I’ll cut right to the chase, I’ve replaced my full suspension Mountain Bike with a new ride. Well……I say new but it’s actually older than the bike it replaces, it’s certainly had a much harder life and the specification is broadly the same. The path to getting it into my possession and ready to ride was long, exceedingly convoluted and started with me selling a spare set of wheels and tyres from my car, involved swapping and interchanging the parts of three separate bikes and an awful lot of spanner and hex wrench twiddling. Its a long old story and frankly would be pretty boring if I took you all through every page of it and tried to explain all the rather convoluted ownership and component changes then brought us to this point. To simplify the story, the Cotic Rocket has gone to a new owner, and I’ve replaced it with a 2018 vintage Santa Cruz Bronson.

Here she is pictured after her maiden voyage in my ownership around a lap of a biblical wet Llandegla trail centre. Now long time readers of this blog may remember that a few years back as we all emerged from the dark days of the covid lockdowns a ride on a very similar Santa Cruz reignited my off road mojo in a big way. I was simply blown away by how well that bike rode and that days riding remains one of my best days out riding off road that I can remember (admittedly the old memory isn’t what it was, but that ride still stands out years later) That fateful day was almost exactly five years ago and I’ve been chasing that rides elusive secret sauce ever since and never quite managed to re-capture it.

I’ve tried believe me, and I’ve written extensively about my struggles to get that same level of off road vibe from the Cotic Rocket frame I bought and built up after realising that the Santa Cruz was out of range of my meagre financial resources. That poor Cotic has suffered through almost five years of my rather ham-fisted and sporadic attempts to make it into a bike it was never going to be. Was it really a bad bike? no certainly not and there’s loads of great reviews out there for the Rocket and lots of happy owners, but it was just never going to ride how I wanted it to and without sounding too much like a mahoosive cliché that was truly a ‘its me not you’ thing. the Cotic was just for me at least a square peg in a round hole, it was never going to fit and persisting in trying to hammer it home was just going to end in more frustration. (as the Bishop said to the actress…..)

So when five years later the chance came up to buy this bike which was now surplus to requirements after its previous owner had upgraded I didn’t hesitate. A back to back test ride with the Cotic over two successive days confirmed that my memories were only slightly rose tinted – the Bronson even when not really set up for me was just faster and felt better around my usual riding trails and so the deal was done. I was a bit nervous as selling the Cotic for a reasonable sum was required to replenish what I had assured my slightly sceptical wife would be a most temporary hole in the household finances but thankfully after advertising the bike at what I felt was a fair price it sold quite quickly to a very nice guy from Wales for his youngest son who rides at my favourite spot at Llandegla a lot so I may well see it again.

With the Bronson at last in my possession and firmly clamped into by workstand the first order of business was to totally strip the bike and give it a detailed look over. Now this was a bike I knew and it had been fastidiously maintained by its previous owner but it’s always prudent to check and the frame needed a good clean anyway. The frame itself had been protected with an Invisiframe kit from knew and this was showing signs of wear and tear in places so it was laboriously removed over the course of an extremely long evening and the bare frame painstakingly cleaned with a gentle solvent designed for paint prep on cars.

After my fingers and hands had regained sensation after the fun hours spend unpicking and peeling back the old frame protection which really, really didn’t want to be removed in a lot of places and the frame and swingarm had been cleaned and given a clean bill of health nice new Invisiframe was installed (the key is biblical levels of patience, a solution of heavily diluted baby shampoo and a soft cloth.) It was time to build the bike back up. I preferred the Shimano SLX brakes on the Cotic to the Sram Saint stoppers the Bronson came with so they were transferred across and seeing as the SLX drivetrain was practically new on the Cotic that found its was across as well.

At the time of writing I’ve only managed to get out on the Bronson once, but rest assured now I’ve finally got the bike I’ve been intermittently mooning over like a lovesick teenager in the garage I’m sure the off road mileage is going to start increasing in the coming months…….