I have a confession to make: I’m terrible at looking after my bike.
It’s not that I don’t know how, or that I don’t want to or can’t be bothered, it’s just often the thing on the long long to do list which is easiest to kick down the road: The only person likely to suffer the ill-effects of my lack-lustre bike maintenance regime is, well, me.
It hasn’t always been this way, in halcyon days of yore when I was more time rich and cash poor, I used to really enjoy the satisfaction of spannering bikes and getting them race prepped and shiny. But as I’ve slowly (mostly unwittingly) gained more responsibility at work whilst simultaneously adding more (delightful) complication to my life in the form of furry, feathered and a few human dependants; my poor old bikes are the ones who’ve borne the brunt.
Sometimes just squeezing in a ride is tricky enough, a quick gritty blast of the local loop just about blows the cobwebs away and often the bike gets at best a cursory splash with the hose before being flung back in the shed as I bluster my way to the shower.
The thing is though, far from getting its own back by unceremoniously and spontaneously farting out all its bearings at once 5 miles from civilisation in protest and teaching me a lesson; this bike almost rewards my neglect!
The thing that drew me to Hope kit all those years ago is the same thing that is currently keeping me rolling on my HB130 many MANY months (years!?) past the recommended service intervals for most major components: This stuff is built to last.
The realities of riding and maintaining bikes in the soggy northern half of the UK is that basically everything we ride is trying to turn a bike to gritty paste. It makes sense then that stuff designed and built in that same damp corner of northern Europe happens to work really well here!
I’ve still got the set of Hope X2 Race brakes that I bought (second hand) in 2012. They’ve done 12 and 24 hour races, short course XC, saved my bacon at an enduro when I ripped the hose out of the original brakes and even rescued a couple of weeks in the Alps on my husband’s 180mm enduro sled. In the intervening years, other brakes and bikes have come and gone, but the little X2s have cheerfully sat on the shelf, awaiting the inevitable day some less reliable brakes fail me, when they get dusted off and have another chance for their day in the sun.
In an industry which is constantly egging us on to buy more shiny stuff; Hope’s serviceability and the ability to ring them up and order a component they stopped making 5 years ago but might just have one of kicking about in the factory is a welcome change. For anyone who’s conscious of their environmental footprint (tyreprint?), finding kit that lasts and can be easily fixed when it breaks can be a lifeline.
My HB130 is approaching it’s 5th birthday and is yet to put a foot wrong, despite my neglect it just keeps going! It’s proven time and time again to be the perfect bike for the job, turning its hand to anything I ask of it and being disarmingly reliable. As a parent of a toddler, my riding this year has been hit and miss to say the least, but my HB130 - just like the trusty old X2s – is a noble old steed that dutifully dusts itself off and makes me smile every time I get round to wheeling it out. Maybe it’s time to repay its loyalty and catch up on some of those service intervals!
Words: Rosie Holdsworth
Pictures: Pete Scullion