Gift Guide: Custom colours and in-ride directions

This holiday season, add a little bling to your bike. Race Face and Industry Nine both have new colour options to make your bike stand out from the crowd. If you’re more pragmatic, Garmin, SDG and SRAM are ready to expand your riding with functional gear and navigational assistance.

Whether you want to get fancy, or just get out there, here’s our holiday gift guide:

Race Face Vault hubs

Race Face Vault hubs have been around long enough to know they’re reliable hub options. The oversized Vaults are at the center of Race Face’s wheelsets, and are available on their own in a simple j-bend flange option. Now, the Vault hub comes in an array of colours to match your bike, your kit, the season, your personality… whatever you like, really.

Garmin Edge 130

Everyone needs a little directional help some time. Garmin has squeezed turn-by-turn directions into its diminutive Edge 130 head unit. The unit is small, so you don’t feel like you’re bringing the world into the woods with you. A clear display and just-big-enough mapping feature will still get you back out of the forest when you set out to find new trails. All the usual Garmin features carry over, including power, heart rate, and speed, distance, cadence tracking. Now you get navigation, too.

Industry Nine A35 stem

The Asheville, N.C. company know for its high end aluminum hubs and wheels recently expanded into stems with the A35. As you’d expect from Industry Nine, it comes in a variety of colours, including the option to mix-and-match your stem and faceplate. The boutique American company has all the machining tools need to create the A35 stem on site, so you can be assured its put the time in to get its first stem just right.

SDG Tellis dropper post

SDG keeps it simple with the Tellis droper post. This gives you confidence that the dropper will keep working when you need it most. There’s plenty of different dropper posts on the market. Tellis is one that has worked reliably through months of abuse. It’s easily serviceable, should you manage to break it. Last, it comes with a comfortable remote lever, so you don’t have to replace that after market.

SRAM GX Eagle

SRAM’s wide range gearing comes down from the soaring heights of XX1 level goods with the launch of  GX Eagle. Featuring all the same Eagle technology, GX lands a little closer to the average price range. If GX is still to steep of a price point to get you up those steep hills, SRAM’s lower price point NX Eagle groupset launched earlier this year. NX features uses slightly different tech to get near the same 500% range. Interested? Read our long term review of SRAM GX Eagle.