Mountain: 2009 Giant Anthem X2- Custom Build
Towards the middle of last year, my beloved 21.8 lb Santa Cruz Superlight
started to give up. The wheels were cracked, virtually every bearing on the bike needed replacement and the drivetrain was shot. So it was time for a new bike.
With help of a grad present donation from my parents, I went with Giant's new and improved Anthem. With 100mm in the front and 100mm on the rear, it has much more of a trail bike feel compared to my past rides. Its also a huge improvement over the single pivot design that was my superlight. While the superlight flew up hills, it would often suffer from severe brake jack during descents. I have yet to get the Anthem to climb as well as superlight, but it certainly makes up for it in every other aspect. It soaks up bumps better, corners better, and feels alot more confident through the technical stuff.
While I did race the bike stock for a couple weekly races, my first order of business was to drop some weight and 'race-ify' the bike. Stock, it weighs 25 even. Not horrible, but not good enough for Pro-Elite.
I ditched the stock Mavic 317 rims, generic spokes, and with some advice from my boss Glenn @ Braun's went for DT 4.2d's laced with DT revolutions. I kept the stock WTB laserdisc hubs since they were extremely light. I've heard reports of reliability problems with these hubs, but I'll take my chances. The resulting wheelset was 1550g. Stiff, and not stupid light.
The seatpost, stem and handlebar were all Race Face Evolve XC. Good reliable stuff, but not worthy of someone who swaps steel bolts for ti bolts =) So it was swapped with an EC90 Bar, Syntace f99 stem, and EC70 seatpost.
The WTB seat was replaced with a standard issue Selle Italia SLR.
Dorky gear indicators were tossed in the trash, the XT shadow was replaced with XTR. In the near future I will probably get rid of the 22-32-44 chainrings and replace with a 27-38 combination.
The resulting package is around 24lb. With plans to try tubeless again, and swapping out the heavy shimano rotors, hitting 23lbs is a reasonable goal. Slap on some Furious Fred's for Albion and you have yourself a 22.5lb race whip.
ROAD: 2005 LeMond Buenos Aires w. Powertap Pro
At 19.6lbs with powertap, its 5lbs off from being among the svelte elite carbon whips in the Senior 1/2 peloton. However, it has logged in miles and miles of training through the twisty steep hills of the escarpment, the sun baked farm fields of Wellington Region, the vicious descents of Georgia, and the drunken jaunts of Guelph suburbia.
It is more or less stock. Ive gone through 6 sets of tires,(Ive tried virtually every top end tire out there, and have to say that Conti GP4000's are the best overall)
Specced with Campy Veloce/Centaur it has been solidly reliable. The crankset is an FSA SLK standard. Light, stiff, and so far reliable..but it is FSA so ill keep an eye on it. The steel/carbon frame is a unique breed. It uses Greg LeMond's geometry which has you stretched out a little further. The result is a bike which is great for century rides, not so great if you want a snappy criterium bike. Regardless, I can assure you that the weakest link is the rider, not the bike, in any criteriums this year.
Pedals are Look Keo's. I originally had some Dura-Ace pedals that were hand me downs..but they developed a crack in one of the bearing races, so it ended up being cheaper to just to throw on some new pedals.
So far the keo's are great. The Dura-Ace pedals had a more locked in feel, but the Keo's feel much closer to my 979 mtb pedals. Keeping it consistent across the two bikes is a good thing IMO.
