Nicolai Helius TB – The Next Ultimate Trail Bike?

In this week’s feature on our blog, we take a look one of our latest Nicolai builds, a 2015 Helius TB 650B that belongs to the same owner of the bike in our last feature.

His first Nicolai was a Rohloff Speedhub equipped Helius RC. After which, he progressed on to another internally-geared, but longer travel option, a Helius AC Pinion. He then decided on a tailor made Helius TB 650B to create a lighter, faster, and more agile ride for the local trails.

Starting from the cockpit, we mated one of the lightest aluminium stems around, Thomson’s Elite X4, with ENVE’s RSR bar for its rigidity and weight savings of course.

We gave the RockShox Revelation RCT3 Solo Air suspension fork some custom treatment to match up to the factory tuned RockShox Monarch RT3 rear shock. This gave the bike excellent tracking capabilities and small bump sensitivity to gaurentee a rad time in the trails on the Helius TB.

No trail bike would be complete with a SRAM XX1 groupset, which we absolutely love for it’s simplicity, reliability, and low weight. We equipped it with a 30T Blackspire MonoVeloce chainring over the standard SRAM ones for better wear resistance, and a stiffer pedal feel. The DMR Vaults pedals were also upgraded with titanium axles, and all bolts were swapped out to blue titanium ones.

It’s no surprise that we’ve decided to spec the bike with Atomlab Suprelite SL 650B rims (which are comparable to the current carbon rims in the market), with a pretty decent weight of 420g a piece, and at a fraction of the cost of a carbon rim. In order to make sure the wheels are further lightened, we laced Marwi titanium spokes to the quick-engaging/fast-rolling Atomlab Pimplite 102 hubs.

We can’t help but be amazed at how the little updates to the suspension linkages in the Helius family of frames have not only made the bike more efficient, but it has not lost any of it’s signature plushness. On a 12.24kg bike like this, it is pretty much perfect for a light-to-mid-travel build for local terrain in Singapore, not to mention the regular long distance jamboree races across the causeway.