KAT’S CANYON SPECTRAL 125 CF 7
£3,499 (+ £56.98 packing & shipping)
A frame switch gets tester Katherine back out on the trails
The keen-eyed among you will have noticed my update was missing from last month’s mag. That’s because my partner John felt some play in the Spectral 125’s cranks and, after first checking the bolts were tight, found a hairline crack in the carbon fibre frame, which circled around the bottom bracket on the drive side.
We got in touch with Canyon straight away, who sent a courier to collect the bike for inspection. In the meantime, they shipped over a replacement small frameset from their German HQ and swapped over all the parts so I could get back to riding.
After consulting their in-house R&D and quality management teams, Canyon revealed the cause of the crack – a breakdown in the bonding between the carbon BB shell and the aluminium sleeve within it. They assured us that the Spectral 125 had gone through rigorous lab testing before it was launched, including jump-load testing and max-torque-load testing around the BB, and said that in this case it was human error in the manufacturing process – more specifically,
