What componentry goes into a good-value road bike?

In my previous post I looked long and hard at the features of the road bike frame you should be checking. The frame is only one part of the equation that makes up the whole bike, though; many bike makers will pair one basic frame with many levels of component package to cater for different budgets.

What componentry should you prioritize? I’ll give my two centavos on the matter.

BRAKES

Why are brakes on the top of this list? I’m a strong believer in having brakes stronger than your accelerative ability.

Shimano’s Tiagra BR-4700 dual-pivot rim brake calipers are reportedly some of the better ones around, just let down by their stock brake pads. A swap to cartridge brake pads is easy, cheap, and improves speed retardation.

They’re also one of the very first things bike makers cheap out on when outfitting bikes. Fortunately this is a very easy fix, especially for caliper rim brakes. Many rim brake calipers are hamstrung by poor pads, so swapping them out for a quality set will improve your deceleration and speed control in more conditions for not much money.

Sometimes it’s the calipers themselves that are the weak link. Given how cheap of an upgrade these are, go ahead and spend the cash for good rim brake calipers. For a few generations now, Shimano’s Ultegra brake calipers are anecdotally widely recommended.

TRP Spyre brakes: still a hallmark of a good value disc-brake road bike, in my opinion.

For disc brakes, though, I would advise getting the best stock disc brake calipers you can get from the outset, as they’re not quite as cheap as rim brake calipers on the aftermarket. Aim for at least a SRAM Avid BB5 or a TRP Spyre; if you can work your way up to a Juin Tech R1/F1 (also sold as the Yokozuna Motoko) or a TRP HyRd, then better. Given how widely panned Promax’s Render R brakes are, I’d suggest upgrading them with something else straight away.

TIRES

The single best-value upgrade you can buy for your bike: better tires.

Like brakes, these are a relatively cheap fix but offer a huge improvement for the outlay. Go for as wide a tire as your frame can take. Trust me, 700C x 28 mm tires are great for dealing with the streets we have in Metro Manila. Even Continental’s basic Ultra Sport II tires are a great all-round option for everything bar very dusty roads.

WHEELSET

This is another easy target for cost cutting. If you’re buying a new bike with a lower-spec component package, you’re bound to end up with heavy but tough wheels with basic hubs and wheel bearings. I say keep them, man up, and deal with the extra rotating weight because they got you a cheaper bike overall – but target them as a possible future upgrade. If you have a turbo trainer, you could always reuse the rear wheel for indoor training.

Hyro’s Giant S-X2 wheelset. While solid, it is rather heavy and uses hubs with loose bearings. Worse, the hubs’ bearing seals have deteriorated over the last three years.

Keep in mind that wheelsets with loose bearing hubs will need hub replacement, at least, if the bearing races on the cups and cones become pitted from water ingress and general wear and tear.

TRANSMISSION

Take a long hard look at the bike’s gearing. It doesn’t really matter how many speeds the bike has (just make sure there are at least 8 at the back). What matters more is the spread of gearing, measured by how many teeth (T) the largest and smallest cogs have.

Once upon a time, this 12-30T cassette was Shimano’s widest-range offering on road bikes.

Wide range cassettes such as 11-28T or 11-32T are supposedly better for beginners, but I’d say they’re better for all-round riding. With such a wide spread, if you’re tired or feeling weak, you could always just click into an easier gear. I’d advise going for a narrow range 11-23T or 11-25T cassette only if all your riding is done on flats or in criterium races, or if you’re a particularly powerful rider.

Top: Shimano 105 RD-5701-SS short cage rear derailleur. Bottom: Shimano 105 RD-5700-GS medium cage rear derailleur.

Similarly, look for the longest cage rear derailleur you can find fitted to the bike. There is absolutely no downside to running a longer-caged rear derailleur on a road bike. In case you want to fit a cassette with easier gears, a rear derailleur with a longer cage means it’ll accept a wider range cassette at the outset. All you’ll need is an appropriately longer chain.

Up front, a 50/34T crank is just about the best option for most riders. Only strong racers need apply for 52/36T or 53/39T options (although such cranks make more sense on a small-wheeled bike). Hyro started with a 46/36T crank, and that was surprisingly useful for most riding.

COCKPIT

To maximize value, you’ll want aluminum in your cockpit. The material has many benefits, most noteworthy of which is that handlebars made of the stuff tend not to crack in a bad crash.

Giant paired Hyro with aluminum drop handlebars, with an anatomic bend and a rather deep 140 mm drop.

If you’re pinching pennies on your road bike while trying to improve your fit and comfort, I would prioritize the shape of the handlebars over the material they’re made of. From the traditional deep round bend, to the compact and anatomic bends, there are many shapes of drop handlebar to suit all sorts of riders.

Upgrading to carbon can improve vibration dampening and shave some weight, but carbon handlebars and seatposts are never cheap…nor are saddles with carbon rails.

PEDALS

Most road bikes don’t come with pedals as they’re a matter of personal preference, and everybody’s got their preferred clipless system.

Despite the high-zoot Saint and Deore XT branding, none of these pedals breaks the PhP3300 mark.

This is another area where more money spent doesn’t exactly get you more. Looking at the Shimano SPD lineup, you’re paying quite a bit more cash over the basic Deore PD-M530s to get the weight savings of a pair of Deore XT PD-M8020s. So far, all my pedals have cost less than PhP3300 new.

Among brands, Shimano pedals are a good choice for longevity due to their easy maintenance; many others such as Look can’t be serviced and are essentially disposable.

 

Let me know in the comments what else you could compromise to get yourself a deal on a road bike that’s long on value.

Reprise: Schwalbe Marathon Racer tires, 20″ x 1.5″

After four years, Bino was due for a change of footwear. Part of the reason why I stuck him on the turbo trainer at home was simply in anticipation of this fact.

The smaller 406 mm wheel size means greater rolling resistance and a faster overall wear rate, since the tires’ tread circumference makes more revolutions to cover a given distance compared to, say, Hyro‘s 622 mm. This was demonstrated in dramatic fashion by the sheer amount of rubber dust generated by my rear wheel whenever I used Bino on the turbo trainer.

Soon enough, it was also made crystal clear to me by how badly worn the rear tire got. At first the tread’s profile got flatter, with more of a pronounced step between the center and the shoulders. Later, the biased threads of the tire carcass were beginning to peek through, some of its carbon black oozing out and slipping on the turbo trainer. At this point, Bino sorely needed new rubber on his wheels and was definitely unsafe to ride on the road.

The outgoing Impac Streetpac 20″ x 1.75″ rear tire. You can see how much it’s flattened on its center tread.

The threads on the casing are starting to show due to the impregnated rubber having worn away. These aren’t roadworthy any more.

I paid a visit to Tryon in Makati and bought a pair of Schwalbe Marathon Racer tires. Bino’s outgoing front tire was also a Marathon Racer, but of a previous generation. The appearance of the sidewall logos, tread pattern, and other features were quite different between them, but they do share the Marathon series’ signature puncture protection.

FEATURES

• 20″ x 1.5″ (ISO 40-406 mm); also available in 16″, 18″, 26″, and 700C wheel fitments
• “Level 4 Raceguard” double-layer nylon puncture protection belt
• “SpeedGrip” rubber compound for good handling
• “LiteSkin” full-length reflective sidewall
• Wire bead
• 67 TPI casing
• Maximum load rating: 75 kg per tire
• Claimed weight: 340 g per tire
• Pressure range: 55-85 psi

IMPRESSIONS

According to the marketing spiel, Schwalbe’s Marathon tires were specifically built for toughness and long service life, for applications ranging from touring to commuting. The “Racer” is so-called because it is the lightest model of the Marathon range – not really for its competition chops. Reinforcing the commuting bent, this was the first tire I heard of that had reflective sidewalls, although my original outgoing pair didn’t as they were of an older vintage.

The new Marathon Racers I got had beads that were ridiculously tight. This particular set was perhaps the toughest pair of tires I’d ever fitted onto my custom LitePro x Newson Sportec wheelset with 14 mm internal width, especially the one I mounted on the front wheel. Every time I used my bead jack to wrestle the tire up and over the rim, the wire bead would just walk itself right out of the bead hooks somewhere else. It was a frustrating ordeal that resulted in at least one tire lever getting sacrificed to the tire mounting gods. Eventually I ditched the bead jack and used every other trick in the book to finally seat this tire on Bino’s front wheel, after much cursing, the process leaving me a sweaty mess.

The “arrowhead” tread pattern on the current generation of Marathon Racer tires. Some people have already tried these tires on a turbo trainer and were put off by the noise due to the broken center tread.

Despite the deeply cut directional blocks on the tread, the Marathon Racer is strictly an on-road tire. Not that you’d want to take a folding bike like Bino to the trails anyway; it’s just not made to withstand that sort of riding. At 60 psi front and 70 psi rear, grip is fairly good, even in the wet. They lend themselves well to the deep lean angles that small-wheeled folding bikes excel in when cornering at speed, even on shiny concrete parking floors where traction isn’t so great compared to paved asphalt or concrete roads. They will relinquish grip quite quickly when cornering or braking on wet steel surfaces or wet leaves, though.

Normally I’d go into more of the minutiae of tires, but any discussion about the rolling resistance these tires offer is moot, at best. Neither is any discussion on ride comfort much of one. The 20″ wheel and tire combo is never really going to roll or cushion road acne as well as a 700C combo, and I don’t think this will change much with the kind of tire you mount. That said, since starting my indoor training in January, it’s no hardship for me to maintain an average pace of 17-20 km/h around my usual commute loop, so the Marathon Racers do seem pretty efficient.

These tires sure look good in profile. Most of it is down to the reflective stripe aping a gum sidewall.

Given how much swearing it took to fit these tires onto Bino’s wheels, the Marathon Racers should make up for all that gruntwork with their puncture resistance. For the most part, they do. Even on my old set, I had only ever one puncture.  Best to carry a beefy set of tire levers with you if you run these on your folding bike, not the ones that come with your multi-tool…and make sure your rim strips or rim tape is up to snuff to avoid punctures from inside.

With the air volume of an inner tube under it, like most other tires, it should stretch out and loosen up a bit over time, allowing for easier dismounting and remounting…I hope. Fingers crossed.

With my camera’s flash fired, the reflective sidewalls really pop as a couple of rings.

Finally we come to the reflective sidewalls. I think they’re nice, and any feature that boosts visibility to other road users, especially at night, is worth considering. They’re not perfect, however. The reflective stripe on mine doesn’t follow the circumference of the tire so well – it has a few wiggles along its length. I’d also prefer that Schwalbe broke these down into four long segments instead of making the tire one reflective hoop, because when the tires are in motion, the reflective segments are more eye-catching and convey a sense of the bike moving much better.

The outgoing Schwalbe Marathon Racer bought back in 2013 that served as Bino’s front tire. It’s worn, but the difference in tread pattern is still notable compared to the newer pair.

VERDICT

Schwalbe’s Marathon Racer tires, in a sense, are ideal for small-wheeled folding bikes such as Bromptons or Dahons, where wheel removal, tire dismounting, puncture repair, and tire remounting can be such bothersome procedures that any measures taken to avoid all that faff are worth your money. Virtually unknown in mid-2013, my old pair went for PhP1,300 apiece; with their popularity rising in the past few years and manufacture moving to Indonesia, they can now be found for PhP1,000 each.

Despite the “Racer” name, I don’t really consider these ideal for competitive use. They’re jack-of-all-trades tires; durable, grippy enough, resistant to punctures, and mid-pack in width. For really fast folding bike riders, Schwalbe’s diamond-patterned Durano or full-slick Kojak might be better options, while comfort seekers might be better served by their balloon-like two-inch-wide Big Apples. For ultimate puncture protection, everything else be damned, Schwalbe can sell you a Marathon Plus.

Showing some skin(wall): Clement Strada LGG 700C x 32 mm

Road cycling is slowly learning a lesson that cyclocross racers, gravel riders, and mountain bikers have known for years: wider tires are better. The past few years have seen road cycling pros give up their 23 mm tires for a defacto standard 25 mm. In the Spring Classics races, such as Paris-Roubaix, the Strade Bianche, and the Ronde van Vlandeeren, pros will even swap in 27, 28 or 30 mm tires to deal with the gravel and cobblestones of these unique events.

In the past, I’ve pressed 28 mm slick road tires into duty for the majority of my riding, as Hyro came stock with 35 mm knobby mud tires that were just a little too ponderous for cornering on asphalt. I was generally fine with running my 28 mm tires at 80-90 psi, although one road ride back on the 35 mm knobbies did make the case for even wider rubber.

Here in the Philippines, 28 mm tires have been rather hard to come by. It wasn’t until recently that the gamut of choice for this width has widened. When the time came for my worn Continental Ultra Sport IIs to perhaps be relegated to turbo trainer duty, I wondered about my options.

It was then that I saw Clement Cycling offer its Strada LGG line locally in a huge width range – from 23 mm to 28 and even a whopping 32 mm. Even better, they offered almost all these in either traditional black sidewall, or a hipsterrific skinwall treatment. I don’t know about you, but the last time I saw skinwall tires in person was on my dad’s 1981 Peugeot ten-speed which I used to ride in high school.

I got these from Raven Cycles for PhP1200 apiece.

FEATURES

• 60 or 120 TPI casing
• Skinwall treatment available for 60 TPI versions
• Chevron/herringbone tread pattern
• 60 TPI version: 70A durometer single compound
• Puncture protection belt on tread
• Folding bead
• Claimed weight: 335 g
• Pressure range: 40-80 psi for 32 mm

IMPRESSIONS

One of Clement’s quirks is to name its tires after the airport codes of cities. “LGG” is the code for Liege in Belgium, home to the annual Liege-Bastogne-Liege bicycle race – another of the Spring Classics.

Having had sketchy moments on the all-slick Ultra Sport IIs when I rode over dusty roads, I began to get curious about how even a light tread pattern would help increase mechanical grip.

Well, one thing in favor of the Ultra Sport IIs, or indeed most road tires by Continental, is their on-road grip is pretty damn good despite the near-absence of tread. Their black art of effective tire compound is most evident when leaned over and turning. For pure road riding, it’s fair to say that Continental’s tires are hard to beat.

By comparison, the Strada LGGs…aren’t as straightforward.

Mounting them to my wheels was very easy and required zero tools, in contrast to the tire lever breakage I got when mounting the Ultra Sport IIs for the very first time. Do note that because of the width, these have much more air volume, and so need a bit more pumping to get up to pressure.

The skinwall treatment does make them look a little chunky on Hyro, but he is a cyclocross bike after all. Knobby skinwall tubular tires are a staple of European cyclocross, so there’s that. They do fill out the SKS P45 Longboard fenders very nicely!

Mounted to a 19 mm internal width rim and inflated to 60 psi, they’re true to size at 32 mm. The photo above doesn’t show it too well as I had to hold too many things to take this photo and the tape measure isn’t straight. I thought the herringbone tread would make a racket when used on a turbo trainer, but that wasn’t the case. There’s enough continuous slick center tread for the trainer’s resistance unit to silently work on, and the tread is on the shoulders for better cornering bite.

So…out on the road, how do they fare? Fundamentally, I was curious about how much comfort gains can be had moving to a wide 28 mm road tire to an even wider 32 mm road tire, and what compromises I should expect. At which point on the tire width scale does diminishing returns set in?

“Honey, does this make me look fat?”

It turns out that was only part of the question. In my first month riding these, I saw that the 32 mm Strada LGGs live and die by the air pressure you put into them. When you get to tires this wide, there’s not much to prepare you for the complex relationship between them and air pressure if, like me, you’re coming from narrower widths. These tires’ characteristics tend to vary wildly and drastically with small changes in pressure. Who knew that just 4 mm of width could give such a massive difference?

One night, I was riding around with these tires softer than normal. I could feel them holding me back and soaking up the watts I was pushing through my legs. It wasn’t until I got home that I found I had just 30 psi in my rear tire. Fair enough.

Toward the other extreme, plumped to 70 psi, the LGGs remained comfortable, rolled much better, and carried a surprising amount of speed when spun up. However, they were not happy at all with anything more than light turn-in. Along a left-right flik-flak along my usual long ride route, I had a sketchy moment as the front wheel lost grip shortly after light rainfall. An hour later, I could still feel the LGGs squirm a bit when making tight U-turns in the dry.

In subsequent rides, I detected the same peculiar slippage on wet patches, even after slight deflation to 65 psi. Clearly, there was still too much air, and the tire wasn’t deforming enough to grip wet asphalt properly.

After some more experimentation, and following Frank Berto’s 15% of sidewall height rule, I felt the LGGs hit their stride at 45 psi front, 50 psi rear. That was a total surprise, counter-intuitive even, given that my body weight doesn’t lend itself to these low pressures, and it’s close to the bottom of Clement’s recommended range. They still rolled well, yet behaved better with cornering forces going through their contact patches, retaining good firmness in the carcass with barely any squirm. Zero punctures, too.

Easing off on the pressure also alleviates their tendency to sniff out little ruts and longitudinal irregularities on the road.

At 50 psi, the Strada LGGs are proving to be happy campers, as grippy as they’re going to get. For people who want to spend long days on the saddle and explore, and are willing to experiment with air pressures, these are just the ticket.

And, to be honest, those fat skinwalls just look really good.