Bicycle tourists build a racing bike - Part 1

Have you ever been riding along on your racing bike and have someone overtake you on a fully loaded touring bike? Ever wondered how they managed to pass you even though you are riding the latest carboon fibre lightweight bike? Well as a favour to the racers out there, a handful of cycle tourists have got together and decided to document how we build an extremely light weight but reliable racing bike.

But first, let us reveal another secret. Usually on a training run, I will load the four panniers onto the bike and all of the water bottles. But somedays just for some fun, I'll fill all four panniers with styrofoam. That's right, styrofoam! Nothings beats the stunned look on the faces of the riders when you overtake a bunch of riders on the latest carbon fibre racing bikes with the bike fully loaded with all of the touring gear. Even further, that can''t beat their look when you reach into your handlebar bag and pull out a cigarette and ask - have any of you guys got a light?

Before going any further, I must state our standard disclaimer. This project is strictly for professional racers, please do not try this at home. All stunts are done by professional stunt people and we accept no responsibility for any damage, death or injuries sustained from following the instructions given in this project.

The Bike

Firstly we needed a bike for the project. We decided to use the bike that we used a few years ago on the "Tour De Crapola". This bike was also used last year on the Great Perth to Rottnest Island and Return ride. We stripped the racks, water bottles, DVD player and all of the other touring gear off of the bike so that it resembles a standard bike devoid of any touring equipment.

Before starting, the bike devoid of all touring equipment.

Front Wheel First

Starting at the front of the bike, we decided to start with the front wheel first. It's a standard 27 inch wheel and luckily it already has racing tyres on it. You can see the wheel pictured below after it was removed from the bike. Because of the age of this bike it is fitted with standard attaching nuts instead of quick release levers. After carefully weighing the two it was discovered that the quick release levers were slightly heavier, especially after we attacked the nuts with an angle grinder and lightened them slightly.

Front wheel removed from bike and before starting.

The first place to start in lightening the front wheel is to remove the tyre and tube so that we can get to the spokes. After the tube is removed, you will see a liner that is supposed to protect the tube from the spoke ends. If the spokes are the correct length they wont stick into the tube. So this liner is not really needed and we can safely get rid of it.

Looking at the wheel, it has way too many spokes. Not only do spokes cause turbulence in the air as the wheel rotates, but when you have this many, they add up to a considerable weight. Therefore we removed all of the spokes except for twelve. If you examine the picture below, you will see that there are three groups of four spokes. This is what is called a triple lacing spoke pattern. It's an extremely strong spoke pattern.

The front wheel after the spoke treatment. Note the triple lacing spoke pattern.

The reason that it is called a triple lacing pattern is that there are three groups of spokes. You could have three groups of three spokes, five spokes, or as in our case, four spokes. So having lightened the wheel somewhat, there is still more weight that can be shed. If you look at the picture below, we have removed the the retaining nuts and axle, revealing the ball bearings.

View of ball bearings, before treatment.

Now each ball bearing is made out of steel. That's a lot of weight when you add up all of those ball bearings, especially as there are two sets. One for each side of the wheel. There are ten ball bearings on each side of the wheel giving a total of twenty. That's a considerable amount of weight. You do not really need that many ball bearings, so you can safely remove half of them. That leaves five ball bearings on each side.

Ball bearings after removing half.

There is some conjecture here about how many ball bearings you should have left in the wheel. In this case there are five each side, but I am assured that you can safely go down to two on each side. I have even heard stories of some riders going to one ball bearing on each side. This is a considerable weight saving. At this stage, this is all that you can do to lighten the front wheel assembly. You could possibly drill holes into the rim and make it lighter, but this would be a little extreme. For safety reasons, we decided to keep four spokes in the triple lacing pattern and five ball bearings in each side instead of two. The picture below shows how much junk we were able to jettison just from the front wheel alone.

All useless weight, just from the front wheel.

What's Next?

The next place we focused our attention was the rear wheel. Firstly those gear clusters have lots of teeth, which when you think about it are not really needed and are just dead useless weight. Before removing the gear cluster from the rear wheel we attacked the gear cluster and ground off every second or third tooth on the larger gear cogs. It made a considerable saving in weight, before we really got stuck into the rear wheel itself.

How much more weight can you take off of the rear wheel? That's in our next article, Part Two - Building a Racer.