A review of the entry level geared MTB bicycle Rockrider 5.0 from Decathlon that had to improvise upon to make it my very own cost-effective yet capable touring bike.
It's not every day you get the chance to see something as exotic and beautiful as this, the lightest road bike in the world. The impossibly-skinny Spin Custom frame is adorned with a whole host of featherweight parts to bring the total build weight to barely over 6 pounds. Fairwheel Bikes has set a new world record of just 2.7kg.
In 2008, a German named Gunter Mai stunned the cycling world by building the lightest road bike ever made. The initial build of his light bike tipped the scales at just under 3.2 kg, and he eventually tuned it down even more to roughly 2.8kg. And it was no mere show bike; Mai reportedly logged over 20,000km on the machine in its first couple years. But he shocked the cycling community again when, early in 2010, he suddenly parted out the entire bike and sold each piece individually, scattered to the four winds.
But some of the key parts made it into the hands of a Colorado rider who wanted to reincarnate the anorexic beast, and he sent off the custom Spin frame, THM fork, the stem/handlebars, and a few more parts to Jason Woznick of Fairwheel Bikes in Tuscon, Arizona. There, Woznick set to work sourcing the lightest parts available to finish off the build. Almost every part on the bike is completely custom, and cannot be purchased off the shelf anywhere, for any price.
How much such a machine would cost? you might ask out of curiosity. Simply put, the answer is that it's not an item that can be purchased. One can't just grab some parts from your local bike shop and hope to achieve a world record bike. This machine required the efforts of several industry leaders, including, for example, a one-off fork made by THM, who already make the lightest production fork. Woznick estimates that, with enough cash, you might be able to get the various component makers to recreate their efforts, but probably not for less than around $45,000.
Some of the parts aren't really available even if you have the cash to swing around. The carbon in those Ax rims, for example, isn't readily available. A very small amount of it was got from some Formula One guys, and it's a grade of carbon that one can't actually purchase anywhere.
A machine such as this is not for the masses just yet. New techniques, new possibilities and some of that technology eventually trickles down to a production level.
Original article: www.tririg.com
Images courtesy: Nick Salazar
