Pro Bike Fitter's 9 Most HATED Bikes

James Thomas is a bike fitter with over 20 years of experience in today's episode nine bikes that he hates [Music] there's a bike that just really annoys the out of me it's a bike that had every possibility of being like a real game changer it could have been a really really great bike it's light it's stiff it's comfortable it's compliant it's easy to adjust it's the specialized ethos the bike has nice organic lines it's got skinny seat stays for greater compliance it's got a threaded bottom bracket which isn't going to Creak it isn't fully integrated which means it's easy and it's cheap to service and this was a bike that was touted by specialized as a bike for the people why is it built like a race bike there it's got a short head tube a long top tube the ridge is way too long for any almost all consumers the stack is too low for almost all consumers which means that most people riding it are going to need a whole load of spaces underneath it a really short stem in order to get into fit compromising the otherwise what would have been a really great uh riding bike and turning it into the heat it's exactly the same geometry as the tarmac uh so I don't really understand why it even exists uh sorry specialized you have the opportunity to make a great bike but it's a thumbs down for me couldn't they just have made it shorter couldn't they just look what they should have done is they should have taken roommate geometry they should have made this bike with rube geometry and it would have been like it would have been amazing most road bikes and most of the road bikes on this list are not really fit for purpose they're designed around 20 year old 60 kilo athlete they can pedal at 350 Watts all day long and puts out tens of hours a week on on the bike translate that to a consumer most consumers that come in here are men aged 35 to 60 instead of the desk all day carrying a few extra pounds probably put out power of anywhere between 150 and 250 Watts there is a big big difference there in terms of the human being uh that is the in terms of the end user why can't the bike industry just make a bike that is light stiff comfortable Thunder ride but also fits well [Music] the rebel endurance SL now actually this is a slightly muddy one because there's nothing actually wrong with the bike itself per se you know it's a sort of Aero road bike the problem with it is the name this is not an endurance bike in no on no planet in this solar system is this an endurance bike for instance if we compare the stack of reach of an endurance SL to a corresponding size of a Tarmac it is six mil longer and three mil lower than a specialized tarmac which is a racing bike so the problem with this is that anybody wanting an endurance bike is going on with the racing bike so it's going to end up relatively uncomfortable and anybody wanting a racing bike is never going to buy it because it's got the word endurance written on it so just a bit of a silly name really more than anything else just be aware it's a long low aggressive racing bike [Music] this is just a marketing exercise this is something that many women are led to believe that these are bikes that are designed specifically for women I guess what we've got to think about is what are the the needs for women and in my opinion my humble opinion from what we've learned in bike fitting is that women don't really need bikes to be pink they don't need to be Panda to they need bikes in a greater degree of smaller sizes more often than not historically the scope the school of thought with women's bikes is that um women have very short torsos and very long legs and this is true for some women but there are many women out there that also have relatively long backs and short legs there are lots of men out there who have very short daughters and very long legs I will admit I'll be the first to admit it's a particularly problematic shape in bike fitting because it predisposes a rider to being too stretched out so historically you've always been told that women's bikes are shorter women's bikes have steeper seat angles or slacker seat angles because of their longer femurs the fact of the matter is that women don't need a women's specific product they need more variety belonging below a certain size range let's take the Envy live in an extra small so this is this is Rebel sorry this is ribbles this is Liv's kind of racing bike it's the smallest bike they make and it's got a reach figure of 370 mil for context that's the same size that's about the same as a 52 centimeter tarmac it's nothing remotely small about that you will hear me uh talk a lot about reach here because reach is a a very important factor in in uh how Rider interacts with the saddle how they interact with the front of the bike the amount of weight that they have on the front of the bike excessive reach is a very very strong contributor to pain in cycling and when you've got bikes that are excessively long you either have a rider that is too stretched out and as a result they typically gravitate to the nose of the saddle or they fall into the front of the bike or you end up having to compromise on the way that the bike rides by fitting very very short stems which means that the bike feels very erratic and very scatty at high speed uh making it even worse for women who are typically less confident with things like descending for instance because they've been writing handlebars that are a yard too wide for them which means they can't breathe the brake levers which results in less control speaking of handlebars the concept of women's bikes is a great concept and most manufacturers they sort of kind of have the right idea but they don't follow it through enough so for instance a medium-sized women's bike will have a 40 centimeter handlebar which is narrower than what you would get on an average sized men's bike but it's still the same size width Volvo all right and you ride I think and what most in fact I would say 90 of the men that leave here leave with a 40 centimeter handlebar whereas women vary a hell of a lot more in terms of their shoulder width I imagine women anywhere between 38 centimeters right the way down to less than 32 centimeters obviously we've got a much greater spectrum of individual women particularly when it comes to width with handlebars So to that end we've we actually stop like 32 centimeter handlebars that we Import in Taiwan and none of this has been done with with women's specific bikes there is no attention to detail to uh to just general uh anatomy and morphology of how women are laid out and I think the only brand okay people are going to think the Panorama sponsors this channel pinarella is a fantastic brand for smaller individuals because they carry a number of sizes below a certain size range with regards to live it's basically a giant with a different lick of paint on it what we did find having looked into the geometry tables is that an Envy live is about five millimeters shorter than a Propel which is the equivalent giant but five mil it's not really enough uh and and again you know on on what's supposed to be a racing bike they've only got three different sizes three sizes and those sizes are slightly staggered against the men's in the the the small is the same size more or less as a small men's and they do so realistically they do one bite that's one size smaller than the men's in the live range so I guess my point to this is that live is nowhere near as female focused as I feel it could be and should be and I believe it's just a marketing strategy [Music] I mean I'm sure it rides fast and all but maybe not but I I hate this just because it's ugly and I know beauty is in the either Beholder in honest but this is this is my list not yours um it's like the evil love child or the Civello S5 at the front end and the giant propeller at the back end and it just got it no why why would you put gold writing on a chillest day buy do we want to talk about the S5 as well they're also ugly it also has a stupid proprietary front end that costs like a thousand pounds to change before Labor and you know you've got to reblead the brake system and it's like you know it's something that can't be adjusted in a bike fit scenario and it absolutely categorically must have a fit before you buy it because you can guarantee that the cockpit's gonna be wrong so bikes like this just it's Spike fits nightmare [Music] any giant with the conduct mechanical to hydraulic braking system for the simple fact that it's complete dog it basically took a mechanical to be fair this is quite an old system you won't see it on any bikes now uh it predates kind of tiagra hydraulic levers uh and maybe even 105 hydraulic levers but it was basically a means of using a mechanical shifter and converting it to a hydraulic brake uh the simple fact is that it suffered really horrendously from uh from cable stretch and the system was just atrocious uh crap [Music] I just I I think that it's the real base is just so unnecessary it has this you know this suspension front end which and yeah there are other aftermarket brands that do this but you know there's a reason why like the proflex and the girvin fork that many viewers might not remember um that they stop making them uh having suspension at the front end I just don't really see a great deal of point the other thing with that we found with uh actually this is the case with a lot of bikes that have integrated suspension systems in them is that it adds a degree or another level of something having to be serviced because if you don't service it it creeps like we had a bike and recently it was a Rube with a with a Future Shock system on it and there was like over a degree of movement of lateral play or rotational play in in the uh in the front of the bike because the the cartridge hadn't been serviced in a long time a question whether you're riding the right bike if you need that amount of suspension in the front of the bike [Music] stupid Canyon Grail isn't it it's got a handlebar that looks a little bit like that and remember when we were in Vietnam and Lawrence had one and every time you take his hands off the front of the bike the whole thing just shake erratically like you need three rolls of bar tape tape bloody thing and like what what's up what's the point it's just it's just Pooky for no reason whatsoever it also looks like a a trip plane from the first world war yeah genius piece of marketing from Canyon though because we're actually talking about it [Music] a number of generations of the trekman Dome I actually owned some of these um so I can speak very much first hand about them and how they were firstly the IRS probably two thousand and um probably 2008 or 2009 where Trek had the marvelous idea of putting the brake underneath the bike under the bottom bracket which meant that it got completely clogged up seized and it failed to work ever again furthermore the bond treasure break that they actually fitted was made of light I think it was made of copper or something it was so flexible it had no power and then you mated it with Andre's coat pads and aeolus wheel guess what you pull the brake and and nothing would happen I remember actually one right one time I think actually it was probably the first time I rode this bike home and I kind of had to do like a bit of an emergency stop because it was a van in front of me that breaks suddenly uh pulled the brakes and there's that kind of initial bite and then nothing happened I just kept on going um and nearly went in the back of the van uh but ultimately stupid place to put a break it's no longer a problem now because we have discs but it was just idiotic placement of a rear brake all the name of it being more Aero my other anoints was of the previous generation window not so much the the new one because they've changed the handlebar setup on the new madome but the previous generation had a I need to get this right because I got it right wrong in the last video it's called a VRC shaped handlebar which they say has got something along the lines of like 80 mil of reach I don't know how they measure it because it's got over 110 mil reach which meant that the cockpit was excessively long so if you had 100 millimeter stem and the VRC handlebar because it was a one piece cockpit it was kind of the equivalent to like a 120 millimeter stem and a normal handlebar um ultimately it just meant that when you fitted this cockpit onto what was already a really really long bike guess what it didn't fit anyone and furthermore when you had to inevitably change the cockpit guess what it cost 500 quid or whatever it was so ludically expensive not particularly functional and again not fit for purpose [Music] more moronic I've seen in here recently was like so I have a lot of love for all Bayer they you know they they make bikes in The Bash country they make their own bikes they make apart from the bike we're about to talk about relatively pretty bikes in my opinion uh but we had an orca Aero come through recently and obaya have sort of slightly contradicted themselves in in the design at the front end of this bike because the The Handlebar has a little bit like a canyon uh recesses underneath the handlebar for the brake lines to run through and it was great in the sense that you've got little grub screws that would take off said plate so that it would mean you could change the handlebar uh relatively quickly in relatively easily however they undid all of this convenience building by adding a plastic fairing at the at the at the stem placement sorry at the stem Junction which meant that you had to completely the brakes anyway just one of the more annoying and idiotic things that we've seen fitted to a bike because we've got we got really excited about oh you know we can here's finally here's an aerobike that we can change the cockpit out without having to put into the workshop and re-bleed the brakes and go through all that rigm roll but no some stupid like after thought to try and make it look more slippery resulted in a need to completely replayed the brakes so what was the point there are nine bikes that James hates did we miss anything what's your least favorite bike put it in the comment section down below thank you so much for watching And subscribe to this channel for more videos like this foreign [Music]

Channel: Cade Media

Views: 222,838

Keywords: cycling, bike, cyclist, london, race, bicycle, road, vlog, francis, cade, tips, specialized, trek, aethos

Id: rim0UjfdsJU

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023