Just a quick recap if you didn’t catch the last but one-ish post and hence aren’t already teetering on the edge of your seat waiting for this one …. Basically I rode my MTB, the bike was rubbish, I was rubbish and I fell off. So what am I going to be doing about this (to be honest) pretty normal for me state of affairs?

Well the first part of my aforementioned three part plan was easily the simplest and quickest to accomplish – fix the damn bike. The biggest and most literally pressing problem was the distinct lack of any braking power whatsoever….. well that might be a bit of an exaggeration, if I squeezed the levers harder than Donald Trump holding onto his toupee in a crosswind there was a marginal reduction in my forward velocity but the braking performance was certainly lacking. Luckily Shimano disc brakes are ludicrously easy to service and the mineral oil they use doesn’t even strip the skin of your hands or the paint off your bike.

After a complete fluid change and flush and a new set of pads the braking performance was back to wheel lockingly good with one finger on the lever levels so that was a comparatively easy fix.

The slipping and crunching drivetrain was a bit more of a challenge. The first step was to give the existing set up a bit of much needed love and attention to see if that was all that was required to restore full functionality. Nope after being cleaned and lubed within an inch of its life the sprockets resolutely still refused to respond reliably to the commands of my right thumb, so I decided it was time for a bit of a rethink on my gear shifting options.

When I built up the Cotic after years of using exclusively Shimano drivetrains I decided to dip a toe into the Sram world for the first time and plumbed for the newly released 12 speed NX Eagle groupset. Why? Well, I got a very good deal on it from one of the big online retailers and I was also genuinely curious to try something different after hearing and reading good reports about the performance of these new 12 speed transmissions. I know a lot of people really love Sram stuff, but I’m afraid for me the Sram experience has been a bit underwhelming. The shift action even when it was brand new and freshly adjusted I’ve always found a bit ‘vague’ and the whole package just seems a bit plasticky and fragile compared with the equivalent Shimano STX level parts. Add a bit of wear and tear and some sticky mud that never got cleaned off properly and the slightly vague shifts turned into only shifting at all if the lever was pressed hard enough to almost feel like I was about to break it off when trying to shift up the block and the downshifts being so lazy I could time them with a grandfather clock pendulum. Yes I know Sram fans will say it’s mostly down to my own neglect, and I’m sure that’s true to some extent…… but if you have to spend more time maintaining your bike than you do riding it that’s also not much fun in my book.

Ok, if the Sram NX was coming off the obvious thing to do was just get some Shimano STX bits and swap them out. Now budget was as always a little tighter (ie non-existant) than I’d like so it was off to eBay I went, and after a bit of browsing came across a pretty left field alternative. After some pondering, internet research, more pondering, and more research a cheeky offer was made on the auction which was accepted, a box of bits turned up and this is what happened.

So this is a slightly preloved Box Components Box2 11speed rear mech, shifter, cassette and chain. Never seen anyone else using this set up which is a lot more common (but still comparatively rare) in America than it is over here in the UK. The biggest problem maybe finding spares for it if it breaks as there only seems to be one UK stockist and they have absolutely no stock whatsoever 🤨

I know your all desperate to know how all this rides and so am I but at the time of riding a nasty case of working and family commitments has kept me firmly off the MTB but that’s not stopped me working on the other parts of my plan to regain my previous peaks of off road averageness, but more on that soon.