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Re: Velobuild VB-R-218 I ordered my VB-R-218 in size XXL with the 110/42 cockpit on August 20, with a September 5 ship date and September 13 arrival in Texas. My intention was to use it as a frame for all of the spare parts I've been collecting in my garage to use as a fun project bike.

I spent yesterday building it up, and it's now mostly complete. I was worried about the shifting quality with the full internal routing -- enough that I actually started researching buying a Rival eTap groupset before I built up the bike, negating the entire purpose of even beginning this project -- but I powered through and I'm pleased to say the shifting is superb. Running both hydraulic brakes and mechanical shifting through the headset was a royal pain, but now that it's done I'm happy with the results. Handlebars rotate just fine with everything bundled up in there, and the shifting is just as smooth as my bikes with more relaxed cable routing.

It was a little tough to get the bottom bracket threaded in. There was a ton of paint in the threads that I had to carefully scrape out because it was preventing me from even getting the threads engaged, but after an hour I was able to finally get the bottom bracket installed. I haven't noticed any friction or problems rotating the cranks, so I'm hopeful everything turns out to be aligned well enough.

The only problem I have so far is that after several hours of tinkering, I can't get the hydraulic brakes aligned at all using the normal tricks. The scraping is much more severe than I've experienced from any of the other bikes I've built, and I suspect the mounts need to be faced. I ordered the Hayes brake alignment tool to see if that will help, but if not I'll pop into my LBS to get them faced. I just want to fully exhaust all attempts to do it myself since they're an authorized Pinarello dealer. Maybe they won't care, or maybe they'll be totally offended and toss me out. We'll see.

Component list:

- R7000 105 mechanical groupset, including 172.5 mm crank with 4iiii power meter
- Giant PR2 wheelset
- Continental GP5000 tires, 700x25
- Bontrager tubes
- Proxim W350 saddle
- Jagwire shift cables
- RS500 SPD SL pedals, sitting in the garage not installed yet

Definitely not lightweight. In its current state without pedals, it's 8.76 kg. The RS500 pedals are about 320g, and when I install the water bottle cages that arrive tomorrow that will tip me well over the 9 kg mark. Definitely not concerned about weight since this is a spare parts build, but depending on how it rides I could see myself swapping the wheelset out with something a little more svelt sometime in the future.

Once I can get the brakes to the point where the wheels turn without waking up the neighbors, I'll report back on ride quality.
September 18, 2022, 04:37:50 PM 		1