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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
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Re: ZTTO 11-46 cassette 11 speed You do need a spacer for an 11speed mtb cassette on a road free hub body. For example , https://www.bike24.com/p259996.html
September 20, 2021, 02:12:01 PM
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Re: jstrawks' Carbonda CFR-1056 build thread My Farsports wheels arrived. The front is 719g. The rear is 820g.

This is as far as the build progresses until the groupset becomes available.

October 06, 2021, 02:10:00 PM
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Re: Frame that accepts qr and thru axles? I don't think that'll work. The hub spacing is different on these wheels as well, so unless your wheelset already supports thru axles by switching the end caps, you'll need to get a new one.
April 17, 2022, 01:57:08 AM
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