, probably in June.

Thursday 9 May 2013

REVIEW: A2B Hybrid 24 e-bike, RRP £1,999
Retailers in the UK, www.wearea2b.com

It goes A2B. That's anti-climb glass atop the wall.

Rear hub motor, 250W

Integrated battery pack has excellent security

London cobbles, rite 'ard
It was my pleasure to recently interview Naveen Munjal. Bear with me. He's the managing director of HeroEco, the electric division of India's largest motorbike maker, Hero Motocorp. They make several million motorbikes and scooters a year. That's of direct relevance to this review, because the A2B Hybrid 24 is a hybrid in more ways than one.

In one obvious sense, any e-bike (or pedelec, to use the correct term) is a hybrid. It has a motor that works in concert with a pair of human legs, the same way a Toyota Prius mates a motor to a combustion engine. The holy grail of e-bike fanciers is an urban nirvana in which the simple beauty of the bicycle is magnified by an electric motor, making it faster and further but without any of the registration, licence, training and insurance and parking burdens that apply even to the lowliest Vespa.

But the A2B Hybrid 24 is also a hybrid of bicycle and scooter design, and clearly reveals the impact of serious engineers coming at a brief from a non-bicycle trade direction.

The unconventional Y-frame was inherited from Ultra Motor, the UK company that created the Hybrid 24 and was acquired by Hero a year ago. It's quite massive, with substantial internal routing for the cables, and prominent welds that are very neat but still prominent. What do I mean by that? I'm not holding back from using the word ugly. But it's not ugly; it's burly, or some other word.

And that's the point I'm trying to make here. This bike is very lightweight compared to a Vespa, but it's barely comparable to a bicycle, particularly if you're viewing it from Planet Racing Bike. In that sense the Hybrid 24 fills a hitherto non-existent sector. You cannot do it justice by only coming at it with pre-conditions and prejudices.

As I ride it away, I keep the motor shut off and spin a low gear. It knocks along OK, but compared to my normal ride (pictured at the bottom of this post, for context), it's terribly upright, even by Dutch bike standards, and massively wide at the handlebars. It's as if this is aimed at a global citizen for whom a bicycle is unfamiliar, or scary.

Stopping to get the juice on, I'm impressed by the way you just wave a fob across the little digital speedo/battery indicator. It lights up neon blue. And then whoosh, as soon as I push down on the crank, the whole 250W mnotor pours out all its torque and thrusts me forwards. More follows until I hit 16 mph (25KM/h), and when I tackle my nearest hill, it makes mincemeat of it. Later on the same day, I come home via my local cobbles in Murray Mews, a secret testing ground I use for bikes. The A2B is in its element on this bad surface. The big tyres and front suspension just shrug off the cobbles as the rear hub motor powers it forwards. 

But it's not all good. I'd deliberately timed my test of the A2B with a week of heavy turbo training at home. There are times when you want the commute to go away. I had fantasised about this bike whispering me along, like a two-wheeled Rolls Royce. But the control system that defines an e-bike is not a power-on-demand (throttle) system like an e-scooter. It's a hybrid. If you don't pedal you don't get assisted. The 35kg weight of the A2B robs the motor of much of its substantial power, and by the time I reached work I had a soaking wet back, exacerbated by the need to wear a rucksack - the battery pack precludes hanging a pannier.

When I got home, I had to carry the A2B up a flight of stairs and wrestle its width and girth into my front room. You could not do this on a daily basis. 35kgs is alot of weight. Getting it down stairs is like controlling a runaway express train.

The weight totally determines how the bike actually handles. It is a sledgehammer to crack a proverbial nut. It's a very difficult bike to love if you're coming over from bicycles. If you're pushing on from a junction and encounter a pot hole, the driving rear wheel can bounce out and slam down - I think we call that axle-tramp, and might explain why such heavy tyres were chosen for an unsuspended rear triangle. At the front end, the suspension is supple enough, but suffers from dive under braking, a reminder that the budget has gone on the Berlin-sourced design (hence the groovy black) and the electric components, while other parts are lower than would be found on a conventional bike in this price range.

The saddle, seat post, derailleur (Shimano Alivio - nothing much on a £2k bike) handlebar, bell, disc brakes, chain and pedals are all straight out of bargain bicycle supply chain. The electric display, frame design and finish, tyres (Kenda 24 x 2.35, inflatable to 40 psi, slick tread), 36-spoke wheels, battery and charger, control systems and motor are all taken from somewhere burlier than your typical bicycle, even at the MTB end of the spectrum. They all feel like overkill for a bike that tops out at 16mph and is easily overtaken by any club rider training around Regent's Park, as I discovered.
The alternative: black graphics on grey, instead of grey on black

So my verdict? There is another generation of speed pedelecs hitting non-EU markets (USA, Switzerland) with double the power. That would suit the Hybrid-24. I wanted more power more of the time. As it stands, it's an interesting experiment but it doesn't solve a problem, it just migrates it some place else.

In the EU, e-bikes are legally restricted to 250 Watt motors, and 25km/h top speed (you can go faster under your own stream, but you won't). So the only way ahead is to reduce weight. This is why Richard Thorpe spent a fortune at Go-Cycle to perfect a magnesium wheel for his e-bike, which is more fun to ride because so much lighter. His brief was to create a great bicycle with benefits. HeroEco has created, instead, a light scooter restricted to the mechanics of a bicycle. It is too heavy.

That said, I love HeroEco. They are just about to bring out an entirely new range of e-bikes. And they are bringing the mindset of a global company to the typically small scale, slightly shambolic world of the cycling industry. E-bikes have a huge, global future as an alternative to cars and petrol-engined motorbikes and scooters. They are already ubiquitous in China, which makes 29 million a year. Meanwhile, one in five bikes bought in Holland are now e-bikes, and the Germans are taking to them in droves. I've seen just three in London over the past three years, but even here they will come. They will get better and they'll catch on, it's just a matter of time. We're not there quite yet though, judging by the Hybrid 24.

Richard Lofthouse

Richard Lofthouse