This summer my brother and I did a chunk of RAGBRAI (Registers Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa). I only ended up going about halfway across, to Des Moines, since I had a wedding in Colorado to attend. I’ve already put a decent number of miles on the Chinese bike so I was feeling pretty good about taking it on a ride like RAGBRAI.
On day one we had a quick 27-mile ride in before the first town of the day from Sioux City. We had a guy drafting us for most of this stint so we started chatting with him, he was a pretty chill older bike cop from Miami. He ended up riding with us the rest of the day. We would eventually run into him every day on RABGRAI.
Within a few miles of day one, my out-the-front 3D-printed Garmin mount broke which was pretty unfortunate. Luckily I had another 3D-printed backup mount I was experimenting with earlier on the handlebar stem I used the rest of the ride. After the ride, I got rid of the stem-mounted mount and made some design and material changes to the out-the-front mount. After RAGBRAI I discovered the frame bag I used had worn some of the matte finish on the down tube smooth, which was a bit disappointing but not a huge deal.
Other than the Garmin mount breaking, the rest of the bike performed extremely well on RAGBRAI. Shifting was quick and usually on point, the gear ratios worked out well with all the hills on the first day. At the time of writing this, I’ve got about 1300 miles on the bike, and I have not found any major issues with the bike outside of a few minor things.
The most annoying part of the bike has been finding the right saddle position and the front brake noise.
I originally built the bike with a Specialized Power Comp saddle, which I use on my old Cannondale, which now lives on my trainer, quite a bit. I spent a few months going on every ride with a hex wrench in my pocket making small adjustments to the saddle position but could never quite find a position that worked. In the end, I replaced it with a Fizik Argo R1 saddle, which has worked out a lot better. It still took a long time to find the correct position but it was good enough to ride on RAGBRAI without much issue. It continues to amaze me how just a few millimeters or a couple of degrees of change in the saddle can change how you feel on the bike.
Something I hit on the first ride was a hum/squeal from the front wheel when applying a certain range of braking force. I would say at around 30%-60% of full braking power the rim and rotor seem to resonate fairly loudly. The YouTuber PeakTorque also seemed to hit a similar issue with his set of these wheels. I suspect this has something to do with the shape and construction of the rotor along with the stiffness of the carbon spokes and also likely brake pad composition. I think if I used a bi-metal or riveted style rotor and a softer brake pad I could get rid of this noise or at least quiet it down. I have tried sanding the pads and checking for contamination, as well as blasting the rotor with brake clean to no avail. I still however think cheap stamped single-piece steel rotors have a few good advantages over “nicer” bi-metal rotors, so I’ll just live with this for now.
Coming back to the Garmin mounts I mentioned earlier, I’ve had to make a few revisions to the out-the-front style mount I designed and 3D-printed from my Garmin Edge 540 to mount specifically to these handlebars. My handlebars have a couple of threaded holes under the center section for a mount, however the ones I found on the internet were fairly expensive for something I could quickly just model and print, so I did just that. The first design I made was not nearly strong enough and broke going over some rough trails. I tweaked the design a bit and the second revision held up fairly well until I had my bike in my truck cab on a hot day and the PLA I used to print it softened.
In my final revision, I made it slightly thicker, to be stiffer, and printed it out of ASA which can handle much higher temperatures. So far this revision has been rock solid. If you’re interested I’ve uploaded this to Thingiverse.
Overall I’m pretty pleased with how the bike has performed so far. As far as planned future upgrades the only thing I’ve been thinking about is the groupset. In keeping with the Chinese product theme of the bike, the L-TWOO eRX, a Chinese electronic groupset, is very new to the market but already has decent reviews. L-TWOO has made several firmware, and a few hardware revisions to fix minor complaints making it look like a solid groupset for the money. Otherwise, I’ve looked into the Shimano 105 Di2, and SRAM Force eTap groupsets, but so far have not made a decision.