I have a Giant Roam 1 that pretty much had all of it's parts upgraded with some going to benefit the GFs bike. The only original part left was the frame and some odd small bits. So I decided to order up a frame to have a full on 'built by me' ride - with the intention of taking the left over parts to build a bike to sell. I recently got it finished and all the kinks ironed out so here it is!
It's a 29"er chinese carbon MTB frame but with a carbon fork meant for a 27.5". I took the Roam's geometry and put it into CAD and compared that with the dimensions of the chinese parts to come up with this combo. I wanted a little lower and a bit more agressive geometry, aiming more for a gravel bike type ride. I haven't yet taken mesurements for the geometry of the final as-built product but so far I'm happy with how it feels though I don't have a lot of miles on it yet. It has carbon seat post, stem, handle bars, horns, and bottle cages to continue the theme.
Drive train is nearly full Shimano 2x11 M8000 including M8100 pedals. I now run 38-26 rings. The only odd one out is I'm using a HG800-11 11-34t cassette. I'm really liking this setup a lot over the 38-28t rings and 11-42t XT cassette I originally had since I get closer ratios between the gears which I really appreciate, and I only had to give up my one lowest gear to get it. The brakes are M6000 with J03a pads and RT66 rotors. The heatsinks on the pads are likely unneccesary but they were only $7 extra at the time of ordering so why not for the extra bling lol.
The wheels I built myself and are DT swiss 240 straight pull 28 spoke hubs, competion spokes, and XR361 rims. I really thought hard about going carbon rims but they are $$$$!!! and the XR361's seem to be oddly light for alloy rims and are reasonably priced. In the end I couldn't justify to myself spending an extra few hundred dollars to save 30ish grams per wheel (comparing to chinese carbon). These are the second set of wheels I've built and from what I read there's no advantage either way mechanically speaking for j-bend vs. straight pulls so I went with the SP for coolness factor on this build. Gotta say I'll likely go j-bend for future builds if I have the choice for ease of building. The wheels are topped off with Conti Speedrides - I really like these tires.
For comfort I finished off with Ergon GS1 grips and a Fizik Arione CX saddle. Final weight as pictured is 9.1kg. I'm super happy with this build and (so far) don't have any plans to change anything. Im curious though what others think of the build decisions, or if they would have done anything differently.
Take care!
Ryan
