Shimano

While the rest of the country tries to decide who they will vote for for President, Nicole and I are making much more important decisions. These decisions will affect our riding and training for perhaps years, well after our next president has come and gone. We are making choices about the component selection for our next tandem!

Well I decided that bike number two was going to be purposely built for climbing. After a year of riding Pedal Force No. 1 I had to change a few things to make it work the way I wanted it to. Just as a review, No. 1 is full Dura-Ace built on a 1050 gram carbon frame Pedal Force RS. I have many light weight parts on it but the key factor was reliability. That bike comes in at just about 15.9 pounds. When I built it up originally it was just  over 15 pounds but I did have to replace the fork and stem, also a change in wheels brought the weight up.

An interesting article was posted today on Shimano’s wheel building at their factory in Malaysia. Some things I did not know. All of Shimano’s wheels are hand-built. The only exception is that a few wheels use a robot to stuff the hub with spokes. Otherwise there are no robots in the wheel building assembly. Shimano makes all the parts that go into the wheel, the hubs, spokes and rims at the same factory. They control the entire supply chain. All their wheels except the all carbon Dura-Ace tubulars, which are made in Japan, come from the Malaysian factory.