I’m considering each of the 2018 Felt IA10 and the BMC TM01 for various reasons. I’m curious about three things, and I’m hoping the experts can help.
How hard is wheel swapping? I run HED Ardennes, and HED Stingers, but on occasion might rent or borrow discs or tri spokes. I’ve had issues in the past with horizontal dropouts being tough to adjust and having to run brakes fully open in order to accommodation these wheels. (Rumor is that BMC has alleviated these issues with their new design, but I’m curious about real world results). Is the rear brake on the Felt troublesome?
How hard is packing and travelling? I do it a few times a year. BMC seems to have made it easy to strip off the front end (I’ve watched the video), but I’d like real world confirmation. The Felt seems as straightforward as any other bike due to the non-integrated stem on the IA10, but again, real world beats all.
Overall thoughts and impressions on the two. I really want a superbike, but it seems the Felt is a really close option which saves some money (and which I can then sell when Cayon ever starts selling bikes…) and seems like the right choice for a dedicated Tri machine where I already have wheels.
Have you used it in real life? It sure looks easy from the video, but I’m wondering if it really works that way. (Little secret… I never swap between pads between carbon and alu, I use the same ones, I just adjust the brake spacing. But that’s the real issue.)
Have you used it in real life? It sure looks easy from the video, but I’m wondering if it really works that way. (Little secret… I never swap between pads between carbon and alu, I use the same ones, I just adjust the brake spacing. But that’s the real issue.)
I have personally witnessed torn-up brake tracks from that. Doesn’t seem worth the risk.
You can put whatever brakes you want on the IA10. My 2016 came with the Vision on the front and Shimano BR-5810. I swapped both to the Tririg Omega X. They are just super simple to use and adjust when swapping wheels and I’ve never had any issues with mine. As for packing for travel I suggest routing the rear brake cable directly from the calpac to the base bar and NOT through the stem (super easy to do if you are swapping the brakes anyway). Sure you will have 1 cable exposed but it makes breaking it down so much easier by just removing the stem from the steerer tube and having more slack with which to orient the cockpit for packing. From there I went a step further and put 2 junction B boxes for the di2 into the stem to connect the shifters to the junction A head in the calpac (relocated out of the nose cone). This provides more slack on these as well and makes the junction A more accessible. The cables were quite short on the 6870 di2 it came with from the shifters. At that point the bike brakes down very easily. Just detach the stem, seatpost, and wheels.
I run HED Jet’s with 25mm continental GP4KII tires. I just make sure to insert the wheel before fully inflating the tires. I would have trouble getting the fully inflated tire past the pads with the stock shimano brake that came on my IA10.
It depends on what bike bag you have. With a scicon aerocomfort tsa road bike bag I can just angle the extensions down and pack my bike bag like I would my road bike.
As said above, you can swap the brake to whatever you want, I haven’t had any issues getting them in or out at all. Don’t even need to let the air out.
I run a hed jet disc with 23mm tires though, 25 would fit, but might be a bit tougher without letting some air out. YMMV
Front end that comes stock is amazingly adjustable. I originally bought the frameset and the same cockpit, but eventually swapped to a different cockpit just to simplify my setup, reduce total frontal drag opportunities, and get myself lower on the front end than I originally had measured for. ( existing stack and reach numbers it turns out were not optimal before )