I have a Cannondale fiber Synapse
and love it. If you bike a lot it probably is worth the extra money.
niche’
The company makes recumbents, so it’s a small market and it probably made sense to not have so many frame options.
btw. you’re right that if everyone is asking for carbon these days then you’d better make something in carbon!
Carbon less than Ti
Ti tubing in bikes is typically Ti3Al2.5V, which is very costly. Just ordered a foot long piece of CP Grade 2 Ti tubing and it was $70.00 a foot! Carbon sleeves we are using are about $2.40 a foot. Of course you’d have three of those + epoxy, + labor to make a similar tube. But with Ti you’d have welding as well. Carbon bike frames vary in construction methods.
Whew!
When I asked, the person indicated that the additional cost of the electronic shift mechanism was several hundred. But considering the level of high end upgrades that went into every aspect of this bike, they may have had their numbers jumbled. This bike was also tuned to someone with racing background, not my area.
That said, if one is doing it others may and eventually bring down the price. Living in the northeast, there are few places where it’d not be nice to be able to get a true granny gear.
Rumor has it…
…that Campy will be introducing their electronic shifting system in 2011. I don’t recall any specifics on it, but it will be interesting to see if they undercut Shimano on the price.
Eventually, this stuff will come down in price, but I suspect it will be a while.
BTW, I forgot to mention that DI2 is heavier than any of the top mechanical groups. What a bargain!
Any chance to rent one or more?
If CF tubing is like metals, it can be made into a frame of differing characteristics. Steel is most known for this, but titanium and aluminum frames of different models can also have differing feels.
I don’t know if you can say that all CF frames feel a certain way or not. That was a common statement about aluminum which turned out to be false.
This is a big-ticket purchase, so take your time and see if you can rent first. Might be difficult to do, though.
I always feel it takes more than just a
quick spin around the block to tell if a bike is going to be a keeper. Never know if you will still like something when your legs have turned to mush and you just want to get home. It’s those rides that I notice every little nagging fault of a bike. But unfortunately many shops and people on craigslist are not willing to let me test ride a bike that long. Go figure?
Thanks to everyone for your comments. What i find surprising is that not as many people here own carbon fiber bikes and that steel is still considered a viable source for a bike frame. Again thanks, Jaws
Been
riding for 40 years…started with steel, moved to alum., then carbon fiber, and now back to Reynolds steel. Usually ride 300-400 miles/month year around and while I loved the weight of alum., the buzz from chip seal roads on anything more than 40+ miles was making my wrists and neck sore. Carbon was fine, but not impressed with stiffness, maybe due to my 210lbs. Also note that if a cf bike gets whacked/dented/hit on the frame, said frame becomes very suspect for failure and there are MANY failures of cf frames. Earlier this summer on a 100k charity ride, my ride partner snapped her cf seat tube going over rr tracks…looked like it was brittle plastic and jagged…very luck she did not get hurt. Trek replaced. Currently riding a Surly steel frame w/105 drivetrain, Mavic Krysium wheels, and NEVER a problem. Fact is when speeding 30-40 mph down a steep mountain run, things like frame, fork, and tire quality come to mind…lol.
Same with boats, eh
Still, you doing a test ride is better than reading other people’s impressions alone, even if it’s not a long ride.
My favs are high-quality ti or steel. That’s despite having owned and liked two Kleins. Never owned a CF frame, just rented one and wasn’t all that impressed. Part of my decision to stay away from CF has to do with what happens when things fail: bend, or snap violently? I would prefer the former.
P.S.
I totally understand people’s reluctance to give you a long test ride. I swapped my ti mtb with someone else’s ti mtb one day. She was used to her front shock, apparently to the point of utter dependence on it. My bike had/still has a nice rigid fork on it. When we stopped, she whined that she had slammed full-on into a log checkdam really hard, thinking the bike would do all the body English for her. On those trails the logs are BIG. I didn’t think to look at my bike, since I pretty much lifted up on the front end if I wanted to go over those things.
Weeks later I noticed a crimp on the underside of where the head tube and downtube join. I hadn’t done anything that would have caused that to happen. You can guess how it got there. I had to strip the frame and send it halfway across the country so Merlin could fix it. They cut out the entire downtube and replaced it. BTW, they insisted I must’ve done “something” to the bike. I offered to send them the whole bike including fork and wheels, which were still true and round etc.
I never swapped bikes with her again, and I knew not to even bring up what happened. She would’ve said, “Well, you should’ve had a shock fork…” Also, she told me what she did when driving someone else’s car, and I bet that owner never let her drive again, either.
105 Group is Plenty Good
and Ksyrium wheels are TOUGH.
fiber bike
does it floated how the tracking .is it easy for portage over fallen trees.what the load limit to
?
You can’t get low enough gearing with a triple?
another factor
to consider is get a bike that inspires you. While all of the modern component groups are nice and functional, there’s something about the elegant lines, construction, and history of Campy components that just turn me on. Couple that with a frame that monopolizes your thoughts all day at work, and that fits you well, and you’re in business. I haven’t raced in years, but when I hop on my well-used campy equipped Cinelli I still feel that rush - and the miles just seem to go by a little quicker.
exactly
this is like asking about shoe materials and which one is better for winning a marathon.
Low enough gearing
I’m not saying that I can’t get reasonably low gearing with a triple - in fact when we did my last bike we used the Ultegra rear cluster with an otherwise all-105 group. If my fuzzy memory is correct, part of the reasoning was that I got a couple of extra teeth to get me a slight edge on the low end over what I’d have gotten with the rear also being 105.
But I live in a county with hills bad enough that they only ran the Century weekend out of here once, and I am closer to 60 than not. (how did that happen?) Everyone came back bitching so much about the hills that they had to move it to one of the flatter counties across the river, and this in a large club with a lot of strong riders. Tho’ it wasn’t all the fault of the hills - bad hills plus a day with temps up to 95 degrees produced a couple of problematic crashes in the half-century group, where you tend to get more under-prepared folks. No trips to the hospital but a slight diff in the circumstances and it could have happened, so the organizers did have some valid concerns.
On my first decent bike (Motobecane Grand Tour) I was able to get to a really low granny gear with no fuss because we could add just about any size third chain ring we wanted. For the final replacement of the front derailleur they had to pull out a mountain bike derailleur, even though the original SunTour rear was still working fine. But with french threading and Vitus 888 tubing, that bike aged out of easily being made road-worthy unless I was a restorer myself.
if you have the cash
and like the ride of course it’s worth it. I’ve ridden on enough wheels to not get too excited about materials. Fast people are fast on whatever they ride, people who stroke their possessions will do that no matter the material. I’m no longer fast or flush with cash but if I was I’d look at the Specialized Roubaiz or Secteur.
I Misunderstood
I thought you were saying that the electronic shifting could provide a lower gear than manual shifting. Wasn’t an electronic derailleur introduced many years ago? Was it called Zap?
That was an ill-fated Mavic group
– Last Updated: Dec-11-10 9:14 AM EST –
It actually made it to market, but it was terribly unreliable (moisture-prone), unsophisticated (basically just electric shifting) and heavy, and it died quickly.
The newer systems are far more sophisticated, with microprocessors and much better/lighter batteries. For example, Di2 senses where the rear derailleur is on the cassette and automatically centers the front derailleur so it won't rub.
Fairwheel bikes in Tucson recently built a one-off modification of Di2 that is pretty amazing. Among other things, it only has a single upshift and downshift button. The system automatically shifts both derailleurs as necessary when you call for a larger or smaller gear. If you combined this technology with a power meter and cadence monitoring, you could actually have an "automatic transmission" that would downshift whenever you were exerting too much effort and your cadence dropped or upshift whenever your cadence became too high for maximum efficiency. Whether riders would actually want that AND be willing to pay for it is another matter...
That is what I was saying
– Last Updated: Dec-11-10 9:22 AM EST –
At least, if the person who had this bike said it correctly. Indexed shifting is more limited than the older friction shifting because the jumps have to be fairly even in terms of how big the vertical drop is. I got the impression that electronic shifting provided the same advantage.
It is of course possible that this is a design limitation of existing indexed systems, not something that couldn't be changed. On my Motobecane, the third chain ring we added up front (after that notable Century ride) could be significantly smaller than the other two, much more so than is allowable on indexed systems.
As far as how new, granted I haven't been riding a lot in the last several years, but I researched the hell out of things when I got the bike I have now and I didn't trip over anyone promoting an electronic shift system. If it was out there, it wasn't regarded well.
eBay carbon frames
I’ve been riding bikes for awhile, too. I like steel frames like my old Reynolds 531 double butted or Ritchey Commando. I recently built up an eBay carbon fiber frame. I paid about $400 shipped for the frame. The company (carbonzone) sells both roadie and MTB frames. The bike is a hartail mountain bike. Turned out about 23 pounds not really using high end parts (mostly SRAM X-9). I’ve put about a thousand miles on it in the last few months. The geometry is good so it handles well. It is not flexy. The finish is good. I think I have about $1,500 in it which includes a Rockshox SID Race.