Although our bank balances often vehemently disagree, upgrading is great fun, offering the chance to tailor the performance and style of your beloved bike to suit your taste.
While many MTB upgrades are worthwhile, not all kit is created equal, with overinflated marketing promises or downright poor performance spoiling the fun.
Following last week’s sorry round-up of our worst road bike upgrades, we’ve brought together the mountain bike team, relived traumas and looked back at our most ill-informed purchases.
Alex Evans – pointless titanium bolts
I’ll start with the positives.
Titanium bolts are claimed to be lighter, stronger and better-looking than their steel counterparts.
The most devout titanium users will save around 50g if they replace each and every one of their bike’s steel bolts, and potentially make their bike look better in the process.
Claimed to be incredibly strong, titanium’s density is nearly half that of steel’s, which makes it quite a bit lighter in a like-for-like bolt – and it has a better strength-to-weight ratio.
But it’s not as strong overall – if you don’t want your bolts to snap, steel is still the best material.
And let’s be honest – if the average consumer is on the hunt to shave the smallest amount of weight off their bike, maybe titanium bolts are for them.
Presumably, they’ll leave no stone unturned – bars will be cut to their minimum width, seatposts trimmed just within the manufacturer’s recommended specs and chains shortened to their minimum length, among other things.
But for the average rider – or even the more fastidious out there – titanium bolts amount to little more than a Ponzi scheme for bikes.
Replacing your stainless steel bolts is akin to running only three out of six disc rotor bolts (something I’m ashamed to admit I’ve done), removing spokes from your wheels, stripping your frame’s paint or filling your tyres with helium instead of oxygen.
The gains are marginal at best, and are far from worth it.
Yes – they look pretty but, functionally, nothing beats the humble stainless steel bolt.
Like aluminium alloy bolts, titanium ones can gall up (also known as friction welding or cold welding) when fastened into aluminium or titanium nuts.
This requires huge amounts of force to break the bond and can result in rounded-off heads.
The trusty stainless steel bolt doesn’t suffer the same fate, even when fastened hastily, lube-free into a stainless nut.
On mission-critical parts of your bike – think stem (both steerer and handlebar) bolts and brake caliper mount bolts – I’d rather not roll the dice with titanium derivatives of stainless ones, even if the peace of mind these create is effectively psychosomatic.
For me, then, the most pointless upgrade anyone can make is the titanium bolt.
Want to save 50g? Take 25g of tubeless sealant out of each wheel, or consider other options such as cutting your bar down or removing chain links.
Maybe you want your bike to look nicer? Colour-match other parts and keep your bolts stainless steel.
And if you’re looking for an improved strength-to-weight ratio, I don’t think titanium bolts are the right upgrade for you, anyway.
Will Soffe – skimping on consumables
I spent years riding on a shoestring budget, so always had to be savvy when spending money on my favourite pastime… but a few disappointing purchases have slipped through the net.
Trying to save a few quid by buying traditional slide-on grips instead of lock-on ones was a false economy.
Even with careful fitment with hairspray underneath them, they would always come dangerously loose after a few wet rides.
You could glue them on with grip glue, but then they’re difficult to remove when swapping bar controls. Just spend a bit more and get lock-on grips – they’re a great invention.
The best mountain bike tyres are very expensive, and as a consumable item, it can be difficult to stomach the cost.
It’s possible to find cheap tyres online and compromise on the compound, tread pattern or construction.
Unfortunately, while trying to save cash, I’ve compromised on all three at some point, and I don’t recommend it.
Tyres with the wrong compound will lack traction or longevity, the wrong tread pattern either lacks grip or rolls slowly, and pinch-punctures are the scourge of the mountain biker.
Tyres and grips are important components, don’t skimp.
Tom Marvin – Magura Vyron dropper post
Magura was the first brand to release a wireless dropper post.
It launched in 2015 – a whopping four years before RockShox’s Reverb AXS kicked off the wireless revolution in 2019.
I was excited to fit the Vyron to my bike, partly because I love a bit of fancy new tech, and partly because I hate routing cables through my frame, thanks to my potato hands.
However, this first-generation Vyron – and I would like to add there are now multiple subsequent versions that, by all accounts, are far better – missed the mark.
First was the functionality.
You pressed a button on the bar, waited a little while (yes, really, you had to wait) and the hydraulic valve in the post was opened for a set amount of time.
This meant that until the valve closed, you had to hover at the saddle height you wanted.
Unweight the saddle too early – say, you encountered a drop in the trail earlier than you expected – and the saddle popped right back up, resulting in you high-posting just when you least wanted to.
It felt as though Magura’s engineers had never really tried a dropper post, and didn’t quite understand their utility.
Then there was the reliability, or lack of it.
The post’s wireless connection would drop out, the post would gum up and the batteries would drain with no warning, and refuse to charge.
The brains of the post hung under the saddle and seemed incredibly vulnerable to impacts – I snapped one off thanks to the most benign accidental sit-down by the side of the trail.
The remote was terrible too. It spun on the bars (it was held on by a rubber band) and had three small buttons – two to control the non-present electronic fork.
As such, I often hit the wrong button – at least until a flimsy plastic clip-on actuator was added.
Subsequent generations of the post have seriously improved on the original, but the first was a swing and a miss for me.
Rob Weaver – shin-wrecking slippery flat pedals
I started racing mountain bikes in the early 90s.
Back then, you either clipped into ‘SPDs’ with super-stiff shoes or you found some BMX-style flat pedals and wore the trainers you promised your parents you wouldn't destroy (sorry mum and dad!).
For downhill riding, although efficient when on the gas, I never really liked the rigid feel of clipless shoes, and the dinky little pedals always felt hard to find.
I wanted to hang my foot off and drift turns like the pros, so set about getting my first set of proper flat pedals.
I’d drooled over my pedals of choice, sat in the glass cabinet at my local bike shop, for months while I saved up. Finally, the day came and they were mine… but what a let-down they proved to be.
Despite the trio of jagged cages surrounding the axle, making them look like the grippiest thing ever, the Odyssey Triple Trap pedals were quite the opposite.
The effort I’d have to go to in order to claw my feet around them when riding, just to offer a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, they’d stay in place, rarely worked – and really hurt.
And, my god, slip once (something that happened multiple times on every ride) and your shins would be screaming in pain. Don’t even get me started on riding them in the wet.
It didn’t help that they were stupidly deep and I found myself clanging them into the floor, even when riding a hardtail.
Buying these awful pedals taught me a valuable lesson – just because something looks good, doesn’t mean it is good.
Read reviews, try stuff out and don’t be a fool like I was. It’ll save you some cash and might mean your shins aren’t littered with scars like mine.
James Costley-White – Onza HO pedals
In the mid-90s every mountain biker was using clipless pedals, so I went into a big new Bristol bike shop (which shall remain nameless) to buy some Shimano SPDs.
When the salesman offered to sell me his own Onza HO (High Output) pedals for a bargain price, I should have smelled a rat – if they were so good, why was he trying to get rid of them?
But I was a schoolboy with only paper-round money at my disposal, so I jumped at the chance.
Sadly, the pedals’ limitations soon became clear.
For the uninitiated, Onza had decided to use then-trendy elastomers instead of springs. The selling points were their light weight and the ability to tune the engagement feel by swapping the blocks of synthetic rubber for firmer or softer ones.
What they didn’t take into account was that elastomers get harder when cold. Not a problem if you live in California, but not ideal during the British winter.
Cue far more than the usual number of beginner clipped-in tumbles before, after a year or so, I gave up and bought some lovely red Shimano DX 636s.
Sometimes, the original designs really don’t need fixing or ‘improving’.
Jack Luke – Fox Talas RLC fork
Picture the scene – the year is 2006, I’m 15, and I’ve spent many sweaty hours washing dishes in a local restaurant.
I’ve saved up my bawbees, obsessively crawled eBay and bought a 2004 Marin Attack Trail for £600 – a truly enormous sum for a young Jack Luke.
Unlike the cobbled-together bikes I’d owned up to that point, the Marin Attack Trail was a proper mountain bike – my first premium build with fancy shiny bits.
Key for me was the (on paper at least) vastly improved suspension platform versus my old bike – no more leaking Magura x Rond Big Ego fork and a completely unadjustable coil shock of unknown provenance on my Coyote Fastrax F2.
I was most excited by the Fox Talas RLC fork, which offered on-the-fly travel adjustments from 85 to 125mm. Although it worked by mechanically compressing the spring, RockShox also offered its broadly similar U-turn system.
The theory was that, by dropping the front end of the bike, you could get into a more aggressive and efficient climbing position.
Performance aside, it was a feature – a selling point – and captivated my young mind. The Reebok Pumps of cycling!
The reality was lacklustre at best.
Adjusting the travel on this version of the fork required several turns of the adjuster dial to compress or extend it – hardly something you’re likely to do at the top of each descent or the bottom of a climb.
While I weighed as much as a fart and rode as aggressively as a kitten, even I could feel the reduced suspension performance once compressed, with the carefully adjusted damping and rebound rendered duff.
Dropping the fork also steepened the Attack Trail’s already (albeit normal for the time) perilously pointy geometry.
It was also pointless – take the industry-wide trend towards longer and slacker bikes with increased stack and more travel as evidence.
While some ideas are revived every few years, I hope travel-adjust forks is one we’ve fully left in the rearview mirror.
Nick Clark – Lezyne's screw-on bike pumps
I like to think I make considered purchases, often checking online reviews and dilly-dallying for days before finally ordering something new for my bike.
However, sometimes products just don’t live up to expectations or the recommended usage.
For me, it was a Lezyne Pocket Drive mini pump that left me stranded with a long walk home.
It’s always risky playing with your tyre pressures when out on the bike, but the reassurance of having a mini-pump gave me the confidence to play around with my setup.
After lowering the pressures for more grip, I pumped a couple of pounds into my rear tyre to make climbing a little easier.
Unfortunately, the screw-on head bound with the valve core on removal, which caused all the air to escape and broke the bead seal on my tubeless setup.
Despite an arduous effort, I couldn’t get the system to reseal and was left walking back to my house.
Whether my valve cores were too loose to start with is questionable, but a design that doesn’t consider that doesn’t belong strapped to my down tube.
It appears Lezyne has worked on this with its latest pumps, adding a pressure-release on the chuck to reduce the chance of removing valve cores.
