Deal of the Day

It’s been a couple weeks, but I figured I should capture some notes from my first weekend of shopping for a new bike and doing test rides. Maybe this will be useful to you, maybe not.

On the process:

As the buyer, you’re in the driver’s seat. Take your time and check out everything the marketplace has to offer. Put the new innovations to the test. Ride a lot of bikes from all over the spectrum—even stuff you have no intention of buying—and have fun doing it. There’s a lot of good bikes on the market and it can be hard to choose between them, but in the end, something will speak to you.

The one thing to be careful about on test rides: remember that you’re evaluating the bike, not the fit or the gearing or the saddle or the derailleur adjustment or the wheels, because all those things can (and will) be changed. So what’s left? A little of this and that: road feel, frame fit and finish, handlebars and stem, weight…

On the SRAM gruppo:

SRAM wasn’t a player when I bought my last bike, and everyone crows about how great their gruppo is, so one of my first goals was to put it to the test.

What I found didn’t impress me. Their stuff’s light, but I think it’s poorly designed. My main complaints revolve around how their shift levers work: push halfway and you shift into a harder gear; push further and you shift into an easier gear; push farther still and you shift into a second or even a third easier gear. Great idea, right?

Wrong. First, when I jumped multiple gears I found it hard to calibrate whether I was downshifting two or three cogs. That can be annoying when you’re searching for just the right gear ratio.

Much worse things happen if you are on a steep ascent and go to downshift but only manage half a throw, which actually causes you to upshift into a harder gear! And if you already happen to be in the largest cog (easiest gear) and try to downshiftpast that, SRAM only blocks the far throw of the lever; it’s perfectly happy to accept half a throw, which again causes you to upshift: exactly the opposite of what the user intended. And that’s my definition of “bad design”.

Another thing I’m used to doing with my Shimano setup is shifting both front and rear simultaneously. By upshifting one while downshifting the other, I am able to make a smaller jump between gear ratios than if I just shifted the front chainring. On Shimano it’s easy, because you can throw matching levers; but on SRAM, it’s confusing, because you have to remember throw one lever halfway and the other one all the way.

So even though a lot of people juice over SRAM’s gruppo, I found a lot to dislike about it. Combine that with SRAM brakes’ weaker stopping power, and I’ve pretty much ruled them out right from the start.

On Shimano’s Ultegra electronic gruppo:

Another thing I wanted to try out was Shimano’s brand-new enthusiast-level electronic shifting. I’m not a huge fan of technology for its own sake, especially when you have to pay a big premium for it. On the other hand, a lot of people have been pleasantly surprised by the electronic Dura-Ace components, so I figured I’d ride these for myself, even if I was unlikely to spend money to have battery-powered servos to do my shifting for me.

The bottom line is that it’s just as slick as promised. The shifting was quick, smooth, effortless, and intuitive. It was nice… but I had expected it to be nice.

What I hadn’t expected were some of the implications. Because the electronic shifter cable isn’t under tension like mechanical cables, there’s no risk of a shifter cable ever snapping, which has happened to me two or three times on long rides. And since it’s not under tension, a new shifter cable doesn’t stretch, so there’s no need to go back to the bike shop to have derailleur adjustments done after a tune-up.

Not that you’d ever have to anyways, because the electronic shifters automatically adjust to keep the chain centered on the cogs. That means you’ll never have chainskip or balky shifts or need any adjustment of your drivetrain. Even if you do the most ridiculous crosschaining, the system adjusts the derailleurs and chainline to avoid the loud complaints that a mechanical setup would experience.

In other words, you wind up with a completely reliable, nearly foolproof, and maintenance-free drivetrain that you don’t have to think about at all. That has nearly sold me on Shimano’s Ui-2 gruppo.

The only things holding me back? It’s heavier than a mechanical gruppo. It’s a hell of a lot more expensive. And I have questions about its vulnerability in a crash scenario.

Definitely worth looking into if you’re in the market.

On Trek’s Domaine:

Another thing I wanted to try was the Trek Domaine. Trek is known for making Lance Armstrong’s bikes, but this brand new model is their first foray into the endurance bike market, which expects a fast bike with a longer wheelbase and more upright riding position.

Now, I’m biased against Trek. I’m usually not a fan of the favorite, whether it’s Lance Armstrong or Trek as the 300-pound gorilla in the mass-production bike market. But I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt and ride this bike, since it ought to be a worthy entry into a fairly specific market.

It was also hard to get over Trek’s strident enforcement of how the name should be pronounced: doh-MAH-knee. As a designer, if you have to browbeat the user on something as basic as what your product is called, you’re probably doing it wrong.

I actually rode two Trek bikes—the other a Madone—and on both of them the chainstays flared out so wide that I found my heel kicking them on every pedal revolution. Both bikes were surprisingly heavy, too. The Doh-MAH-knee, despite being a comfort bike, did nothing to smooth the ride over rough pavement; it transmitted every shock, bump, and vibration from the road straight into the rider’s body.

I rode the Doh-mah-knee in the hopes that this new model would show me something that would overcome my natural aversion to Trek as a household name. While their bikes were okay, there was nothing outstanding about them that would lead me to choose them over more established and better performing endurance bikes.

The only thing that almost impressed me was Trek’s “Project One”, which basically allows you to choose what components your bike comes with. That’s a huge benefit over most bike companies, whose models only come in one or two configurations. But even Project One only lets you select from a very tiny spectrum of approved alternatives, so their vaunted configurability is actually not much more than a nominal advantage.

So don’t expect to see me riding up on a Doh-MAH-knee any time soon.