Team Bikes - Part 3: First Bike, First Ride
Gaulzettis are in the house. Quite literally - I have a bunch of these bikes in my house now.
I was able to build mine up last night and took a first ride today. I did a fairly long ride up in the Fitchburg area today with Jay and all I can say is how impressed I am. It really does everything well and rides very similarly to the best steel bikes I've ridden - not a bad thing for an oversized-tubed aluminum bike. As a team, we feel fortunate to be able to ride such capable and unique bikes and I expect these will rise to every occasion during this season.
I could go on and on about it, but for right now, I'll just post some pictures of the frames and the complete bike. I built this bike up with a mixed Force/Rival group for right now. It's a Battenkill-specific build, so durability and function are the name of the game. It weighs in at about 16.5 lbs with pedals and a stupidly heavy FSA Gossamer crank, which will be replaced shortly with a much lighter K-Force Lite carbon crank. To me, the real beauty of these bikes is how functional they are. There are no superfluous features for the sake of marketing hype and no corners cut when it comes to build quality. These are simple, well-built race-specific bikes - something strangely missing from the market these days.
Here are some images I took during the build process.
The frames are made from Dedacciai light alloy - 7005 series aluminum.
Embrocation logo on the seat tube.
Dropouts and derailleur hangers are a simple yet effective affair.
Dedacciai supplies a propietary seat mast cap to match their light alloy tubesets. It has 4cm of vertical adjustment and is very easy to install and adjust.
Our painter did a truly great job. All the lines are clean and accurate with excellent paint clarity.
Yup.
These welds don't mess around. They're text-book quality.
Chainstay bridge is nothing fancy. Big welds get the job done.
The downtube and chainstays are huge. Using the BB30 shell allows maximum real estate for the welds.
The team bikes use standard Chris King headsets.
The bottom brackets are huge BB30 compatible aluminum shells.
The team bikes use Serotta F3 forks, which share contruction methodology with Reynolds Ouzo Pro forks but in a different shape in multiple stiffness levels.
The Serotta forks also use titanium dropouts without lawyer tabs for easy wheel changes.
The bikes very nicely match our team kits. A necessity, of course.
More bikes to build this weekend...
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more pictures and ride reports from other team members.
I was able to build mine up last night and took a first ride today. I did a fairly long ride up in the Fitchburg area today with Jay and all I can say is how impressed I am. It really does everything well and rides very similarly to the best steel bikes I've ridden - not a bad thing for an oversized-tubed aluminum bike. As a team, we feel fortunate to be able to ride such capable and unique bikes and I expect these will rise to every occasion during this season.
I could go on and on about it, but for right now, I'll just post some pictures of the frames and the complete bike. I built this bike up with a mixed Force/Rival group for right now. It's a Battenkill-specific build, so durability and function are the name of the game. It weighs in at about 16.5 lbs with pedals and a stupidly heavy FSA Gossamer crank, which will be replaced shortly with a much lighter K-Force Lite carbon crank. To me, the real beauty of these bikes is how functional they are. There are no superfluous features for the sake of marketing hype and no corners cut when it comes to build quality. These are simple, well-built race-specific bikes - something strangely missing from the market these days.
Here are some images I took during the build process.
The frames are made from Dedacciai light alloy - 7005 series aluminum.
Embrocation logo on the seat tube.
Dropouts and derailleur hangers are a simple yet effective affair.
Dedacciai supplies a propietary seat mast cap to match their light alloy tubesets. It has 4cm of vertical adjustment and is very easy to install and adjust.
Our painter did a truly great job. All the lines are clean and accurate with excellent paint clarity.
Yup.
These welds don't mess around. They're text-book quality.
Chainstay bridge is nothing fancy. Big welds get the job done.
The downtube and chainstays are huge. Using the BB30 shell allows maximum real estate for the welds.
The team bikes use standard Chris King headsets.
The bottom brackets are huge BB30 compatible aluminum shells.
The team bikes use Serotta F3 forks, which share contruction methodology with Reynolds Ouzo Pro forks but in a different shape in multiple stiffness levels.
The Serotta forks also use titanium dropouts without lawyer tabs for easy wheel changes.
The bikes very nicely match our team kits. A necessity, of course.
More bikes to build this weekend...
posted by Team Embrocation at
2:13 PM
2 Comments:
very nice, i approve.
Great pics, nice table.
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