PaulRivers

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll keep that in mind if I try them again. They do tend to have a more liberal return policy than others.

andr0id

Araya used to make some damn light tubular rims also. Of course they cracked after 4 or 5 years, but they were light.

Jiggle

Yeah, we heard you. We thought it was dumb.

PaulRivers

You're not very bright or good with money, ok, I got it.

sleepy

I'm surprised the pedal talk is derailing the thread.
I'm more surprised folks are calling that comment stupid. This the land of the multi-thousand dollar bike after all.

I like clip less pedals for climbing, but I haven't used road shoes in over year. The click clack sound is annoying and mtb shoes and pedals are more convenient. Cages and sneakers rock because you can just hop and go without having to make it a production.

dr_lha

Probably like the rest of us, he spent a perfectly reasonable amount of money on clipless, and found it an improvement. Like myself, since moving to clipless I've bought 4 pairs of pedals (2 SPD, 2 SPD-SL) and 2 pairs of shoes (1 MTB, 1 Road). Not regretted a single dollar spent.

Sorry you had a bad experience, it's not universal.

alexaschwanden

CAAD10 frame was so thin it dented very easy and flexy BB.

Campag4life

Me too. Mine went back to Amazon. Wouldn't hold pressure on gauge...leak down between strokes. Fixed my Joe Blow Pro and back in business.

Maelochs

So far as not being good with money ... if yuo are spending $150 on flat pedals ... okayyyyy ....

See, I don't think you're dumb, just maybe missed the point of the thread.

Specific example of what the thread is about: I bought a Lezyne headlight. It got good reviews, had great specs, came with a spare bespoke battery (great, because you cannot tell at the start of a 4-hour ride that you only have two hours of juice in the battery.)

I weighed it all out, compared it to all of the competition, and dropped 100+ dollars for a three-month light.

If I had read a thread like this where someone said, "Hey, I bought a Lezyne headlight and ... "

No ego, no bruised feelings, just an investment which turned out not work out, so I am sharing the news with others to hopefully spare someone else the same disappointment.

WalksOn2Wheels

Exactly. There are plenty of other places to rail against clipless as a concept. This thread is about very specific purchases that seemed like a large investment for little return, like the aforementioned light. We're very sorry that you didn't enjoy clipless, but unless you have a very specific pedal that was expensive and then failed, or an expensive shoe that fell apart in three months, this is not the thread for you to talk about clipless pedals.

WalksOn2Wheels

1) What were you doing to dent a frame? I know plenty of CAAD10 owners who managed to not dent them.

2) Many of those aforementioned owners bought them specifically to race in crits. If it had a flexy BB, I'm pretty sure at least one of them would have made a big deal about it.

EDIT: Not to say that they don't dent easily, because they do. It just takes significant action to do it. Like a big fall or carelessly leaning it against something precarious and letting it fall.

rmfnla

OK:

ENVE SES 2.2 Rims - Wheelbuilder.com

Clinchers @ 424 g, tubulars @ 287 g

Same dimensions...

Hiro11

I agree that usually you get what you pay for with bike gear. Whenever I've sprung for the high dollar stuff, I've usually been pleased. I'm not saying it's always been worth it, just that the chances of high dollar stuff being complete crap is low.

Notable exceptions:

Zipp 404s from a few years ago. I think the current wheels might be better. The older 88/188 hubs can be unreliable, the older wheels are prone to breaking spokes and the older clincher rims are easily damaged in impacts. I never bought a pair but three different friends of mine did and had nothing but problems.

Most high end lights with non-replaceable batteries. In my experience most LiPO batteries have a fairly short lifespan when using a high powered LED. I've purchased (relatively) high dollar lights from Cygolite, Lenzyne and Bontrager and all died withing a couple of years of fairly heavy use. This may seem reasonable, but I've also had cheap-o lights that are brighter that last just as long from makers like Nitefighter, Xeccon and Yinding. These cheaper lights cost a fraction of the more expensive ones. The cheaper ones used to be complete crap, so it made sense to buy the nicer ones. I'm not sure that's the case any more. Also, I prefer lights that use replaceable 18650s or 18650-based standard packs these days. The lightheads almost never die, it's the batteries that crap out.

Back in the day, the Modolo Professional stem. The most expensive stem of the day. Bar none, this was the best looking quill stem ever made. The problem was that it was also horribly creaky and prone to snapping unexpectedly. Throw it away if you still have one, one of the most dangerous parts ever made.

...that's about it.

gsa103

Those are carbon. He specifically said Aluminum tubular rims, there's plenty of lightweight CF tubular rims.

rmfnla

Are they? I looked for material but didn't see it mentioned.

Funny too, because my point about construction really applies to aluminum since CF is not extruded.

I'll look for examples later if I have the time, but the superiority of roll-forming over extrusion is a known engineering quantity...

topflightpro

A Quarq.

I went through three of them in 18 months. Sure, Quarq fixed it each time it broke, but it shouldn't break so often. After the third repair, I put it on eBay.

Standalone 

Is this not what you are doing? Clipless didn't work for you. OK, no problem. It's even helpful to general knowledge to understand your foot size and how it may impact how well they work for you.

Most folks here disagree strongly with your conclusion however, even those who do not personally favor clipless. Try SPD's before you give up.

And on topic,

Arm warmers. Damn things don't stay up the way that the leg warmers do. What do they think cyclists don't have skinny arms?

thermalattorney

+1

It doesn't work so poorly that I can justify throwing it out, but I would never recommend one. Total waste of $$

Tune Gum Gum headset expander. I was looking for a headset expander that worked with a Pitlock top cap and it's flat-out worthless.

Stronglight CT2 Chainrings: I bought a 48/36 set for my CX bike and could *not* get them dialed in with my Di2 FD. Ended up selling them to a friend after he found they worked pretty darn well with his SRAM Yaw FD.

Dave Mayer

[QUOTE=rmfnla;18578970]Not completely accurate.

Half the advantage of tubulars is a much superior rim because they can be roll-formed rather than extruded, making them are both stronger and lighter.
QUOTE]

Partial answer. You are correct in that advantage of tubulars is in the rim. The key benefit is that tubular rim eliminates the hooks required to hold on the clincher tire. These hooks are heavy (at the worst possible place on a bike), and fragile, and they cause pinch flats.

I am riding my winter beater pig wheelset right now. Chorus hubs with Open Pro clinchers. I cannot wait to get back to the dry weather and riding on tubulars. My alu tubulars are easily a pound lighter, and feel much faster rolling up to speed.

Is anyone riding in important races on clinchers? Anyone?

rmfnla

Clinchers vs. Tubulars by Jobst Brandt

"used to be capable of taking higher pressures, had lower weight and mounted onto stronger, lighter rims than clinchers. Clinchers have now largely caught up, but many cyclists' thinking hasn't. Tubular tyre + rim combination still lighter and stronger."

njkayaker

Too many people expect magic out of a particular piece of equipment, when the reality is that the benefit is small.**

I suspect the benefit of clipless for normal riding (eg, "cruising") is that it it allows you to unweight the non-power side. That is, you can pick up your foot instead of having the power leg push it up, which lets that power (small as it might be) go to move the bicycle instead. In normal riding, people don't appear to pull up with force. That's not something people would be able to do for very long anyway. Unweighting, on the other hand, is something people can do all day. That's for normal riding, not for things like aggressive riding (eg, sprinting) where the benefits of clipless might even be larger (but not really used much by normal riders). A no-clipless pedal, even with pins, rules out any unweighting.

** The only piece of equipment that has a large benefit is something that everybody has but not many use: the lower ends of the drop bars. Between being in the drops versus being on the hoods, you can go around 18mph versus around 16.5 mph for the same power. No other piece of equipment is likely to produce anywhere near that benefit.

njkayaker

The use of toeclips that matches clipless is to use shoes with cleats and tighten the toeclip straps. Clipless is much, much easier to use than doing that. Once clipped- or strapped-in, the two have the same performance benefit.

Clipless lets you unweight the non-power leg and makes high cadence easier. These benefits might be real even if they are small.

The discussion of clipless started with platforms being preferable to one person. That is, the discussion is because of platforms.

rmfnla

For me the #1 benefit of clipless pedals is they keep my feet on the pedals no matter what.

That's all...

njkayaker

Pot meet kettle.

It's not a big deal that you don't use clipless. It's unfortunate that it took you so long to figure out that it didn't work out for you. What doesn't make much sense is arguing that people use clipless for "ego" rather than clipless working better for them.

Hiro11

Agreed. Clip in, thrash away and your feet wont go anywhere.

However, I recently bought a fat bike. I rode the fat bike all winter on modern pinned platform pedals. This was a bit of a revelation for me: the giant pinned pedals that are out there now work really well. Your foot sticks very, very well with a pinned pedal, you can use regular shoes and I don't feel like I "lost power". Also, my feet were very comfortable over three hour rides in trail running shoes...

Overall, I'm starting to come around to the idea that clipless may not be entirely necessary. I'll keep the road shoes and SPD-SLs on my bike, but certainly there are clear benefits to flat pedals for many riders. Personally, I could see going with flat pedals for something like a rando bike... This was a big wake up call for someone like me who's been using clipless since first gen Look pedals.

Perhaps Grant from Rivendell has been right all this time. He advocates Crocs on pinned flats... I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far.