Been lurking here for several months as I am a new cyclist with sticker shock on carbon road bikes here in the US which led me down the rabbit hole of Chinese frames and building my own. Finding this forum and seeing several channels on Youtube that are dedicated to the Chinese parts I want to give it a try on building my own. I have been making some purchases and starting to gather parts. Having watched Trace Velo on Youtube I purchased off Aliexpress the Sensah team pro shifters to be used witha Shimano 105 groupset along with some Junitech f1 brakes. It's taken a turn for the worse with the Elite Wheels purchase he recommends.

On his videos he claims he's not sponsored by these companies and he gives his "truthful" reviews. Looked legitimate to me as I have seen some of his videos he did give negatives on some of the Chinese products. With the Elite Wheels ENT set getting solid reviews by him and people in his video's comment section I gave them a look on Aliexpress. They had hundreds of good reviews so I went ahead and made an order with upgraded xray spokes for a total of $500. Fast forward months later the mangled Elite Wheel box showed up on my porch. The hubs were sticking out of the box on both sides. I opened it up to find many broken spokes and some badly damaged wheels. Needless to say they were paper weights at that point. Contacted Elite Wheels through Aliexpress and they said Aliexpress is responsible for all shipping so start a dispute. Once the dispute was started Elite Wheel denied the claim so it went to Aliexpress for decision. Aliexpress offered $100 refund. Of course this was not acceptable so at this point I started a chargeback through paypal. Come to find out Aliexpress bans you for this.

So with this bad experience going down I left a comment on Trace Velo's video on these wheels kinda as a heads up to potential buyers. That was yesterday. I woke up this morning and checked to see if I needed to reply to anyone and to my surprise the comment had been deleted. I posted another comment and added that I am going to post on here to let people know Trace Velo is deleting negative comments on these Chinese companies that he is supposedly not sponsored by. It was deleted in less than 2 minutes. Now I am not the brightest bulb in the pack but for a person to claim they are giving honest reviews and are not sponsored by the company to turn around and have a negative comment deleted in less than 2 minutes speaks volumes to me. With the above said I do have a screen shot of what I posted. I can post it if that would help. I am more concerned with people knowing which youtubers and forums are legitimate advice to listen to and spend their hard earned money accordingly and who is just making content to make money off people.

Needless to say I am still in need of wheels. I am wanting 700c 50mm deep by 25mm wide carbon wheels. It looks like I most likely will have several xray spokes after the Elite Wheel fiasco so I am not afraid to purchase more spokes and hubs to put something together. What are some recommended brands to go with for wheels? What places are legitimate to purchase from? I am also very interested in the Carbonda CFR1056 frame. Is that frame worth buying over a good aluminum frame with a lifetime warranty stateside for about the same price?

Wish my first post here was more positive but if my situation can help save just one person the headache I went through it was worth it.

Thanks,
Kyle