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Review: Mythos 3D-Printed Titanium Stem is My Kind of Excess – Pinkbike.com

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We sometimes joke about reviewing stems because, well, let’s be honest – as long as they hold onto the handlebar and steerer, they’re usually not that interesting. Unless we’re talking about Mythos’ £250 IXO stem, that is. Pronounced “icksoh” and looking like something from H.R. Giger’s catalog of bike parts, the IXO is manufactured via a 3D-printing process and the result is a see-through stem that Mythos says is both light and strong.

The IXO comes in 40mm and 50mm lengths, both with zero rise, a 35mm handlebar clamp, and a 38mm stack height. Claimed weight is 136 grams, but the IXO they sent me actually ended up being a bit lighter at 127 grams.

Mythos IXO details

• 3D-Printed titanium
• Lengths: 40mm, 50mm
• Rise: 0mm
• Handlebar clamp: 35mm only
• Stack height: 38mm
• Material: Aerospace-grade titanium (Ti6Al4V)
• Weight: From 136g (including hardware)
• MSRP: £250 (including UK VAT)
• More info: www.mythos.bike

Electron beam melting & vacuums

If you hadn’t heard of Mythos before, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of their parent company, Metron, who has been making ultra-high-end components for years, mostly in the skinny tire world. The IXO is their first mountain bike stem and it’s manufactured via a process called electron beam melting which does exactly what it sounds like. EBM is similar to the more common Selective Laser Melting in that both ‘grow’ the component via powder, but while SLM uses “normal” lasers, EBM uses a beam of electrons in a vacuum environment.

If you want to make your bike parts via EBM, all you need is a special gun that shoots out a beam of electrons from a super-heated tungsten filament at around half the speed of light, as well as a barrel or two of aerospace-grade titanium and a hell of a lot of know-how. Mythos is doing that at their Derbyshire facility in the UK, the same place where they manufacture their equally crazy-looking Elix stem that’s even more expensive. After the stem is grown, its clamping surfaces are machined down to hold onto a steerer tube and a 35mm handlebar, and titanium hardware is used because of course it is.

Wondering why you can see through the IXO? Mythos says that they employ FEA (Finite Element Analysis) and CAD to figure out exactly where material needs to be and, as you can probably tell, where it doesn’t need to be. The 3D-printed result is an alien-looking shape that Mythos says exceeds the 200,000-cycle test program at ISO-specified forces while also being stiffer under both bending and torsional forces than a traditional stem.

Alien looks, normal performance

The first thing I noticed about the IXO stem is that it looks a bit rough, especially in a few spots where the surface seems inconsistent. It turns out that this is a byproduct of the manufacturing process and has no effect on its strength or rigidity, Mythos said, even if it does seem odd compared to the forged and machined aluminum stems we’re used to. “Many people believe that 3D printing produces a lower grade material, but EBM titanium actually matches or beats the material properties achieved by traditional manufacturing processes, meeting or exceeding all requirements of the relevant ASTM and ISO standards for Ti6Al4V (ASTM 1107, ASTM F1472, AMS 4999 and ISO 5832-3),” Mythos told me. So why not give the stem a smoother finish? Matthews explains: “Due to titanium being exceptionally tough, it’s extremely difficult to remove material evenly to produce a smooth or polished finish, and surface finishing the visible interior of the stem is incredibly difficult. This is why we decided on the raw as-printed finish. Plus, what’s the point of 3D-printing something and then making it look like it’s made with some boring old traditional manufacturing process?

There are plenty of boring black stems to choose from and all of them cost a lot less (and some weigh less) than the IXO, but Mythos isn’t trying to sell thousands of these things anyway. Personally, I love how it looks, especially on a black bike with a black handlebar, but I do have a soft spot for anything weird.

Forgetting about the price for a moment, are you a fan of the IXO’s lines or would you prefer something a little more normal?

Installation is like any other stem; it should sit a few millimeters proud of the steerer tube, and it uses a no-gap faceplate and the same 5Nm of torque for all six of its titanium M5x0.8 x 14mm bolts. The steerer clamp tolerances are a bit tighter than other stems I’ve used and it needed a good push to slide down onto the tube (no, there were no burrs), but it all went together as intended. You’ll certainly want to use a torque wrench for your fancy stem and read the instructions before picking up any tools.

The stem that the IXO replaced was a standard no-frills aluminum thing that definitely wasn’t doing anything wrong, but the difference on the trail between it and the 3D-printed titanium Mythos unit was… Not at all noticeable, of course. What the hell did you expect? I know that Mythos says the IXO is, “16% stiffer in torsion, and 11% stiffer in bending, when tested side-by-side with an equivalent alloy stem,” but I’ll never feel that while riding my bike because it’s not like any 40mm stem a soft noodle to begin with. I’m not saying that it isn’t stiffer, only that I can’t tell the difference, even when I clamp the front wheel between my knees while trying to twist and turn the handlebar in my faux-science test.

So it’s not a game-changer, but it also didn’t do anything wrong while I used it, never creaking, groaning, or slipping, as you’d hope for such a high-end component. One thing to note, however, is that riders who’ve had stems take core samples from their knees might prefer a smoother backside to the steerer clamp.

If you were hoping for a groundbreaking leap forward in stem performance, this ain’t it. The IXO does nothing wrong but it’s also not going to change your riding in any way, which is pretty much what I expected. That said, if you’re interested in the technology behind the stem and like how it looks, which describes me, I don’t think it’s all that crazy to consider given the other things we spend our money on.


Pros

+ 3D-printing titanium is cool AF
+ Polarizing looks

Cons

Price to performance ratio
There are lighter and less expensive stems
Polarizing looks


Pinkbike’s Take

I’ll admit that I don’t really care if the IXO is noticeably better or not than an $80 stem because I don’t think that’s what it’s about. If you want tangible performance gains, spend your money on tires, wheels, geometry, suspension, or lessons, not an expensive stem with an interesting backstory. Instead, think of the IXO as a demonstration of technology usually reserved for hyper-cars, aerospace, and the medical field.

No, I don’t see myself buying a £250 stem, but the unrepentant tech dork in me absolutely loves the idea of a 3D-printed titanium anything and how it looks on my bike. Are you into it, or do you prefer a different kind of excess?

Mike Levy

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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