Chris Lane in former tight quarters

Old Mouse, New Bike, Year 2002

Anyway, here’s the guided preview from owner and chief guru Chris Lane. Opening day should be a hoot, so make plans to check it out! More on the shop Web site.

This year they got new bikes.

Now a new bike for Christmas is everyone’s dream. If you’re a kid, it’s the best gift you can get. If you’re an adult, it brings back fond memories of childhood freedom and exuberance.

Ikea's gift bike. Tampa Bay Online photo.

Unfortunately, the Ikea bikes do not live up to the dream. We wonder if they’re even safe to ride.

Although it’s difficult to do detailed analysis from the photo, these bikes appear to be put together with the proverbial chewing gum and baling wire. The parts are outmoded and cheap. The wheels are undoubtedly flimsy and soft. The cranks look to be stolen from Wal-mart specials.

We’re most concerned about the integrity of the frame. It looks to be a suspension frame modified to a hardtail — a recipe for disaster. Notice the interrupted seat tube. On a typical hardtail there’s no reason to cut away the seat tube, and the design of this frame indicates it was initially planned to provide for a shock and pivot setup.

We can’t see the welds, but the seat stays seem too long and thin to offer the stability and strength that they would on a normal hardtail frame.

Without getting our hands on one and showing it to, say, a Gary Fisher or Joe Breeze, we can’t say definitively that the Ikea gift bike is a landfill magnet. And we don’t want to spoil the Christmases of Ikea employees by dissing their rides.

But if it were our choice, we’d definitely take the $50 instead.

Titus bikes once were like a gift from heaven.

As we noted earlier, Titus had abruptly closed its doors after running out of money after a long descent into poor management, layoffs and lack of tech and marketing focus.

What remains of Titus will probably be picked over by Planet X for tech, patents and miscellaneous inventory.

We’re sorry to see Titus go but will always cherish our titanium HCR hardtail. A little steel wool to that baby and it looks brand new every time.

More from Bike Radar.

From today’s Seattle Times:

A year ago Rodney Watkins, a garbage hauler with CleanScapes, pulled his truck into the North Transfer Station in Seattle and saw one of those very pricey Cannondale bicycles with all its expensive components ready to be dropped into the garbage pit.

Why should perfectly good bikes become trash, Watkins wondered. And then he remembered a movie his children had watched, “Robots,” where the chief robot’s mantra was “See a need, fill a need.”

That’s how CleanScapes started a program to recycle bicycles in conjunction with Seattle’s Bike Works, which takes on used bikes for repair classes, rehab and resale and otherwise getting them back into the transportation matrix.

This works on so many fronts: Landfills have less metal to process, kids learn how to fix bikes, a bike that otherwise would have been destroyed goes on to ride again. It’s the ultimate win-win-win.

More from The Times.

One of Titus’ most stalwart dealers, Roaring Mouse Cycles in San Francisco, heard about the liquidation via press release like the rest of us. A couple of other Titus shops contacted by Bike Intelligencer had not even been notified.

Our Titus HCR the day we bought it.

Foremost was forcing out Titus’ founder, Chris Cocalis, in 2006. Cocalis landed on his feet of course, founding Pivot Cycles. But his acumen, contacts and reputation were never something that Titus could replace. It’s impossible to say how many core and potential Titus customers Cocalis took with him, but a review of the MTBR.com forums revealed considerable name loyalty.

Post-Cocalis, Titus was left mainly to ride out its brand name without coming up with true innovation or a feel for where markets were headed. It dropped the SwitchBlade, its best-known (and most popular) bike ever, and was slow to adapt to the freeride revolution. The El Guapo had potential but took a couple of tries to get right. The same was true of Titus’ 29er full-suspension model, the Rockstar.

RIP Switchblade. Photo courtesy GalbraithMt.com.

“They tried to cover too many bases without really shining at any one thing,” noted a Seattle dealer, Adam Schaeffer of Downhill Zone. The road market never really latched onto Titus, and its focus stayed on too-light cross-country and racing bikes long after those markets were usurped by aggressive trail and freeride bikes, Schaeffer added.

Dealers said they will continue to support Titus as long as they can get parts. Sean Ramirez at Roaring Mouse said the hope is Titus will get purchased and supported by another company, but that may be wishful thinking in a down economy.

We have a Titus we purchased from Roaring Mouse nearly a decade ago but count ourselves lucky: It’s a titanium hardtail, built Cocalis-tough, and not likely to need attention. Owners of full-suspension models may face increasingly uphill battles getting replacement parts, and God help the Titus owner who breaks a rear triangle or tube butting.

More from Jimmy Mac at Mountain Bike Action.

Rodale continued to offer Mountain Bike at the ludicrous and unsustainable rate of six issues a year — included with a subscription to Bicycling — but the publishing giant’s heart was obviously never in it. It always seemed like a weak cousin to Bicycling, which we’ve never cared much for either.

Rodale purchased the mag in 1987 and supported it well in its heyday during the 1990s. Mountain Bike had some great writers, including Zap (Zapata Espinoza) and Captain Dondo. Another favorite was Dan Koeppel and his long-running “Hug the Bunny” column.

Dondo moved on, Zap was fired, “Hug the Bunny” disappeared and Mountain Bike became simply a way to sucker mtb addicts like ourselves into subscribing to the lamentably bland Bicycling magazine.

Which means that Rodale’s pledge to “fold the contents” of Mountain Bike into Bicycling is pretty much empty talk, similarly aimed at snagging mtbers into staying with Bicycling.

We doubt the ploy will work, particularly since we doubt its sincerity in the first place. Lesson No. 1 of publishing is that you can’t get rid of the good writers and expect readers to hang around just for the ads.

Instead our suspicion is that Rodale has folded Mountain Bike simply because the magazine business is on its last legs. Our inbox just recorded an email from Rodale offering Bicycling at $5 a year for 11 issues. That smacks of desperation to us.

Mountain Bike lasted a quarter of a century and took us through the sport’s salad days with literary acumen and grace. Its Rodale incarnation, albeit anemic and lackluster compared with its predecessor, will nonetheless be missed.

Further info from Bicycle Retailer.

The idea is that anyone could scan a suspected stolen bike (or confirmed stolen for that matter) and upload the info to a common database (BikeRevolution.org) which can then be accessed by the victim. Anway, worth checking out.

Noble Bikes, based in West Seattle, is the brainchild of Mark Landsaat, an engineer and frame designer who used to work for suspension pioneer Proflex and moved to Seattle from Amsterdam in 2001 to join K2 after the former purchased Proflex.

In 2005 he started Ardiano Design, a consulting business focused on suspension and carbon-fiber frame design. Still an active racer in the expert category (he raced elite for Proflex/K2), Landsaat decided to build the bike he’d like to see on the market.

In 2008 he founded Noble, naming his new venture after the popular Noble Knob epic ride near Mount Rainier. To celebrate his new frame’s debut, Mark rode Corral Pass-Noble Knob-Ranger Creek with a group of friends this past weekend.

The new frame, the F4, retails for $1,495 and is on display at Downhill Zone in the University District. It features an arresting blue paint job and remarkable detail work, especially on the rockers and pivots. The just-under 6-lb. (actual weight) frame is intended to ride very stiff as you’d expect from a racer, and touts custom hardware that lends a distinctive look and sense of craftsmanship to the F4, as well as (in the case of the shock) unique performance capabilities.

Noble is also working on a 5-inch trail bike and has longer-travel in mind as well, although Mark stops short of saying it will go head-to-head with the other Seattle-based boutique mountain bike maker, downhill specialist Evil Bikes.

“They’re evil, we’re noble,” he joked.

We asked Zone’s owner, Adam Schaeffer, to give us the rundown on the F4 feature set.

The root of all Evil.

Full results from PinkBike.