We found out that Tim and his brother also did dirt jumping, so we met up with them and they showed us proper doubles.  These doubles totaled my bike and that was when i realised that i needed a better 'jump' bike...

I first accuired this bike in July 2002 from Devon.  It was 2nd hand and cost £130 which was a good price.  It stood up to the doubles i was jumping at the time but when i advanced to bigger, harder doubles the bike started to break.  first i changed the crank to a shimano deore crank because it bent, then i got a rear disk to make the bakes better,  i then changed the forks from Zokes Zone to Marzocchi Z3 Lights.  This kept me going for a bit but then i broke 4 Rear hangers in 3 weeks.  I couldn't afford to pay £11 every time i broke one so i sent my bike into Whitehouse cycles and had my sram 3.0 rear mech changed to a shimano deore mech, and the sram 3.0 gripshift swapped for a XT rapidfire shifter this solved the problem.  I then had a Truvativ chain device fitted because my chain kept falling off.  I then changed my cranks again to Truvativ Hussefelts to match the chain device because the deore left hand crank didnt stand up to dirt jumping any more.  During the winter months i started doing some trials and wrecked my pedals.  so i changed them to wellgo bombshels (in bright orange).   Then i changed my wheels from Airline and Gremica to Halo and Shimano and recently i swaped my bars and stem to F.U.N.N instead of Tioga.  I purchased a set of Magura Julie hydraulic disk brakes off brad ages ago but only fitted the back on the 20th of June and i still have the front to fitt.  I have won a set of '04 Marzocchi Z1 Drop Offs (see http://www.b3n.iwarp.com/photo.html) from ebay and they will be fitted in the next couple of weeks.  

After changing all the parts on the X-ESS i just put them away in the garage thinking i would be able to sell them or something, but then one day my dad came back from work with a SARACEN X-ILE frame.  With the spares from my SARACEN X-ESS i was able to build this bike up in a day and it is prettu much exactly the same as my X-ESS was when i got it from devon.  both the X-ESS and X-ILE look the smae but have different components.  I built it for my mom but if my X-ESS is in the workshop being fixed i can jump on the X-ILE and ride it straight away.

This bike started out as a frame purchased from Ebay (www.ebay.co.uk)  This frame was going to be a replacement for the X-ESS frame but when I got it I realised that the X-ESS was better so I put the frame in the garage.

Recently I realised that with my old Ammaco I would have enough spare parts to make a bike to ride to school on.  So over the last 2 nights i have built this,  it has no gears, crap wheels, dodgey bars, ok brakes and an old crank, just right to ride to school on.