Best Groupset in your opinion

[pdlpsher1]

I have no loyalty to any brands. I choose the components that I believe are best-in-class. My bike has all three major brands. I'm running Dura Ace 9150 with an Ultegra 8050 RD. Crankset is the Quarq DFour. Wheels are two sets of Campy Boras. On my prior bike I've used the Sram 1090 cassette with excellent results. I'm currently using an Ultegra cassette and it's very heavy. But I need the extra low gearing.

I think each brand has both pluses and minuses. An example is a set of Shimano C50 wheelset that I once owned. Fresh out of the box the bladed spokes were not parallel with the braking surface. Imagine if this wheelset is being tested in the wind tunnel like this! I did complain to Shimano customer service eventhough I fixed the issue on my own.
But I had expected better quality from Shimano. I'd be interested to find out if Hambini had similar issue on his C50. The wheelset I had was made in Malaysia. Not sure if that mattered. Another example is a set of Ultegra shift levers that I had to get it warrantied after a year. So yeah even Shimano has its fair share of manufacuring/QA issues. No company is immune to defects.

[robertbb]

And their chains and cogs are really jewels of precision imo, and durable too.

Chorus 12-29 cassette, purchased a week ago. Look at the little "dollup" of extra alloy on one of the teeth. No idea how this passed Campy QC.




Waiting two days on the seller to confirm warranty.

[pdlpsher1]

It could be just an extra plating material. I wonder if you can just knock it off. I don't think that came from machining.

[alcatraz]

Those cogs look pressed out of a sheet of metal. I'm looking at the edges.

Maybe plating like the previous poster?

/a

[Calnago]

Yeah, I'd be inclined to take a quick swipe of a file to it. Unless you want to wait for a warranty replacement.

[alcatraz]

The best group is probably the one that's maintained properly. I have some friends that don't even lube their chains.

I'm trying to develop a drivetrain quick maintenance routine because I'm really not happy with my maintenance. It's not efficient enough.

Here is the problem. I don't have a garage so I need some routine to do all this indoors without making a mess or stinking up the place.

I'd like each bike to have 3-4 chains that I ultrasonicly clean and wax all at once together with the cassette and derailleur pulleys. Then I rotate chains until I've put ~300km on each.

Right now I'm looking for a temperature alarm for my chain waxing. I need it to work the other way from a cooking alarm would because I need to take the chains out when the temperature is low enough to let the wax thicken but not solidify. I havent found such an alarm yet hmm. I'm not sure the one in the pic here would sound an alarm going from hot to cold.

[robertbb]

It could be just an extra plating material. I wonder if you can just knock it off. I don't think that came from machining.

Those cogs look pressed out of a sheet of metal. I'm looking at the edges.

Maybe plating like the previous poster?

/a

Yeah, I'd be inclined to take a quick swipe of a file to it. Unless you want to wait for a warranty replacement.

It's solid... I tried pushing it off with a flat heat screwdriver... it's going nowhere. Rather than taking a file as Cal suggests, I'll wait for warranty replacement. Pics on phone don't do it justice, it's 2mm - more than big enough to jam the drivetrain under certain conditions.

[spdntrxi]

all said and done.... Shimano DuraAce Di2 Hydro

[Calnago]

I remember a long time ago I built a new bike. New group, the whole bit. For some reason chain suck kept happening. Was pissing me off. I took it out and immediately stopped at the first hint of the chain not releasing properly. Marked that spot with tape then went home, removed the crank and inspected the teeth at that spot. Sure enough, there was a tiny burr that was catching the chain like a pick up pin. Swipe of the file and all was good. Not suggesting you do that here if you’re not comfortable with it, however, especially since it should be fine for warranty. Annoying.

[2lo8]

It's hard to tell what happened there, but metals are disolved in solution for plating, not melted to liquid form, so it would be unusual for a solid drop of plating metal to bead up like that.

[youngs_modulus]

One of the developments in material technology is a material called superlight. It's an Aluminium alloy with hexagonal crystalline construction. This is about 50% lighter than normal aluminium and almost all of the tensile strength.

Oh, interesting! An aluminum alloy that's half the density of conventional alloys like 7075 but that exhibits ~90% of its yield strength? Heck, that's leagues better than beryllium, a metal that is both toxic and strong/stiff/light enough to be worth the effort for pedestrian things like satellites.

Al 7075-T6 has a density of 2.81 g/cc and a yield strength of about 462 MPa (67 KSI). That's a strength to weight ratio of about 164:1 (strength in MPa / density in g/cc).

Beryllium's density is 1.844 g/cc and its yield strength is about 240 MPa (35 KSI). That's a strength-to-weight ratio of 130. That's not as good as 7075, but beryllium is significantly stiffer than steel, which has benefits beyond a strength-to-weight ratio.

But your secret-squirrel aluminum alloy has a density of 1.4 g/cc (half that of 7075, a fairly dense aluminum alloy) yet has a yield strength of about 416 MPa (~90% that of 7075). That's a strength-to-weight ratio of about 297, or nearly twice that of 7075 and about 2.3 times the strength-to-weight ratio of ultra-exotic beryllium! That's astonishing!

But given those numbers, I must ask: what on earth is this material doing in the bicycle industry right now? Shouldn't it be prominent in the defense industry? Shouldn't the manufacturer of this miracle material be charging enormous sums of money for it, thereby pricing it out of the bike industry?

Please enlighten me about this aluminum alloy with such extraordinary material properties. I'll be a hero at work tomorrow if I can propose such an alloy for our current project. Which alloy is it?

[kgt]

Hambini never said that this aluminium is used or is ever going to be used in bike industry.

[mattr]

There are a few papers/articles kicking around about it, supertetrahedral aluminium IIRC.
It's been pretty quiet for a year or so, so it's either died a death, or is starting to get interesting (patents, commercial manufacture/availablity and that sort of stuff)

[2lo8]

If it's supertetrahedral aluminum, that would be a solid form of pure elemental aluminum no? And normal pure aluminum is not very high strength at all. Forget commercial usage, I don't think they've even made it in a lab. Who even knows how it would react to alloying or forging.

[mattr]

It could be. I've read quite a lot of articles about new "super materials" over the last few years, mostly aerospace stuff (Mostly nickel based super alloys, new ti alloys and so on), and thats one that comes to mind. There will doubtless be many others.