Since it’s that time of year, I thought I’d drop my impressions of the new blackburn trainer.
The resistance unit here is a HUGE refinement on the Kinetic Mechanical… maybe it qualifies as a new type of resistance all together. It works by using the centrifugal force of the spinning roller to push one flywheel up against another flywheel, with a set of bearings sandwiched in between. It kicks back harder as you spin faster. It’s dead quite… by far the most quiet trainer I’ve seen. I sprinted on it just to see if I could get it to make SOME noise, but even under high torque it was silent. Any noise was coming from my bike. The stand has infinitely adjustable legs, so you can set your rear tire 1mm off the ground if you want, and the stand is stable, unlike previous blackburn trainers.
The ride: I got the impression that the power curve was too steep… that is, too dificult, even at low speeds. However, I didn’t ride it for long and had no measurement of my effort. It was quite smooth, I would say smoother than CycleOps, not as smooth as Kinetic, but my favorite feature was the coast down. When you coast on this thing, the flywheel immediately comes away from the flywheel that it is pushing against, so there is an instant relief of resistance and it lasts a long time. At the same time, the flywheel keeps spinning, so when you start pedaling again, you pickup right where you left off. Basically there is a freewheeling mechanism in the trainer resistance unit rather than relying on the freewheel of the bike itself.
The rep said that if you feel the resistance is too light, you can throw in another set of bearings, but I thought it was very sufficient. Over all, it was a reall nice ride. I think it retails right around $320 at full price.
I don’t know if you call this a disclaimer or disclosure, as this is a positive review, but ya’ll should know I used to work for Kinetic.