I’m excited about the someday-to-be-released Metrigear pedal based power meter system, but I got tired of waiting and decided that it was time to add power to my weight weenie machine. Here are a few photos of the system weight including everything except for the head unit. The lightest head unit I could find was the Bontrager Node 2, but I like the Garmin EDGE 500 better, so that’s what I’ve been using. The Node is maybe 20 grams lighter than the Garmin, but the display on the Node shows your speed in huge numbers and the power in really small numbers, and you can’t configure the display to do otherwise. I don’t really care how fast I’m going, but I really care about the wattage I’m producing. The Bontrager Node also doesn’t store the power data, rather it just displays it. This is fine for pacing yourself while racing, but it’s not much good if you want to analyze the numbers later. The Garmin, on the other hand, lets you configure the display so that your power is most prominent, and I love it. I have mine configured to show power (largest), heart rate, cadence and distance.

The 622 gram scale photo includes the cranks, the Quarq, the BB cups with ceramic bearings, and even the BB magnet attachment.

Nico Toutenhoofd and Kevin Nicol approach the finish line at the 2010 Lookout Mountain Hill Climb in Golden, Colorado. Photo by Dejan Smaic

I got mentioned in this blog post about “old guys” and hill climbs. It’s not a big story, but the comments amuse me. The question is “Do the old guys (that’s me) only race well when the young guys are out of town?”

303cycling.com/master-cyclist-win-big-at-lookout-mountain-hill-climb

If nothing else, it does seem to me that there are fewer juniors racing, and more salt-and-pepper dads, then in the ’80s.

AX-Lightness ALPHA 580 gram frame

LUST is the only word I can use to describe my feeling for this photo… I’ve heard rumblings of the AX-Lightness frame, but in recent days those rumblings seem to have turned into reality. While Photoshop hobbyists might spend days working on fake iPhone images, they don’t generally work on fake bike frame photos; this is real and I WANT ONE!

Now will it really weigh 580 grams for a small? And just how big is a small? And will it be stiff enough for real racing? Given my experience with AX-Lightness, and their history for producing awesome stuff, I’m going to remain optimistic.

So what I know so far is that the price for the frame only is supposed to be 3900 €, and the price for the frame+fork+headset is supposed to be 4600 €. When you compare that to the recently announced Cervelo California Project, this seem like a veritable bargain. With the current exchange rate that’s $5,300 for the frame, sans fork and headset.

There’s a discussion on the frame on the Weight Weenie forum here: http://weightweenies.starbike.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=71934 And if you can read German, then you can check out this page: http://www.forum.light-bikes.de/showthread.php?t=12893

New RH-180 and FH-50 hubs from C-4

Here’s a sneak preview of some new hubs from C-4 that are in production now, and will be available in limited quantities within a few weeks. The hubs arrived via FedEx and I had the opportunity to play with the hubs, take a few photos, and then I had to wrap them back up and send them back.

C-4 names their hubs based on the weight. This new rear hub will come in two different flavors, the more budget-conscious RH-180 and the no-holds-barred RH-160. The production RH-180 is supposed to weight 185 grams, and I was told that it might even tip the scales a few grams under that. And the lighter version, the RH-160, as the name suggests, should end up right around 160 grams. (This pre-production RH-180 weighs 197 grams on our scale.)

RH-180 possible specs: (I can’t guarantee any of these….)

• MSRP $395 USD
• 100% manufactured and assembled in the U.S. (Orange County, CA)
• 15mm quad butted aluminum axle
• Hub shell CNCd from 7000 series aluminum
• Patent pending self-adjusting bearing preload system. (I don’t know anything more about this)
• 4 Phil Wood cartridge sealed bearings. 1 6902 for the drive side and 3 6802 bearings — one for the non-drive side and two for the cassette body.
• Forged aluminum cassette body.
• Available in 20, 24, and maybe 28h?
• Colors: black for sure, sliver most likely, red probably, gold & blue unknown.

RH-160 possible specs: (again, no promises here….)

• MSRP $495 USD
• 100% manufactured and assembled in the U.S. (Orange County, CA)
• 15mm quad butted aluminum axle
• Hub shell CNCd from 7000 series aluminum
• Patent pending self-adjusting bearing preload system. (I don’t know anything more about this)
• 4 ceramic hybrid sealed bearings. 1 6902 for the drive side and 3 6802 bearings — one for the non-drive side and two for the cassette body.
• Machined aluminum cassette body (lighter than the forged one for the RH-180)
• Titanium ratchet rings (lighter than the steel ratchet rings in the RH-180)
• Titanium pawls (lighter than the steel pawls in the RH-180)
• Available in 20, 24, and maybe 28h?
• Colors: black for sure, sliver most likely, red probably, gold & blue unknown.

The pre-production hub that I had the opportunity to play with came in at 197 grams, and that was with full ceramic (not ceramic hybrid) bearings. C-4 has no intention of using full ceramic bearings, rather they had them in there for a show, where hundreds of people would be spinning the axles in their hands. The production hubs will lose weight over this pre-production hub mostly due to some hub shell modifications, a new axle design, and a different end cap. And the RH-160 will benefit from a significantly lighter cassette body (CNCd rather than forged) as well as the titanium ratchet rings and pawls.

There are a few other nice design touches worth mentioning. One thing that I love is that you can simply pull the cassette body off of the hub and replace it with a Campy cassette body — no tools required. This is wonderful if you’re a shop or wheel builder and don’t want to have to stock as many hubs or wheels. You can simply get all of your hubs in Shimano and then keep a few Campy cassettes on hand. The wheel dish doesn’t even change if you swap cassette bodies. (2009 and later PowerTap hubs are the same way and I love it.) I realize that there is a small sacrifice in terms of flange spacing, and optimizing spoke triangulation, from Shimano to Campy, but to me the trade off is worth it.

The drive-side flange is angled toward the center of the hub, to allow for less bend in the spokes. Similarly, the hols in the non-drive ring (no flange) are angled toward the center of the rim.

FH-50 front hub specs: (These I feel more confident on, but again, no promises…)

• MSRP $135 USD (standard) or $155 USD (ceramic)
• 100% manufactured and assembled in the U.S. (Orange County, CA)
• Adjustable preload
• Phil Wood or ceramic 698 bearings
• Available in 16, 18, 20 and maybe 24h?
• Colors: black for sure, sliver most likely, red probably, gold & blue unknown.

While technically a pre-production hub, this one won’t see any real changes before production, other than getting polished and anodized. This hub will be available with Phil Wood bearings or ceramic hybrid bearings. The ceramic bearings drop the weight by about 2.5 grams.

Final thoughts… These look like awesome hubs. There are lighter hubs out there, like the M5 flanged front and the ExtraLite SX rear. But the M5 flanged front uses micro 688 bearings, and it isn’t specifically designed for radial lacing. And the ExtraLite SX rear hub reduces weight by substituting bushings for one of the cassette bearings. So if these hubs are robust and reliable, then they should be popular — time will tell.

And for those who like pictures, here’s some eye-candy:

When I started racing in the early ’80s everyone confidently claimed that their bike weighed 21 lbs, and I’m confident that they all were more in the 23 lbs range, or at least all of my racing bikes were. 21 lbs just sounded like what a racing bike should weigh. And then there was the day in 1990 when everyone who worked at The High Wheeler Bicycle Shop gathered around to witness the shop’s first Ritchey P-23 mountain bike get hung on the shop’s fish scale — somehow a bike that was supposed to weigh 23 lbs came out at over 25 lbs.

We all know that the “manufactured claimed weight” is often not the real weight. That’s why the Weight Weenie Listings has columns for “claimed” vs. “real” weights — they are often quite different.

741 gram Guru Photon at Interbike 2009

I decided to write this blog because in the past month we’ve heard from two of our great customers that their custom Guru Photon frames were significantly heavier than they thought they would be. At the last Interbike there was quite a buzz in the weight weenie community about the Guru Photon frame, and I even posted a photo on this blog of a sexy Photon frame on a scale at 741 grams. The frame was a 54cm, and it included the integrated seat mast and rear derailleur hanger. On Guru’s Photon web page they describe the Photon frame as “tipping the scales under 750 grams for a 54 cm”. This didn’t seem like an outrageous claim — they had two pre-production frames at Interbike, one frame was in a glass case hanging on a scale, and one frame was floating, almost literally, around the booth so onlookers and journalists could fondle and admire it. Some companies refused to let me weigh their pre-production frames, for fear of reality not matching up with their marketing machine’s claimed weight, but the Guru representatives were more than happy to let me put the frame on a scale and blog about it.

Reality -- 894 grams

So let’s jump to reality 6 months later. This friend of mine, who wished to keep his name out of our blog, is as gram conscious as them come, and he ordered his custom Guru Photon frame from a Denver Guru dealer almost immediately after Interbike. He’s working on a project bike so to him every gram is sacred. He opted for the non-integrated seat mast, choosing instead to use a traditional and very light seat post, in an attempt to make the project bike lighter. He designed the frame geometry to be as compact as possible, so that the seat tube, seat stays and head tube would be as short as possible. It’s hard to say what “size” the frame is, but I’d call it a compact 56 based on the top tube and head tube lengths he sent me. He was told that the frame would be under 700 grams due mostly to the fact that he opted out of the integrated seat mast. Imagine his dismay when he unpacked the frame, stuck it on his scale, and saw this — 894 grams. 894 grams is a light frame — don’t get me wrong. But my 58cm Cervelo R3-SL is an honest 845 grams, and it’s larger and less expensive, too.  MSRP on the Guru Photon is $4,900 and MSRP on the R3-SL is $3,995.

Then about two weeks after this friend sent me photos of his Photon on a scale, we received a call from a great CyclingTechnology.com customer who was also greatly disappointed with reality upon receiving his Photon frame. His small (54cm) Guru Photon frame, also sans integrated seat mast, came in about 100 grams heavier than he was told it would. These are bike geeks who are willing to spend $907 on a 65 gram AX-Lightness stem as opposed to $69 for a 115 gram Ritchey stem from ExcelSports.com (far better deal). And if you’re willing to spend an extra $800 on a crazy light stem to save 50 grams, you’re spending $16 for each saved gram. At this “grams-per-dollar” rate, saving 100 grams is worth $1,600, and saving 200 grams (894 gram Guru frame compared to the customer’s expected 690 grams) is worth $3,200.

Now Guru is not the only company that suffers from this problem — Ritchey back in 1990 did the same thing with the P-23. It seems that most major companies, like Trek, Specialized and even Cervelo, don’t publish frame weights, and you have to go look at independent reviews to fine out reality. So were these customer naive in believing they would get sub 700 gram frames? Or does Guru need to revise it’s “claimed weight” to match reality?

One of the problems with racing in Colorado is that you show up at a local hill climb, with hardly any prize money to speak of, and you notice Tom Danielson warming up in the parking lot. It’s easy at this point to predict that you won’t be winning…

A good friend of mine just sent me a link to a road race “predictor” that scrapes registered riders from bikereg.com’s website for an upcoming race, and compares those data with each rider’s USA Cycling points, in an attempt to predict the winner. Sounds fun, eh?

I love hill climbs, and the Mt. Washington Hill Climb has a list of registered riders on bikereg.com, which includes me, so this seemed like a perfect test. I started off by going to the race predictor website (http://www.road-results.com) and I entered the link to the Mt. Washington confirmed rider list (http://www.bikereg.com/events/ConfList.asp?EventID=9819) to see how I could expect to do when I race up that hill in August of 2010. What do you know, I’m predicted to get 268th place, and Chris Hurst is predicted to win. Chris Hurst and I both did the Mt. Washington hill climb in 2009, and I was about 38 minutes faster up the 7-mile climb. Maybe the website knows more than I know, and maybe Chris has gotten 39 minutes faster, or I’ve gotten 39 minutes slower…

Okay, to be fair, here are a couple of reasons why it might not be working in this case:

1. Most races in Colorado are not USA Cycling events, so those of us who race here don’t have many USAC points. In Colorado most races are American Cycling Association sanctioned events instead. I do have a few points, but not many.
2. I don’t think that the road race predictor algorithm takes into consideration what type of race is being predicted. If a rider has lots of USAC points, but those points were earned from winning crits, using these data to calculate how a rider will do in an upcoming hill climb probably won’t be that accurate.

While I think it’s not exactly fine tuned at this point, I love the idea of this website, and by adding a few additional metrics into the predicting calculations this could be much more accurate. If they looked not only at your points, but the type of race in which you earned those points, that would be a huge improvement. And if they combined this with the results for that same race from previous years, that would also be helpful.

What I’d really like is to have someone who races in USA Cycling events, and who does have points, to write up a little report for us. Any takers? We’d love to hear what you think of the  road-results.com website and how well/poorly it works. Most importantly, is it fun cycling technology?

And if any IT geek Colorado racers out there have spare time on their hands, they could do something similar for us by scraping the American Cycling Association website for rider results and upgrade points.

In the year 2000 the UCI declared “Thou shalt not race a bicycle lighter than 6.8 kg…” While I’m a self-confessed weight weenie, and the words “carbon fiber” are a sure way to perk up my ears and evoke a Pavlovian dog response, I also understand the logic behind the UCI’s thinking when they set the minimum bicycle weight rule. Most sports have equipment rules intended to make the sport safer, and many also have rules designed to make the sport more accessible (less expensive).  Those were exactly the justifications that the UCI used in 2000 when they imposed the 6.8 kg limit.

6.8 kg is 14.99 lbs, or if you round to the nearest hundredth, it’s 15 lbs. Maybe those French officials are all of the age where they still think in standard English (non-metric) units? Okay, to be fair, 6.8 kg seems like a reasonable number for the year 2000, in terms of the equipment that was available, and the prices for high-end components. Sure there were mass-market, commercially available carbon frames and wheels, but to build a bike less than 6.8 kg meant building a project bike. It generally involved spending twice as much and pushing the borderline of safety. I remember lusting after the ADA/Lightweight wheels ridden by Lance and Jan, and wishing someone would donate $5k to my project bike.

Now jump ahead 10 years and ask yourself what has changed? While racing bikes haven’t quite kept up with Moore’s Law, cycling technology has drastically changed in the past decade. It’s no longer just the top pros who race on carbon wheels — go to any local race and you’ll see 12 year-old kids and 65 year-old masters, on carbon wheels and frames.

At Cycling Technology our typical customer is someone who will never race a UCI sanctioned event, rather he/she is someone who wants to be UCI illegal, and build a sub 6.8 kg rig. What sparked me to write this blog post was a recent bike we built for Kevin Czinger, CEO of Coda Automotive.  (Wall Street Journal article on Kevin and Coda Automotive)

Unlike most of our customers, Kevin wanted the stiffest bike possible, and he didn’t care about weight. After Kevin read a Cozy Beehive synopsis of a German magazine’s frame stiffness test, he narrowed his frame choices down to the Canyon Ultimate CF SLX and the Storck Fascenario 0.7. While he initially wanted the Canyon, he ended up going with the Storck because Canyon won’t sell to Americans — go figure. Yes, the Storck is a light frame, but Kevin’s decision was based on stiffness, not weight. As for the rest of the build, there are some light parts on there, but ask any weight weenie and they’ll tell you that these are not particularly light parts. Dura Ace 7900 group, clincher wheels with a PowerTap rear hub, Garmin 705 computer, Dura Ace pedals, EDGE bars, stem and post; the only true weight weenie part on the bike is the AX-Lightness saddle and the AX bottle cages. Of course I couldn’t help but put the bike on the scale, and what do you know? A 2010 bike that was built to be stiff, not light, with everything, including the Garmin 705 computer, the pedals, bottle cages, the PowerTap clincher wheels, is not UCI legal — 14 lbs, 10 oz. And before you go adding up the price of this bike (yes, it’s expensive) remember that you can walk into any good bike shop in the country and buy a bike with clinchers that pushes the UCI limit. And the Tour riders don’t race on clinchers.

Bicycle technology has changed over the past 10 years and it’s time for the UCI to change the minimum weight limit.

7 grams of AX love

AX-Lightness Premium AX1000 saddle & "cover" on scale

A big box just arrived from AX-Lightness today, and we always enjoy opening the box to fondle the goods. But while I expected to see the meticulously crafted, carefully bubble-wrapped, signature AX-Lightness carbon parts, what caught my eye instead was the new 7 gram AX-Lightness “seat cover of love”.

Is AX-Lightness branching out of the lust-worthy bike part business and going directly into the lust business?

Out of interest I measured the regular Phoenix saddle (3k carbon weave) against the Premium Phoenix saddle (1k carbon weave) and the Premium, with the new seat cover included (see photo at right) came in at the same weight as the non-premium saddle sans sexy cover! So the difference between the two saddles is 80 Euros ($110 USD)  and 7 grams. This particular 7 grams can in some cases mean the difference between a “casual fun ride” and a “serious consequences ride”.

We have two of these in stock but I can’t bring myself to post them on our website… I have no idea what the MSRP should be. Suggestions welcome…

And if you haven’t figured this out already, this is indeed a condom… A few readers have asked me if this is really a seat cover or not

John Cobb’s new wind tunnel optimized position for me has my arm rests 5cm lower than my 3T Ventus LTD bars, and has my elbows much closer to each other. My choice was to either buy a new Cervelo P4 with a shorter head tube, or to use a crazy dropped stem with some non-integrated bars, or to have some bars custom made. You know where this is going…

I also want to have UCI legal bars, which means not exceeding the 3:1 aspect ratio. The most aero commercially available bars I could find were the Tula Aero Bars, which are 17mm thick and 50mm deep. They come in a narrow version that’s 38cm wide. Al Morrison’s “rule of thumb” says that:
0.001 square meters of frontal aera is equivalent to 1 watt, which is ~ 4 sec in a 40 km TT.

This had me tempted to do the aero-or-die position as it would be removing the entire frontal area of the wing section of the bars. But there are two issues with using aero-or-die bars. The first issue is that the UCI could very easily make this illegal; there’s a rule that says something like “bicycle handle bars must supply sufficient control to safely steer the bicycle”. So far it doesn’t seem that anyone has been banned for using aero-or-die bars, but quite a few people say it’s only a matter of time, and I’d hate to be that guy at Nationals who gets told that his bike isn’t legal in the starting gate. My friend Matt Johnson, who is the president of the Garmin-Transition Professional Cycling Team laughed at me when I told him about aero-or-die bars, and said “I’m sure they wouldn’t allow those in the Tour”. The second reason for not going with the aero-or-die bars is that I have a wife and two young kids, and the “die” part of that name was inserted for a reason.

The frontal area of the Tula bars is 380mm (the width) times 17mm (the thickness) which comes to .006460 square meters. To lower that number there were two things I could do — I could make the bars narrower and I could use thinner tubes. The thinnest aero tubing I could find that would still be structurally sound for making bars came from the wonderful frame builder Dave Tiemeyer who recently made a custom TT Tandem for me. It’s the tubing he uses for his seat stays. It is 13mm x 38mm, meaning it’s UCI legal, and it’s thinner than the 17mm thick carbon wings on the Tula bars. Then I decided that I’d make the bars as narrow as possible. I came up with 28cm as the right number, pretty much by experimenting with holding my hands on the tops of my regular road bars. I can’t yet tell you whether this is sufficient as I haven’t ridden these new custom bars yet, but it sure looks safer than the aero-or-die bars.

Back to the math… The frontal area of my new bars is 280mm wide times 13mm thick which comes to .003640 square meters. That’s about .003 square meters less than the narrow Tula bars. According to Al Morrison’s rule of thumb, this should save me 3 watts or 12 seconds in a 40k. The Tula bars do have the inline brake levers, and I opted for traditional brake levers on my custom bars, so I have to add back a little frontal area. My lazy math says that I might give up 2 of those 12 seconds by using some really thin 3T time trial levers, so now we’re down to a 10 second savings. That’s 10 seconds over the Tula bars — not 10 seconds over my now illegal 3T Ventus bars. Once these bars are done I’ll do some frontal area calculations and see if I’m really back to where I started. The 3T Ventus bars have remarkably thin wings and very little frontal area.

These initial prototype bars are being built by my great friend, master frame builder JP Boylan of James Frames here in Boulder. Thanks JP!

If you’re interested in having some custom bars made, let me know. I’d consider making more, depending on how well these work. These are not adjustable at all, and are probably best for people who have done wind tunnel testing and know exactly what they want.

John, maybe you can send us some customer’s measurements and we can make them some bars?

A big box arrived today, which cost a fortune to ship from Germany, but not because of how much it weighed… The very large box felt empty. If I had more time I’d weigh more pieces, but seeing as I’m tight on time, I decided to pull out four things that I was most interested in.