OneTinSloth

poor cyclist my ass, i ride for a living, most of the time i ride a fixed gear. my cadence on a road bike is better than most of those yellow jersey wannabe weekend warrior jerkoffs that i see out there, and i usually blow right past them...on a single speed, granted, they probably aren't in a race mentality, but still...plus most of them can't handle traffic for ****.




i like products that WORK the way they should because i ride my bike for a living, it's a pain in the ass to futz with a stupid shifter that goes one gear at a time, when i need a least three most times. STIs are not dynamic enough in that respect. when i want to get from 18T down to 12T i don't want to have to hit the stupid shifter six god damn times, when if i had the campy shifters, or DT shifters i could do it in one motion. also, hitting the shifter six times in a row, will wear it out faster than if it was one smooth motion, but, like i said before, i like friction shifting because it lets ME move the derailluer into the sweet spot.-

and i'm not lazy, i prefer efficient shifting that fits my needs. remember that one shift used to take up several gears at a time in the old days, are you calling eddy mercx lazy?



the brake lever moves to the side when i go to pull the brakes. yes, i have small hands, but i'm pretty sure there are a lot of people out there who have the same problem with the way shimano engineered their lever/shifters. i also have had problems (when the levers are mounted on regular drop bars) with shifting to an easier gear and having the brakes pulled because the whole stupid unit moves together.



maybe you're the poor cyclist here, crashing all the time. i see your point, but people who live in glass houses should not throw stones...i've crashed maybe twice on a road bike or a fixed gear, and one of those times was when a car sideswiped me.

admittedly, i have not broken anything yet, but that's because i barely ride the stupid bike anyway, partly because of the shifters, but mostly because a friend has my wheels. a good friend of mine works in a shop and about twice a month someone comes in whining "i broke my STI shifter, i broke my STI shifter what do i do!?!" and then they have to replace it.



i spent a long time planning out what components i was going to put on this bike, comparing prices, durability, functionality, and finally, looks. i decided i wanted an all black parts group because well, it looks different from everyone else's bike, plus the bike i have is a pretty dark color already. i went with 105 because it was under the price cap that i set for myself for building up this frame. i'm not going to spend $1000+ on parts for a $300 used frame, that i'm probably not going to ride very much. i looked at a lot of reviews of STI shifters and most of them had good things to say, so i went for it. i got a pretty sweet discount at my friend's shop too, i didn't have to pay for labor for setting it up.

i was also not going settle for anything less than campy chorus if i got campy anything, and at the time i didn't have the money for it, i probably could have gotten dura-ace, but then i'd be in the same boat, wouldn't i...the main reason i decided to go with 105 is that i wasn't building the road bike thinking i'd be on it all the time, seeing as i have two track bikes set up with top of the line components. THOSE are the bikes i care about. THOSE are the bikes that i like to keep running because those are the bikes that i ride most often and depend on the most.



you didn't get my point. i know STIs weren't made with bullhorns in mind, i'm not ********. my point was, if they're going to go to such great lengths to make everything aero and slick looking, but then have the shifter cables come out and screw it all up, then shy bother with aero routing in the first place? and FYI, we made the aero brake cable routing work with the bullhorns that i have, but then i saw how heinous it looked with the other cables sticking out, so i said F-it. i planned from the beginning to use bullhorns, which is another reason why i went with shimano instead of campy, the campy shifters use a thumb button which would be inaccessable riding with bullhorns. also, i use bullhorns without aero bars, so if i used bar end shifters, and put them at the ends of the bullhorns, the cables would get in the way of the brak cables on the inside of the bars, also there wouldn't be an exit hole for the shifter cables unless i drilled one, and i'm not about to ruin my handlebars.

in case you're so thick that you didn't get this by now, i'm not PLANNIN TO BUY DA STIS!!!!! i already have them. i didn't have an opinion on them before i got them, so i decided to try them out. in my OPINION, they blow goats in functionality. next time i set up a road bike, if i actually care about it this time, i'll get campy, or i'll try to find downtube shifters and SLRs that match my scheme. sorry that i don't follow what the pros use as gospel, they ride the components they ride because they are paid to, and my guess is they get free replacements when something breaks down.

my bike looks pretty sweet, BTW, it's a dark purple steel lugged pinarello with all black components (everything 105 except the crank, which is an FSA gossamer cross crank with the 48T/38T chainrings). i got the smaller rings because i'm riding in the city, and i have to slow down a lot and i don't want to blow out my knees on a start in 53T/15T. i prefer the looks of a 53/39, but i went for what suited my purpose, and i saved a little weight too. currently the bike is sitting upside-down sans wheels because the jerkus who built them (me) didn't tension the spokes properly....oops. everything worked fine for a few weeks, then i noticed my rear wheel was in pretty bad shape, so off to the shop it went....i should have it back by the end of the week though.

oh yeah, learn how to use the quote tags. it'll increase your posts' readability by 20%.