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Microshift Sword Black sounds expensive, but it’s actually a more affordable version of the original Sword gravel group. Microshift’s intent with Sword Black is to fill its product line and reach more riders by offering an even more attainable price point. Let’s check it out below…
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We’ve partnered up with MicroShift to give away a Sword gravel groupset for your bike in either 1 x 10 or 2 x 10 setup for our April Group Ride giveaway! Sign up by April 30th for your chance to win!
Congrats to John from St. George, Utah! You’ve won the Sim Works kit!
With Shimano releasing CUES to replace Alivio, Acera, and Altus groupsets, is it possible we are getting something better? CUES unites all the parts under its umbrella with the same flat cable pull ratio and chain pitch across 9, 10, and 11-speed drivetrains. Spencer Harding devised his own mix of CUES parts to fit his touring demands at a low price point. Check out what he found and his thoughts on this new parts offering from Shimano below…
While our favorite stories are always ride and event coverage, people love flocking to The Radavist for our opinion on products. We view ourselves as the bike industry’s press corps, offering nuanced takes on hot items each year, while pushing back ever so slightly on the long arm of the industry’s marketing. This year, we cracked a lot of hard nuts but walked away with some compelling products—some of which deserve extra recognition—all while deciphering the world of bikes we know and love, and penning opinion pieces that garnered lots of eyes throughout the past twelve months.
Let’s check out The Radavist Product Awards and our Top 10 Articles of 2023 below!
The playful, go-anywhere-themed Element + Pelago Silvo collaboration hits Richard Pool hard with a heavy dose of teenage skateboarding nostalgia. Read on for his review (and accompanying playlist!) for this bullmoose-equipped and gravel-ready commuter, built around an eccentric bottom bracket for the singlespeed conversion this bike is asking for…
MicroSHIFT’s new Sword group came into Travis Engel’s life at the perfect moment. He had been noticing that his Ratio-12-speed-converted SRAM Force shift quality would degrade quickly, as the cable housing wore and friction increased. It’s a sad side-effect of the Ratio conversion’s decreased cable pull per-shift. Also, the hydraulic brakes had too much dead stroke for Travis’ discerning index fingers. He was looking for something new. That’s when, like the sexy stranger disrupting a rom-com protagonist’s unhappy European vacation, microSHIFT Sword bumped into Travis with a very timely meet-cute.
It seems like only yesterday that the aggressively capitalized microSHIFT ADVENT group proved there’s a demand for an unpretentious wide-range 9-speed drivetrain. ADVENT X followed, stacking one more gear and two more teeth, while still holding fast to microSHIFT’s commitment to simplicity, serviceability, lower prices and upper cases. Today, they launch the decidedly more mature microSHIFFT Sword group. Aimed at the gravel and adventure road market, Sword is drop-bar only, cable-brake only, and comes in 1x, 2x, and dropper-post-compatible configurations. We cover all the details below…
Microshift has just announced their updated Trail Trigger shifter ($29.99) and 11-46t MTB cassette ($39.99), bringing even more affordability and versatility to their 9-speed shifting range. You’re reading those prices right! Head to Microshift to read more about their new Advent additions.
With a combined weight of 857g, the new microSHIFT ADVENT X 10-speed MTB group weighs less than GX and XT, with comparable gear range offerings. That includes the new 11-48T cassette, which weighs 424g. Yet, weight savings wasn’t the only thing they were going for here. ADVENT X costs you $166.97 for the three-piece kit. The rear derailleur is even compatible with their new road shifters! Now that, you can’t beat! We’ll try to get our grubby mitts on a group and let you know how it goes! I will say that I’ve been very impressed with microSHIFT’s modern products and hope to see how ADVENT X performs in the real world.
A cross between Evasion and Romancer, the Crust Bikes Nor’Easter is a low-trail bike, with a slightly shorter rear end than the Romeo. It’s a 1-1/8″, 1x specific bike, with internal routing. The Nor’Easter comes in 4 sizes, with the two largest rolling on either 27.5+ or 29, and 26+ or 27.5 on smaller two sizes. This beautiful color pictured is not the final color unless you all express just how much you love it.
… gets put to the test around Lake Como.
