I don’t know what I was expecting when I did a weight analysis of Le Chacal. That didn’t stop me from being surprised that my two wheels account for a full one-third of the total 13.84kg (roughly 30lbs) bicycle.
I’m glad to discover this, because I have known all along that my wheels are overbuilt. The rims are wide and heavily spoked, meant for a BMX bike, and the Kenda tires are pretty chunky, too. So cutting the weight with lighter wheels should make a good relative contribution to the bike. A ten percent savings here would amount to around 400 grams (nearly a pound) or a total 3% weight reduction.
Where can I make other savings? There is nothing I can do about the seat tube+cranks. I’m not sure how much the seat tube weighs versus the crank, but it’s probably 95% crankset, 5% seat tube. The crankset is a high-end Shimano set, so that’s about as good as it’ll be.
There’s no savings in the Fork/Headset either, unless I were to replace the steel blade fork with a carbon fork. Maybe I should consider that. Any meaningful savings from a different headset?
The seat stay and chain stay are made from fork blades. Consequently they’re pretty heavy. There’s nothing to do about it now, but I should think about this for Matt’s bike, The Fourth Protocol. Longer term, maybe I could try out carbon seat stays. Sulaiman suggested that we can probably use lighter tubeset overall.
There’s not much left than incremental savings on some of the components. The Pannier rack is heavy and nothing special. Perhaps I can hack that down or find an alternative. The seat is a stock Bontrager MTB seat. Nothing special and not especially nice for touring anyway. Maybe I’ll loot the fizik seat from my road bike.
Relative weights
This bike will never be a feather, nor need it be. I can probably save some weight and rolling resistance with some lighter wheels and maybe trimming a bit here and there. But, as Alton Brown likes to say, “a pint’s a pound the world around.” Filling up my water bottle can counteract my expensive component upgrades. At the end of the day, this is touring bike, not a racer, so it doesn’t matter so much.
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[...] calculating Le Chacal’s weight at around 30lbs last night I tried to put it into [...]
[...] My graph indicates, practically yes, they’re all similar enough. The middle sizes are most “efficient”, around 25g lighter than the estimated 200g weight (equating to 12% improvement on theory). But 25 grams, even on my six couplings, adds up to only 150g weight saving, which is miniscule. [...]
[...] (equating to 12% improvement on theory). But 25 grams, even on my six couplings, adds up to only 150g weight saving, which is miniscule. This entry was posted in Bike Parts. Bookmark the permalink. ← Custom Randonneur Bag [...]