Carrera Fury 20” Hardtail Mountain Bike 09 Review

Carrera Fury is a simple hardtail mountain bike with true bargain price and perfectly positioned for good budget option from Halford. This mountain bike maintains decent specs with considerable frame quality. It is recommended as entry level cross country bike similar to the Voodoo XC and Dawes XC mountain bike range. It comes with little mountain biking profile with standard cross country usage. This hardtail bike gives reliable usage pattern with climbing and descending efforts on rocky gardens. It cannot be compared with other mid range cross country mountain bikes that always excel with performance and are expensive.

Available at the price range of £550 from Halford, Carrera Fury would not disappoint riders. Rather this bike would let them enjoy normal mountain biking. This cross country bike is fitted with suitable group set and matching fork on a reinforced frame. Fury is the popular XC mountain bike from the Italy based Carrera brand and still liked by many riders who would like to save money and have plans to go for a hardtail one, instead of a full suspension mountain bike.

Stiff Hardtail Frame Design

The frame of the Carrera Fury bike does not look like an average budget hardtail frame. Rather, it has been given a special treatment to incorporate a strong butted chassis. This cross country frame is fully made up of heat treated aluminium tubes, which are very stiff and strong with perfect shapes. It is equipped with disc facility and built with big weld contact areas behind head tube for a reinforced front end. The top tube is featured with a square shape near the point of contact with extended seat stay. The down tube projects great stiffness and strength and well gusseted with head tube. This butted down tube is oval shaped near the bottom bracket shell and weld contact areas at head tube.

This hardtail chassis would show some flex with spindly seat stay and that cannot be avoided. Not a big issue for such a low priced hardtail bike. This mountain bike has rack mount facility and is featured with two bottle cage mounts. There is a curved gusset with bolted collar near the forward facing seat clamps for safety purpose. The chainstay is rectangular shaped and gives large keyhole clearance for rear wheel. This aluminium frame is finished with white colour paint and looks simple with brake and gear cables passing under the tubes. Seatpost of this 20” mountain bike is long enough to suit a rider more than 6ft tall and the butted frame looks like a racing bike with a long saddle and more comfort.

Single-track Trial Riding

The cockpit has plenty of room to play around and the long top tube enables you to put your body weight in the front end. This means you can lean forward enough to control bike speed through tight corners. With the controlled speed, this hardtail bike can be used for long riding with comfort. The butted aluminium frame plays a vital role in putting your riding power down the wheel with great stiffness. The contemporary head angle along with matching fork gives good traction on the ground with full stability and confidence when you happen to push the bike hard.

Even less experienced riders would get more stable ride with this mountain bike as the top tube width gives enough control leverage, similar to an experienced rider riding with a short stem. You can really push the bike hard on rocky drops as this cross country XC bike nicely obeys your muscle power on rough rides. Carrera Fury is a 120mm semi trail bike with certain limits for day riding with good tracking benefits and power delivery.

120mm Fork performance

Carrera Fury cross country XC Mountain Bike is setup with 120mm of travel Suntour Epicon fork with a contemporary 69° head angle. With this setup, riders can get most out of this bike and it is much suitable for steep climbs and deep descents. This mountain bike is designed with a slightly slack geometry under Carrera Fury production line for 2009-2010. With longer fork setup, Fury is meant for fast and hard riding on bumpy terrain. The fork can be maintained with less sag setting, in order to achieve correct and intended bike suspension response, without being too bouncy and stiff.

With the help of 120mm long travel you can comfortably go for trail riding on leaning corners and rocky gardens. This mid priced 120mm fork is fixed with adjustable damping facility, so that you can stiffen up the fork for easy climb and control the rebound setting for deep descent. The fork also comes with lockouts for climbing and rebound damping.

Impressive Components

The wheel setup comes with decent specs, which highlights the efficiency of Carrera Fury and at this price range you can expect ever reliable continental speed king tyres with Mavic XM-317 rims. In British winter conditions, the wheel will slide when you crank them over, apart from that, it is good in most summer conditions. The Suntour Epicon fork really does a great job and gives room for adjustments based on riding condition and rider’s weight. The frame cut outs avoid any mud clearance.

The real highlight of this hardtail bike is the screw-through QLOC axle of 15mm size, which enhances the true definition of tracking and gives significant steering. This benefit would put this XC mountain bike more specifically on technical trail ride when compared to normal non technical cross country bikes. It is worth mentioning about group-set, which line up with SRAM X5 shifters and SRAM X5 gears along with Truvativ crankset and Powerspline BB. This mountain bike is equipped with Avid Juicy hydraulic disc brakes that provide good stopping power.

Our analysis

This 20” hardtail mountain bike weighs 13 kg and it is not a light weight bike but fitted with long fork travel for technical trail. When compared with other low priced cross country bikes, the Carrera Fury really adds value for money with decent specs and quality frame. This mountain bike is now available with three frame sizes such as 16” (2008), 18” (2009) and 20” (2009) model. There is always going to be compromises on low priced hardtail bikes but Carrera seems to be well managed the build quality of the Fury bike with better components and set the bike with 120mm fork as key selling point.

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