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Friday, February 15, 2008

15.71 pounds

even though i have chased marty's weight weenie ways several times with the mountain bike, i have rarely bothered to work on my road bikes weight. usually, they end up right around 17 lbs. and that's light enough. my ill-fated litespeed was in the 16's, but a couple of rides on it were enough to help me figure out why it was light and i sold it.

the orca got the sram red treatment today. the thf team that i am so lucky to be a part of has a deal with sram to use their groups. i took advantage of that by diving into the catalogs and coming up with a mostly-red group. the exception was the cranks. they are hard to come by, and rival cranks are not. the rival's are also stiff, and, wouldn't you know it, cheap. it took a while to get the bike built, not being too familiar with some of the sram details. but it shifted right on the first try, and it felt pretty light.

and even though i chose the heaviest sram crank, once i put the orca together with the rol volant wheels....wow...15.71 pounds.

say again?

yes. i have a sub 16 pound bike. fully built. i have aluminum bars and stem and seatpost. no other carbon except the shifters. that says something about how light some of this stuff is getting. the orca frame is stiff, too, even by my dilusional standards. and the volants are the BOTTOM of the rol line. if i really tried (and i won't), i could get this thing into the 14's. that might make marty jealous...

i'm psyched!

3 comments:

Bike Drool said...

That's crazy light! And especially light for not really trying to make your road bike super light!

Super jealous about the "Red" stuff. Dang, I was drooling over that at InterBike... just seemed so simple, light, and worked well. Stuff ain't cheap tho! Will Shimano go to carbon levers?

Matt said...

Maybe you know this already, but I just got my new bike with Force and it seems to work better than Shimano ever did...

Pedal Brake Pedal by TK said...

works great! it's hard to believe that it is so light.