The unidirectional carbon weave shines through a bit but only at the bottom bracket area. Everywhere else, it’s solid black. Starting my inspection at the fork, I was surprised to see a slotted hole that was not machined, but much rather drilled/filed by hand.
Cost cutting for sure. Of course, one is supposed to add a brake line guide there and you won’t see that slot but still interesting to spot this. Bottom bracket is 40.95-40.98mm throughout on both sides, so well done. Both thru axle inserts needed tapping, especially on the fork. I also faced the caliper mounts but this is something that I do anyway. With an endoscope camera I checked the inside of the frame for irregularities. No surprises there, everything looked well-made and very clean. I admit I expected nothing less from Giant.
After inspecting the frame and fork, I started to remove the paintjob on the fork. 95% of the surface area got the well-known knife method. You have much more control compared to sanding, especially if you are using an electric sander. I own one and have used it many times in the past but I prefer to stay away from it now. Working in tight areas or around corners, it’s almost impossible to not damage the first layer of carbon. After I was done with the knife, I used 600 and then 800 sandpaper.
A thick coat of clear first, then black paint, primer and filler in some areas after which the first layer of carbon weave was exposed. There were many imperfections that needed filler. I invested around four hours for the whole fork. And it’s not something I enjoyed to do, especially since I had to wear a mask all the time. Take a guess how much material I was able to remove.
It was 42g. Which is a LOT.
I sanded more than 20 framesets to this day and only two times I have seen a fork with more removable material than that. It’s 2024 and in terms of paint, Giant is still in 2010. In my experience, you can remove 10-20g of weight at the fork and 50-80g at the frame in most cases. Specialized being a notable exception with their superlight paintjobs (20g-30g on the newest S-Works SL8). BTW, 325g for an uncut fork is pretty light. And to those who have doubts about the weights: I use two Kern precision scales. So definitely no Park Tool underreporting
Some impressions:
The horizontal line on the second pic shows that the right fork leg is composed of two parts. A lower part with an aluminium thread insert and an upper part of the fork leg. They are glued together. And the vertical curved line is not a hairline crack. It’s just the parting line from the mould.
Behold the first Cadex fork
And then the stripping of the frame… Frame and fork were definitely not painted at the same place or at least not with the same material. While the fork was ok to work with, the same can’t be said about the frame. Especially the primer was super hard to remove and required frequent sharpening of the blades and many times I was close to using the electric sander. More than 20 hours went into this eventually. At least it was a lot of heavy material: The naked frame now weighs 879 grams, 107g less than with paint. As with the fork mentioned earlier, it’s been a while since I have seen such a weight reduction on a frame.
A few observations: In the factory they used a lot of white filler where the two triangles are glued together. The DS rear dropout is made out of cast aluminium. That’s definitely a cost saving measure. NDS is carbon. In general, the frame is well made for sure.
This is where I'm at currently. I need to murder out the aluminium rear end, sand the frame with 800 grit sandpaper and add some logos.
I'll then send the frame and fork to my painter who will just add clearcoat with a ceramic coating in it. And then it's time to build this thing.
Did I mention that I don't like to do this kind of work at all 
