I bought my Felt F5 new 9 years ago. My sedentary, overweight, middle-aged thinking stretched to: "I want a road bike, this looks fast, and hey, it's been heavily discounted, so it's a bargain". No experience, no bike fit, no LBS, no riding friends, no clue. 3 or 4 rides and less than 50km later I gave up. I couldn't cope with the bike geometry, even with a flipped stem, the saddle hurt like hell, I could barely get up the first hill, Staple Lane, that I met, and the 2nd, Guildford Lane/White Lane, was an insurmountable wall. I left the poor bike unused and unloved for 7 years.
I dug it out of the garage in August 2020 during the dark days of UK lockdown 2 and we're both now coming up on 19,000km with 240,000m of climbing. Most of my riding is up, down and around the Surrey Hills area of the UK, so lots of short, sharp hills and ropey road surfaces. I'm not fast, I don't race, but I've completed my first hilly audax and sportive events this year, and I'm inching towards my OFFICIAL 100Climbs No14 Box Hill target of 7 minutes. To get the weight weenie stats up front, the bike as new was probably 8.2+kg without pedals and is currently just under 7.3kg including cages, phone mount, bell (very important) and pedals.
My first 'upgrade' was purely for survival; switching from the original 11-25 cassette to an 11-28 and shortly thereafter to an 11-32. That helped. Next up/sidegrades continued the comfort/fit theme: tyres from 23's to GP5000 25's, a new 120mm stem (up from 100mm) and carbon handlebar, seatpost and saddle with cut-out (bliss!). The Kalloy Uno 7 stem, Toseek 'Super Light' carbon bars, and Elita One saddle and offset seat-post, all recommendations from here, sent me down the AliExpress rabbit hole for the first time. With the weight weenie bug just beginning to bite, in came Ali carbon bottle cages.
By that stage I'd decided that the original Mavic CXP 22 rimmed wheels must be holding me back, so built up new ones with Kinlin XR31T rims, Sapim Race spokes & Miche Primato Syntesi hubs. Thanks to Malcom Borg for his advice on this board and his thecycleclinic.co.uk site and my apologies for not buying the parts from him. I almost wore through the rear rims in under 1000km; I've now learnt to use the front brake more and to check brake-pads before every ride. A 2nd Kinlin took a nasty gouge from a pot-hole strike, giving me more re-lacing practice, but the wheels have been true and trouble-free for over 15,000km since then. They've trimmed about 400g from the bike, though they're still a relatively meaty 1710g.
The bike came with a Shimano 105 5700 10-speed groupset. Replacing the brakes with on-sale Ultegra R8000 dual-pivots (and Koolstop Salmons) dramatically improved my braking and descent confidence. At which point I had my first and so far only "over-confident but under-skilled" accident. Lots of missing skin, finger-nail pulled off and a broken rib. Bike was fine. I'm back to being a slow and cautious descender.
Next up, with mechanical quickly going out of fashion, was to fit bargain half-price R8000 shifters and derailleurs. They're awesome - it's such a treat having the bike change gear whenever you ask it. Only drawback: the gunky coating on the inners - it's going to be uncoated, shiny, polished stainless from now on. The new group-set also meant a new cassette and chains: SROAD SLR2 lightweight monobloc all-steel-cogs 11-32 cassette and 4 KMC X11-EL's in rotation. A perfect time to jump on the chain-waxing band-wagon. A slow cooker, plain old food-grade paraffin wax, nothing added, nothing taken away and 300km or so between chain swaps, giving me a chain-wax day every 5-6 weeks. The cassette and the 4 chains between them are at 8000km, looking and feeling good. And, oh the joy of clean hands, and the quiet but deeply satisfying sense of schadenfreude at friends' grubby mitts, jerseys, bibs, handlebars, shifters, keys, front doors, dogs, children & partners when they drop chains.
The F5 was shipped with FSA's inaccurately titled Gossamer crankset. I finally managed to snag a lightly used SRAM Red Exogram BB30 crankset on Ebay, and because it's a rather lovely carbon thing, I also invested in a chain catcher. 250g (well minus 6g for the chain catcher) saved. Swapping out the chunky original QR's, headset expander, collar & spacers, and the seatpost collar with suspiciously delicate looking AliExpress substitutes brings us nearly up to date. None of these was anywhere near the lightest to be found, but the titanium QR's and the single-bolt seatpost collar in particular leave me a little nervous, though they've survived their first 200km. Most recent change was much-needed - wrap some light Cinelli Cork bar-tape.
If you got this far, then that brings us up to date. A rather handsome (I'm biased), reasonably comfortable but old-fashioned, non-aero, mechanical, externally cabled, rim brake 7.267kg bike that I thoroughly enjoy riding all day and that I can easily maintain & service for myself.
Weaknesses? Tyre clearance. I'd love some more grip, a bit more pot-hole resiliance and a bit more comfort. I have a 28c (measures 29mm on a 19mm internal width rim) up front, but even the 25c I have at the back shows some sidewall wear and a 28c would only have 2.5mm clearance.
What's next? Can I safely and, well, frugally, get below 7kg for a ride-every-day bike? And will that get me up Box Hill 14 seconds faster? (No). I've ordered Xpedo single-sided RF-S1 SPD's from AliExpress as potential replacements for my Shimano PD-M780 double-sided SPD's. There are lighter options out there, but none near the £30 of the RF-S1's. If I can get the hang of single-sided then they'll take 99g off. I'll also look at some of the light-weight outer cables next time I need to re-cable.
Beyond this, my options for safe and budget-restricted weight reductions are narrowing down. I'm 80kg on a good day, I'm nearer 60 than 50, I ride in a hilly area with plenty of free pot-holes, and I've discovered that it really hurts when you fall off.
- Brakes: EE G4's are too rich for me - real ones go for £400+ used on Ebay. I'm tempted by the July 21's, but I don't think they'll do as good a job as my Ultegras, and the current UK price of £160 is expensive for an experiment.
Lightweight tpu inner-tubes: I could save 100g's compared to my Continental Race Lights, but @alanyu has frightened me off the RideNow's.
Wheels: these might be the next mini-project. Find a moderately priced, well-reviewed set of 26-28mm wide, 35-40mm deep, hooked rims with a high-temp resin & water-clearing brake-surface cuts, pop them onto Bitex RAF/RAR12's with some Pillar wing spokes and brass nipples and I should have a sub-1500g winner. Would need to work out whether I can go 24 rear (triplet lacing?) & 20 front. Even as summer/dry wheels, they'd need to be nearly as bomb-proof as my current Kinlin/Miche/Sapim wheels though.