Worlds lightest road bike.

It's snowing outside so riding my road bike is about as far away from my thoughts as it ever gets. Road bike technology is amazingly high tech and doesn't last long in foul weather,  I saw this post about the world's lightest road bike, weighing in at only 6.0lbs. 6.0lbs of carbon moulded into an incredibly light bicycle, I can imagine this thing riding really badly in any sort of weather condition other than perfect Californian wind free sunshine. the slightest breeze would have it careening out of control. I also imagine that there would be a weird relationship between bike and rider as there weights are so incomparable.

The builders of this bicycle have gone to the lengths of removing a limit screw from this Sram RED rear mech and also replacing the aluminium B tension screw with a plastic one.

But amazingly they've left the overly long Skewers in both wheels untrimmed, vital grams could have been saved with no functional penalty on the skewers by way of 20 seconds of hacksaw. Instead they have chosen to remove vital pieces of the rear mech. In the event of cable stretch the chain could end up jumping off the high end of the cassette and rip sawing through the experimental high grade and non commercialy available frame.

The builders have left long pieces of untrimmed brake cable, think of the extra weight. Trimming this could get the overall weight of the bike down to 5.9999lbs. They also could have built the rear wheel radially on the non drive side to save a tiny bit of spoke length and in turn extra weight.

High end carbon version of a one piece non adjustable KHE seat looks uncomfortable but it's one of the more sensible ideas on the bike.

I'm not sure how you preload the headset bearings with this style of set up. Fork and stem in the vice maybe?

The article mentions that if you were to recreate this bicycle it would cost around $45,000 outrageous. As a one off project there is a degree of interest here but the bike seems utterly pointless in a real world situation.

You can read the full article here.