I've fitted my front one and have been using it for some hard braking. So far, so good. It was straightforward to set up, using the instructions at
https://www.lekki8.com/instructions. I don't know which type of pad holders I have, but Shimano pads fitted OK. My levers are Etap 11, and my mystery Lekki? requires much more lever travel than the Sram brake.
Before fitting the Lekki? I set the lobe to the maximum, because my rims are 20mm. The lobe advice is in a separate para above the instructions, titled 'How to use the microcam'. Perhaps some owners haven't read that para...maybe Ted didn't put it there until after he'd written the instructions? Maybe this accounts for some of the failures, for example the one pictured in another thread where there's a crack near the finger?
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=152269&start=165#p1626016 That post is notable because apparently the brake was fitted by a customer of a dealer...a dealer who said that he found the Lekki8 to be reliable...and as you can see the dealer said the crack was in a carbon piece, whereas it was actually in a 7075 Al casting.
After the pads are pressed firmly to the rim and max braking has been achieved, it's possible to squeeze the lever quite a bit more, because the calipers flex so much. You can watch the arms getting closer to the rim while the extensions on the legs move down the wheel. It's so weird to watch that I found myself doing it repeatedly, wondering if it was an optical illusion. Obviously this kind of treatment could lead to cracks and fractures all over the place, so I'll have to discipline myself to stop doing it. (Although I really ought to video it.) It doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Basically I'm just waiting for the brake to explode into a thousand pieces. Or maybe the elasticity is designed in, and it's an exciting feature of carbon fibre! Anybody know whether the Lekki8 does this?
Anyway, when it's not doing an impression of some jelly, the caliper looks very pretty. My terrible phone camera does not do it justice:
The weight of my pair without pads is 138g on my scale.
The calipers, being narrower than the Lekki8, ought to weigh less. The extended legs, which look just like the ones from the Brompton B1 model, ought to weigh more. (Ted claimed 129 for the Lekki8, but the Roadbike Review pair were 136.)
As for what these brakes really are....well, they're not the Lekki8 or the Lekki8 Brompton B1. The calipers are a unique shape. As I keep saying, they can't possibly be clones, that would be absurd. They can't be a prototype, because so many have been made. So they must be a legit Ciamillo product which was never released. My guess is that they were intended to be the Lekki8, but Ted had a change of plan when he saw the market shifting to wider rims and tyres, so he told the manufacturer to stop production and he went away and changed the width of the design. The manufacturer has had these on the shelf for years, he's fed up with Ted not paying his bills, so he's cutting his losses by putting them on Aliexpress. I don't know where the Brompton-style extensions fit into this puzzle. Whatever. For £140 they were an intriguing gamble. They might last, they might vapourise. But this is weightweenies, we like to experiment.
Given how ridiculously heavy they are, I weighed some of the parts to see if there might be some tuning possibilities. I doubt it.
