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1st Build: TanTan/Seraph GR029 with Sensah SRX Pro 1x11 Thank you for the admission to this board.
After positive experiences with Chinese carbon wheels, we decided to research the possible build of a Road/Gravel bike for my girlfriend. Chinertown gave some hints on what to look out for and which suppliers to choose for our project.
The goal was to build a bicycle mainly for the use on tarmac with some lighter gravel, therefore had to have clearance for wider tires.
Finally we decided on following components for our build:

Frame and Fork:
TanTan / Seraph: GR029 with 15mm Fork and BSA BB in size 52
We ordered the matching headset and thru axles directly with the frame to prevent any mismatch.

Groupset:
Sensah SRX Pro 1x11
Crank Zrace RX 172.5mm long with 44 chainring
Casette Zrace 11-46

Brakes:
Ordered seperately Zrace cable actuated hydraulic disc brakes for 160mm rotors.
The sets normally offered on Aliexpress only include adapters for 140mm discs which do not work for our terrain.  ;-)

Seatpost and saddle:
Ordered a separate carbon seat post 27.2mm and a saddle in "Specialized Mimic" style.

Wheels:
We still had a set of Alexrims with Schwalbe X-One 33mm tires laying around to be used.
The disc rotors are some standard Schimano.

Some additional parts such as brake and shift cabling were sourced locally.
The Fizik Cyrano bars in 420mm width and 110mm stem completed the build.


Additional remarks:
The frame was ordered mid of October and we requested a specific custom paint.
Communication with Seraph was excellent over Aliexpress. They sent us a CAD drawing with the custom paint for our confirmation after 24 hours, which is great service.
They let us know that the paint job would delay the shipment for about 20 days, which was about correct.
Due to the reduced air shipment choices caused by Covid-19, the shipment was rerouted and finally left china around the 9th of December 2020 and arrived in Europe end of December.
The quality of the frame and custom paint is very good. The only complaint is that the whole in the fork for the axles were not perfectly protected during painting so some colour entered, which I had to remove before assembly.

The assembly went pretty smooth without bigger issues. Inner cable routing always presents a challenge so you should have the right tools at hand.
Cable routing was done using a Zitto routing tool that is similar to the much more expensive Parktool counter part. For around 10US$, I can highly recommend it.  :-)

The Sensah groubset works well especially the shifting is very nice.
The break power needs to be checked once we had the chance of some extensive rides.
But make no mistake it is certainly not on the level of Shimano hydraulic disc brakes but we expect it to be OK for relaxed riding.

The total bike including Shimano SPD pedals is at 9.065kg which is not too bad considering the 33mm wide tires and quite heavy wheelset.
Going with some nice carbon wheels and tubules would certainly be a big improvement.  ;-)
The cost for the whole build was around 1000US$ including shipping, import taxes and additional parts.
Not super cheap but a real fun project with good result.  :-)

Some things still need to be fixed:
- For correct crankset mounting you need to use spacers adjusting the side to side play and preload of the BB. Unfortunately the shims in the set do not fit perfectly leaving about 0.5-0.8mm play. We will have to source a matching shim to correct this.
- There were only 4 instead of 5 screws speed to fix the chainring to the crank. It seems some mountain bike chainrings only use 4. We did order some additional parts to fix it.
- The cable routing for the rear break is not perfect on the first try so we have some slack and soft feeling when actuating the rear break. This should be easy to correct.

No riding experience yet due to the points to be fixed and cold and wet weather.
We will report our experiences at a later point in time.
January 10, 2021, 07:20:42 AM 		4
Re: Price & availability check... For our build we ordered a GR029 frame from Seraph/TanTan and they seemed to be on stock.
We had to wait an additional 20 days until shipment due to a custom paint job.
This frame is quite old so it seemed they had stock seems some newer designs are back ordered.

Pricing in October 2020:
GR029 Frame, Headset and Through axles: 387 US$
Custom 2 Tone paint job 80 US$
Shipping to Europe: 120 US$

I hope this helps.
January 18, 2021, 04:24:29 AM 		1
Re: 1st Build: TanTan/Seraph GR029 with Sensah SRX Pro 1x11 Hello Dmitry

Unfortunately still no long ride with the bike due to snowy conditions here in Switzerland. I guess that the current weather is comparable to NY at the moment.  ;-)
But the shifting feels crisp so should not be an issue. The Zrace brakes are the thing that I am more concerned with, they definitely need more force to activate than Shimano Hydraulic discs.

Thanks for the compliment she is really happy with the bike, especially with her chosen colours.  :-)
The full bike weighs in at 9.06Kg, with some lighter wheels this could go below 9kg I guess.
Unfortunately I did not weigh the 11-46 cassette separately. But it seems to be pretty light for this size.

I recently bought a super light Zrace 11-34 Cassette that weighs in at 230g Vs. 306g of an R7000 11-32 Shimano.
So some of the Chinese parts can offer a weight advantage. The durability needs to be proven in the coming season...

I installed the Zrace 11-34 on my Merida Speeder which I modified to a Gravel bike.
I bought Elite 32mm x 35mm Carbon Wheels and 35mm Panaracer SK tires to complete the build.
The Merida comes in at 9.17Kg including pedals.

Looking forward to see your Trek finished with the 1x setup, curious about the weight when finished!
January 27, 2021, 04:55:39 AM 		1
Titanium Gravel bike: PYTitans build thread I felt tempted to build a Titanium gravel bike after checking the offers of on Aliexpress, I decided to pull the trigger on following PYTitans frame in October:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001085459477.html?spm=a2g0s.12269583.0.0.7cfc1333bqHRlA

It took until beginning of January to arrive, but the seller was communicating clearly it would take more than two months for the frame to be ready to ship. Communication with the seller was good.
The weight including seat post clamp is just shy of 1600g.

Below some pictures of the frame.
January 16, 2022, 03:46:59 PM 		3
Re: Titanium Gravel bike: PYTitans build thread Here the build details:
- PYTitans Gravel frame Size 52
- Zerace RX4 crankset and BB with 42 Tooth
- Sigeyi Power meter for SRAM
- Juintech F1 break calipers
- OG Evkin: Seatpost, Stem, Handlebar and Headset
- Toseek Saddle (Prologo copy)
- Elite Wheels 32mm/35mm with RD13 Hubs and Panaracer Gravelking SS 38mm Tubeless tires.
- Shimano 105 brifters and GRX RX812 Derailleur
- ZTTO 11-46 Casette
- Garbaruk Deraileur Cage with 15Tooth Meroca Pulley to get the 11-46 cassette to shift smoothly

Total weight including pedals, bottle cages and garmin mount: 9.2kg
First short test ride was good, now waiting for some warmer weather for a longer ride.
January 19, 2022, 03:11:43 PM 		3
Re: Suitable gravel 1x chainset ? Here a picture of the Crankset including upgrade with Sigeyi spider power meter.

The link to Aliexpress offer for reference:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003801499299.html
January 20, 2022, 11:30:29 AM 		2
Re: Titanium Gravel bike: PYTitans build thread
Quote from: 00Garza on January 20, 2022, 09:47:46 PM
Thats a great looking build! Did you have to source your own fork or was that part of the deal with PYTitans? Paint job on it looks fantastic.

I chose a different fork from the Aliexpress seller Cwind:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003127524864.html

The quality was not as good as I hoped, I had to clean up the threads and the contact area for the flat mount calipers.
But with some elbow grease the problems were solved.

I decided to give a home made paint job a go and used the "marble" look. Automotive "Blue metallic" spray paint and a plastic foil were used to transfer the pattern to the fork.
The original matte black was sanded slightly with 800 grit sandpaper in preparation of the paint job.
To finish the surface I gave it two coats of clear 1k automotive grade lacquer.
Here is a video where I got the idea for the paint job:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PuX8LNhLNTI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>



Maybe a full frame paint job in the future....   ;D
January 21, 2022, 01:53:20 AM 		6
Re: Velobuild GF-002
Quote from: Txapa80 on December 12, 2021, 11:42:18 AM
Hi All,

I finally finished the build of the my bike.

I'm not totally happy with the feeling of the cable actuated hydraulics brakes because I had to swap the outer cables from the jagwire compression less for a cheap Clarks that were quite more flexible and allow me to fit them through the headset without kinking.

I will give a bit if time testing the bike and if the biting don't improve I will take it to the bike shop to have some advice.

A part from that during the short ride that I did to try all was working fine the bike rides very comfortable.

Hello there, I can fully understand your point.
Using the compressionless Jagwire cable makes a huge difference.
Last year I built a bike for my GF and was not aware of this fact and used cheap outer cables with the steel coil.
Result was an unsatisfying feeling when breaking that needed way too much force. Additionally the ZTTO brake callipers where not working well.
As a result she got an upgrade to Shimano full Hydraulic.

For my new build I went with Jagwire compressionless and made sure there were no tight curves in the routing, which may be challenging for all internal cabling trough the hanbdlebars...
In my case the routing through the Ti frame allowed for smooth bends and the resulting break feeling is very good and quite close to hydraulic disc.
How good the break power is, needs to be confirmed during longer rides.



But don't write off the cable actuated brakes without trying compressionless...

BR Chris
January 21, 2022, 02:36:47 AM 		4
Titanium Gravel bike: PYTitans Sorry for the cross posting...

Since the frame is metal I put the complete build thread under MTB metal frames.   ;)

Here a picture of the finished project.



If you are interested you can find all details in the build thread:
http://chinertown.com/index.php/topic,3555.0.html

BR Chris
January 21, 2022, 02:46:33 AM 		1
Re: Titanium Gravel bike: PYTitans build thread
Quote from: stumpym4 on January 21, 2022, 12:47:39 PM
Whats the rear tyre clearance like ?

cheers

Officially 42mm with a 700c wheel, this seems about correct.
My Panaracer Gravelking 38mm measures 40mm wide with my wheels and there is still plenty of space.

BR Chris
January 21, 2022, 07:17:06 PM 		1