On-One Macinato review

Traditional fixie with a modern palette

Our rating

3.5

1097.3
799.00

Published: December 30, 2011 at 8:00 am

Our review
Contemporary fixie with an athletic race riding position

With its Macinato, On-One has blended traditional fixie ideas for modern, metropolitan palettes. It already has a fixie in the form of the Pompino; the Macinato is more mainstream. There’s a retro feel to the frame finish, with bold white bands for the On-One name. Beneath that it’s modern: the chromoly steel frame uses a semi-compact design, the chromoly fork is straight rather than curved, and the stem is a contemporary threadless one.

The new breed of fixie rider apparently wants clean frame lines above all, so there are no mudguard eyelets or chain tugs. Yet there are permanent guides for the rear brake cable, which looks a little incongruous to us – and no doubt carbuncular to the hipster who absolutely must remove that rear brake. There’s more than meets the eye to the 120mm track ends. They have a taperlock design so they thicken towards the front, which should prevent you pulling the wheel over when you’re muscling the Macinato up a steep hill.

It climbs and descends just fine though better suits shorter sprints than long lopes through the countryside, simply because the head-tube is short on this medium size bike. The lower handlebar creates a trackie-style head down stance, ideal for pushing the pace – or for converting the bike to a fixed-wheel time trial machine with tri bars – but if you lack flexibility it’ll pull at your lower back on long rides. To sit more upright, just go up a frame size and fit a shorter stem.

There’s no toe overlap with the front wheel – at least with clipless size 42 shoes – so you can flick the front wheel to and fro when finding your balance point to trackstand at the lights without worrying you’ll end up on the tarmac. You can thread through stationary traffic more easily for the same reason. Like most off-the-peg fixies, steering is fairly light. That’s a function of the averagely steep (73 degrees) head angle and a narrower than normal handlebar (38cm, centre to centre). You soon get used to it, and we didn’t have any heart-in-mouth moments. Cornering is confident for a fixed wheel bike, simply because you can lay it over a bit more.

The bottom bracket is 7mm further from the ground than that of its next highest peer and it has 165mm cranks too, so the risk of clipping a pedal is remote. Shorter cranks are easier to spin at absurd speeds too, and you’ll appreciate not being levered out of your saddle on the first full-on descent. The Weinmann DP18 fixed-free wheels are nice enough, and they’re shod with our almost-favourite training tyre: Schwalbe’s Durano in 25mm. White stands out and sort of matches the white tape and saddle, though it quickly loses its looks.

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