On Wednesday, October 16, 2019 at 10:12:32 AM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
I have a Redline Conquest which is a Cross bike. As far as I can tell the only difference between a cross, gravel and road bike is the bottom bracket being slightly higher on the first two.

There are other geometry differences between the three besides BB height, including chain stay length, head and seat tube angles,steering geometry and tire clearance.

It is a disk brake bike and I have a friend coming next year and need to build him a rider. He is a roady.

When I first built this bike there were no hydraulic road levers available so I made it a flat bar bike with MTB components. I spoke before about how dangerous disk brake bikes are but on a road bike they should be more manageable since you have longer sight lines and can plan your braking.

Dangerous for you, but not the rest of the world.


The bike will of course be Campy so I've been trying to find 11 speed hydraulic levers. I can get Potenza levers but they have the "cheap" Campy problem of only shifting one gear up at a time.

Why will it be a Campy? Buy a 105 11sp hydro group and call it good.

So my plan is to get a Chorus or Record set of used levers now that everyone is changing over to 12 speeds and to install a Potenza rear derailleur and 11-32 cassette. I could get this fairly easily for Shimano but Campy doesn't believe that lower gears are for real men.

Buy Shimano and skip the headache. Re-sale will be better for the CX market..

One of the questions I have, and can't find the answer for, is whether the Chorus or Record levers will work with the Potenza rear derailleur. So as I'm building it I have to learn that.

The Redline is aluminum and it will be lighter than Mike's custom steel Tomasinni so my plan is to put the Fulcrum tubeless tires and disk brakes on them to give him a dose of modern technology which he has spend the last several years denying is worthwhile. While I happen to think that tubeless is the only way to go on California roads, I see disks as bad. They put all of the braking loads in the incorrect areas of the bike and lord knows what will happen in the future. We've already seen them having to move the sizes of the axles up 2 mm and to eliminate the real quick release function.

The rest of the world manages. I commute on discs every day, and they're the only thing I ride for wet weather weekend riding. IMO, a front through-axle is as quick or quicker than a QR with lawyer lips when it comes to fixing flats. Rear is probably slower. The bike racks at my building have lots of disc-brake bikes ridden by ordinary commuter goons who aren't killing themselves.

BTW, why all the effort? Don't you have three or four road bikes? Give him one of those and skip the rebuild. Sell the CX bike if you're not using it.

My disc CX is my commuter, so it gets lots of use. It's also a pig and not much fun to ride compared to the gravel bike or road bike. I don't like Cannondale's choice of steering angle, which is counter the usual steep CX front end. It's too slack and gives the front end a super heavy feeling. I got the frame as a warranty replacement and it came with the new "out front" geometry along with BB30, a different HS standard and other stuff I had to accommodate during my rebuild. The front disc is, in fact, a little soft, and I'll have to attend to that. It's probably a dirty pad, or I need to juice it up a little. I rebuilt that caliper, and I'm hoping its not a leak -- which I doubt.

-- Jay Beattie.