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Corridori’s Brian
Curtis is LondonCycleSport’s cyclo cross guru and he was nudged into action by a quick chat to give us a few tips about reducing your bike’s weight.
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There was a time when the market was awash with colourful Ti and alloy bolts,
but now you will need to hunt harder and maybe venture onto E-Bay to find such goodies.
Brian’s tips
Where it’s safe to run them (tried and tested by me on my Road/Cross/MTB bikes)
Chainsets
for removal/replacement of the cranks)
Brakes Pair Road
star driven Allen bolt to hold the brakes to the frame/fork on there Record
Skeleton Brakes
Weineman Cross Brakes per brake/wheel
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Mechs Rear
Cross or MTB bikes as they come under more pressure and are more likely to snap
off),
use Hollow Steel jockey wheel bolts to shave a few grams off)
Plus
shell
bikes
So how much weight can you save?
Brian tells us quite a bit, but we intend to return to this theme in the future
where we will see how much weight we can knock off with a lightening kit.
Brian update (9/2)
Mr Mer makes a good pint in the Forum about the "non use" of alloy
brake cable clamp bolts, quite a lot of Pro’s used to use the SRP Alloy versions
in the late 90’s (Motorola for example had a complete set of blue bolts supplied
to them).
Tony Rominger was another weight fanatic even going as far as having 7 or
8 different bikes for the TDF with different bikes for the TT (a least 2 diff
models) flat road stages (again think 2), hilly road stages (lost count) with
a few Colnago’s with different coloured bolts, skewers, bottle cages (remember
the old Elite Cuissi cages that came in loads of colours?) he even went as
far as to start drilling out anything he could. (ala Merckx style)
Rominger used lightweight chainrings, rear mechs, brakes, brake levers, gear
levers, seat pins, and he was one of the few "modern day" cyclists
to realise that you make the bikes as light as possible then go and slap 2
great big bottles full of liquid on your bike, so he only ran 1 bottle cage
for the high mountain stages and normal brake levers with down tube gear shifters.
I used to run the Chiappuchi/Pantani set up of 1 Rear Ergo lever, 1 Record
carbon brake lever and a front mech down tube shifter on my road bike as it
was way lighter and you could get round that annoying front mech rubbing on
the chain noise.
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