As sometimes happens when one is a cyclist the urge grows to have yet another bike in the stable. Depending on circumstances the idea either grows or wanes sitting in the subconscious for the first opportunity to be revisited. For myself I have 5 bikes of which my first, a Raleigh Pioneer Trail hybrid bike, is my turbo bike. I then have the Super Acciaio as described in other posts for fair weather efficient fun and a Kona Jake, go anywhere, all weather bike. The two remaining bikes a Dawes Super Galaxy and Ambrosio Stelvio carbon bike are now retired. It was whilst looking at these that I started thinking of a new project, initially I pondered fully renovating the Super Galaxy. This would be rewarding to bring it back to its former glory as it currently has surface rust in various places. Then I thought I could simply use the Kona as a tourer if so desired and why not instead make an all weather road bike for distance/light touring.... in essence an "audax" bike. This idea lent itself nicely to using most components ( groupset, wheels ) from the Ambrosio carbon road bike. After much thought I decided to go ahead with the plan and research a frameset for the job. Ideally it would be good to have the low weight of carbon but there are very few framesets with the potential to fit racks and mudguards.... plus tyres up to say 32mm. So the search concentrated on aluminium and steel, one other restriction from my perspective was obviously budget. Even with that restriction there are many good framesets to consider. Amongst the many I researched were framesets from Velo-Orange, Soma, Rodriguez ( too expensive for this project but I simply enjoyed the range ), Surly, Kinesis and Tifosi. All of the frames I viewed would build into an excellent "audax" style bike, I particularly liked the Soma Smoothie and Smoothie ES ( though the colour, coffee related perhaps from the name, I didn't like ). If I was a city banker and retired at 30, then I'd buy one of each frame, build them, and give them away to people who'd cherish them. It's a pleasure to design a bike with its constituent parts to a target weight and budget particularly when starting with a nice frameset. Sadly in the real world I'm not in a charmed occupation, in fact playing catch-up after redundancy, so I finally settled on a low cost frameset from the UK company Spa Cycles. They have two frames of interest the Spa Tourer and the Spa Audax both steel. The Spa Audax fitted the criteria of what I was aiming for, also for a steel frame ( Reynolds 725 ) its quite light with a quoted weight of 2450gms F+F in a 54cm(M). I duly ordered the frameset and it arrived as shown in the image below:-
It was pristine though I had to buy a replacement cable guide and scrounge some M5 bolts after Spa did not follow up my phone call regarding issues with parts sent. Quite often its small customer service points like this that rancour but its not uncommon in the UK. One thing I'd advise anyone buying this frameset to do is to upgrade the headset at purchase if possible. The headset I received was a Stronglight weighing 183gms and from an engineering perspective poorly sealed( the cartridges were but not the body ) and also with unmarked bearing cartridges. I sourced an FSA Orbit MX for £19 which was an order of magnitude or even two better, all the correct sealing gaskets and o-rings. This has identical upper and lower bearings fully marked, easily available to purchase in pairs and the whole assembly just over 100gms. The frame design is well thought out in terms of head/seat angles, chainstay length and the welds are excellent. The frameset weight as mentioned earlier, weighed in reality nigh on identical to about 30gms. As noted by others on forums the decals are applied to the frame without a lacquer top coat so we'll wait and see how they fare.... and actually they aren't too bad to look at, certainly don't shout at you like some. So the time to build had arrived the build list being as below:-
Wheels: Mavic Open Pro rims with Campagnolo Veloce hub's ( legacy )
( built by Dave Hinde in 2001 )
Groupset: Campanolo Veloce 9spd 2001 ( legacy )
( crankset changed to champ triple but with 53-39-30 )
Cassette: Veloce 13-26T ( legacy )
Brakes: Tektro R539 57mm drop, silver ( required due to deeper fork )
Handlebars: Deda Zero 2, Cinelli gel cork bar tape
Stem: Deda Zero 1
Seatpost: Humpert 27.2mm, 300mm
Saddle: Charge Spoon
Mudguards: SKS Bluemels
Tyres: Vittoria Fortezza Senso Xtreme 28mm
In component choice I've tried to balance silver and black where possible to keep some aesthetics. Weight wise I've tried to keep new components relatively light but the groupset is quite weighty being Campagnolo Veloce 2001. I cleaned most of the groupset and wheels with T-Cut metal polish which is very effective. Its noticeable that Campagnolo's quality has decreased over time. The original chainset showing no ageing but the new champ triple being totally marked under the lacquer surface after only 3yrs of use in dry weather. If I had the budget I would have built with SRAM Rival 22spd compact groupset as I feel this offers the best weight/gear range/price of the low/mid end groupsets. Campagnolo have never been at the forefront of offering wider gearing for road bikes until very recently with slightly wider range cassettes. SRAM's wi-fli seem's to address this more satisfactorily and offers sensible gearing for what an "audax" bike would require without resorting to touring triples. A future upgrade perhaps, but for now I'll stick with the Veloce system as per my original plan. The wheels were built by Dave Hinde and are quite light ( rim weight 425gms, 36H double butted spokes ). On to these I've put the Vredestein Fortezza Senso Xtremes after reading reviews and also being unable to obtain Continental GP4000S2's at the right price. The Vredesteins are 3 possibly 4 season tyres but my choice was for the wet grip for summer/autumn, durability and lowish weight of 280gms. The complete build is shown below:-
At the official weigh-in using my Chinese luggage scales it was 10.51kg including pedals, pump bracket and bottle cage ( obviously mudguards too ). Not a fly weight but it's actually quite a light bike when you discount the mudguards, 22lb's dead without those and the Rival groupset would lose about 0.7lbs compared to the Veloce triple. Pedal choice also may drop some weight but cleats could similarly offset this gain. That leads me to toe overlap..... well the photo's below show my size 43 Shimano shoe in position ( 170mm crank ) with clearance unless you have your foot at a very acute angle. This is unlikely to occur in real life as you'd have to be a contortionist and I've not seen an issue with it so far ( unlike my Kona Jake ), with a level foot it's clear. That's with the front mudguard 15mm away from the tyre.
I've now ridden about 200mls on the Spa Audax and it's very good. The sizing for myself at 5'10", 33" inseam is spot on with the 54cm(M) frame, as mentioned in my super acciaio post I've found RattleCad a boon for sizing framesets. On all my rides so far ( up to 40mls.. well its far from warm days at present on the north-east coast ) I've experienced no aches in wrists, neck etc and the gel bar tape works very well. Comfort wise it isn't a magic carpet ride, whether that even exists on narrow high pressure tyres, but it does mute the vibration of chip seal roads and potholes. I'll have to try a contemporary carbon or titanium frame to give a better opinion but it causes no wrist or hand issues over bumpy surfaces. The frame does have spring in it but it's the combination of the tyres, cork gel tape, bars etc that makes it overall a comfortable bike. Therefore its subjective as every different combination may be better or worse. Also I've not felt any frame "flex" but I'm more Shetland pony than shire horse so I may never experience that and the 54cm(M) isn't at the size where it is associated. One area I've yet to experiment with is tyre pressures, currently 100psi rear 95psi front so scope to drop 5psi both ends to see if any perceptible difference. Overall I think it's a nice bike that would suit audax/commute/light touring duties all in one for anyone on a tight budget either financially or space wise and I can heartily recommend it. I hope this article helps anyone in their decision making, I'll update as I get more miles if anything changes.
