Hi y'all,
I recently bought a Winspace SLC 2.0 frameset and had quite the adventure building it up.
I've always passively wanted one, specifically in the Kanazawa color, but for the price this lightly used Superlight Black frame was close enough. The steerer was cut too short and I hated the color, but whatever. I'll do something with it someday, maybe I'd lose some weight and magically become more flexible?
So it arrived and just sat for a while until I found a new, uncut SLC fork on Ebay. So with a new fork and way too much confidence, I started sanding and sketching out some fresh paint jobs!
The paint process took way too long. I had this idea in my head of a purple/gold galaxy looking alcohol ink pattern on a black background, how hard can it be? It's biggest pain in the ass and took up way too much time, 10/10 do not recommend. I dig the result, though. The base color is candy black over raw carbon. Most of the black half has the coolest dark raw carbon effect that you can see in direct sunlight, but some sections got too much black. A two stage white pearl and logos in Ford champagne gold to finish. Overall, I'm happy with paint but it was much too ambitious and the end result is far from perfect. Many mistakes were made and there's a few issues that I just didn't have the patience to fix anymore. They're hard to spot, but I know they're there and they'll always bug me.
The actual build process was fairly quick and painless, even with fully internal routing. AXS builds are very straightforward and tbh I can't see myself using another groupset on my bikes right now. A lot of parts carried over from my 177.
Frame: Size 490
Wheels Farsports Kaze 45mm
Tires: Panaracer Agilest 28mm and Ridenow tubes
Seatpost: Elita One 63D, but looking at maybe getting one of those VFV or Ryet posts with the hole in it.
Saddle: Ryet 3D printed saddle
Handlebar: Fire Spider FS160
Stem: S Works SL 100mm
Bar tape: Silca Nastro. It's alright.
Bottle cages: Supacaz Fly Ano. Very light and good looking, but don't feel very secure
Groupset: SRAM AXS mix - Rival shifters, Force crankset, Force cassette 10-33, Red chain, Red FD, Force RD w/ JRC pulleys, CLX-R rotors
Crankset: Force AXS GXP 167.5mm - Wheels BB, XCadey spider power meter, and Stone 48/33 chainrings. Rotor 48/35 Q rings are sitting in the closet, I'll be installing those soon.
My verdict so far? This bike is sick. It's a classic aesthetic but make no mistake, this is a race bike. The ride is not very forgiving nor is the geometry. It's a super stiff frame and I can feel every imperfection in the road, on longer rides it kinda has me wishing for my 177. I see now what people mean when they say a bike "just wants to take off" or "holds its speed well". In reality, am I any faster or are either of those statements actually true? Strava and my legs both say I'm as slow as ever, but I sure feel fast af.
Short frame walkaround:
https://youtube.com/shorts/V-t9kH_zGyUAnyone else have an SLC 2.0 build to share??