We brought you news of Germany company Rose's 2011 mountain bikes last month but Fin and Jonny from Rose UK have just popped into the office to show us a couple more models – and this amazing custom paintjob.
Hidden under the Treasure Island style graphics – including palm trees, jungle plants, skull-and-crossbones and pirate treasure – is a 130mm-travel Rose Jabba Wood trail bike.
One-off airbrushed finishes like this are available on all of Rose's bikes but they don't come cheap, at €650 (around £555) for mountain bikes and €900 (around £770) for road bikes. You can even get handlebars, forks and other parts painted to match.
Gerd de Kock is the man behind the custom paintwork. If you're of an artistic bent you can send him your own design; otherwise, give him a couple of ideas of leave it up to his fertile imagination!
Other paintjobs featured in the massive Rose catalogue include everything from charging bulls to raging infernos
Staying with the customisation theme, the Bike Configurator that impressed us at Cycle Show 2010 in London is shortly due to go online. This basically lets you customise the equipment spec of any Rose bike, and shows you exactly how it'll look and how much it'll cost.
Beef Cake SL
Rose told us about the Beef Cake SL at Cycle Show 2010 but this is the first time we've seen one in the 'flesh'. It's essentially a slimmed down version of the standard Beef Cake, weighing at an incredibly light – bearing in mind that it's designed for downhill/freeride use and has 180mm of travel – 15kg, or around 33lb.
Scott's 185mm-travel Genius LT may beat it by a few pounds but the Beef Cake SL is still remarkably light considering its big-hit potential
Features include internal cable routing and size specific tube butting (as with all of Rose's bikes), a tapered head tube, ISCG05 mount, rear Maxle 12mm axle, and cable guides for a remote dropper seatpost. Geometry wise, it's got a 66-degree head angle, 114-118cm (depending on frame size) wheelbase and 36.5cm bottom bracket height.
The Beef Cake SL is available as a frameset (including Fox DHX Air 5.0 shock, headset and seatpost clamp) for €1,190 (around £1,020). Claimed weight of the frame (size medium, anodised finish, without shock) is 2.89kg (6.37lb). It's also available as a complete bike, with two different spec levels on offer in the UK.
The Beef Cake SL 6 looks like very good value, with a Fox DHX 5.0 Air shock and 36 TALAS 180 FIT RC2 fork
Both have a Fox DHX 5.0 Air shock and 36 TALAS 180 FIT RC2 fork. The top-end SL 8 (£3,129) gets a SRAM X0 groupset, Formula The One brakes and DT Swiss EX 1750 wheels, while the SL 6 (£2,399) downgrades to SRAM X9, Avid Elixir Rs and DT Swiss E 2000s.
Other changes for 2011
Refinement, rather than radical change, is the theme across most of Rose's range for 2011. Weights have gone down across the board, thanks to measures like machining out excess metal from head tubes and bottom bracket shells, and work has been done with Fox Racing Shox to improve rear shock performance and reliability.
All of Rose's aluminium mountain bikes are available in this stealthy anodised matt black finish. This is the new Mr Ride 29er
Rear brake tabs are now post mount rather than IS, alloy hardware has been replaced with tougher chromed steel, and bearing placement has been improved. You can check out a few of the new models in our image gallery. For more information, visit www.rosebikes.co.uk (UK) or www.roseversand.de (international).
