I’m nearing the end of my time with this frame, and I figured I’d make a post detailing some issues I’ve had and how I’ve addressed them. Overall, this is a fantastic frameset and I love it a lot, especially with how I currently have it kitted out. The paint is holding up well – one tiny chip on the seattube – and it’s the only frame I’ve ever had where passerby will spontaneously comment on the color (“ooh, sparkly bike!” was my personal favorite). However, my fork has a fatal flaw which, along with my desire for a few additional features, eventually inspired me to make a very poor financial choice and order a new, different frame.
To back up, over the course of several months at the start of this year I simultaneously became enamored with the 1x setup of my commuter bike and got increasingly fed up with the not-super-great front shifting setup of the 2x setup I was running (see my prior posts for pics of that). With the news of XPLR coming down to Rival level, I decided to swap to that groupset when it released, and also consolidate my wheel setup to 700c x 45 mm tires, as the handling with my 650b wheels wasn’t ideal – it’s just too close to the ground and I was getting pedal strike on rockier terrain. This post isn’t a review of Rival XPLR, but I will just say that the lever design really is as good as the reviews claim, and overall the groupset is a good if not totally perfect fit for my needs. 8.5/10, I do recommend.
More importantly for the frame setup, the larger diameter wheels/tires are a much better fit for this bike’s purpose, and they handle superbly, but only with the fork chip in the forward position! Running the chip in the rearward position (~49 mm offset) results in extremely twitchy handling. This also allows for the use of a 180 mm front rotor, which I like for additional heat capacity, as many of my descents drop multiple thousands of feet with lots of turns so any additional thermal headroom is welcome. Unfortunately, flipping the chip forward marked the beginning of my trouble with the fork…
Before I get into the weeds on the fork issue, I had one problem with the new build that turned out to be my fault. I was experiencing a classic seatpost creak, but I had no idea why, as everything was clean and freshly pasted. Running a dropper post means messing with the assembly really sucks, so experimenting with different options wasn’t easily possible. Amazingly, that week's Escape Collective tech podcast had a member-submitted question regarding seatpost creaking in a carbon frame with a wedge-type seatclamp, i.e. my exact problem, and their advice completely solved the issue. It turns out that if carbon paste gets too far down past the clamp, it can cause creaking as the seatpost flexes and the grit in the paste rubs in the seattube. Cleaning the post and frame (down the seattube a fair amount) and only applying paste to the post in a roughly 2-inch swath where it gets clamped totally fixed the creaking, and it’s been rock solid ever since. It was definitely worth paying my EC member dues for that!
Now for the fork, specifically the flip chip. As I pointed out in my first post on this thread, the non-driveside chip/dropout combo is very poorly designed, as the chip is not retained in any way and falls straight out if the axle isn’t pushing it into place. I think that, over time, that slightly loose chip very slightly ovalized/modified the dropout hole, and this was exacerbated when I flipped the chip to the forward position and changed the orientation of this asymmetric ovalization (see my following post for some evidence). The effect of this is that the fork began to click at irregular intervals in an extremely irritating fashion – silence for 10 seconds, a barrage of clicking, silence for 5 seconds, a click or two, etc etc etc for every ride… I couldn’t (and can’t) take it! So I tried quite a lot of methods and materials in an attempt to immobilize the chip:
- A small bit of butyl tube (as landboard did – see his post on page 4)
- Single-sided tape, applied to the frame; after this failed I tried it on the chip, to no avail
- Thin double-sided tape
- Blue Loctite (this REALLY didn’t work)
- Sugru (this REALLY, REALLY didn’t work)
- Aluminum foil, folded to the maximum thickness where I could still get the chip into the fork. This worked the best, but it didn’t totally solve the clicking and after about 90 minutes the foil would get completely compressed by the movement of the chip and lose its effectiveness
- Soda can shim – this was the tightest fit but was worse than the foil at preventing the clicking.
- The final, irreversible attempt: Gorilla Ultimate Epoxy, liberally applied all around the chip and dropout hole. This actually did fix the clicking, but only for ~30 minutes before it failed and the noise came back as bad as ever
This last attempt also came right when I was building up a new frame for a friend, a frame that has downtube storage, and I got very fond of this feature very quickly, both for ease of maintenance and actual carrying capacity. So, extremely frustrated by months of fork clicking and desiring a silent bike with downtube storage, I reached out to Carbonda about their new AF01 frame; technically it’s under their “Assisting Force” brand, but what a terrible name, and all email to that brand goes straight to Carbonda anyway. It has storage, very slightly bigger tire capacity (which I think will matter more in the future as tire brands converge on 50 mm as a standard tire size, so 47/48 mm tires will become hard to find), and has geometry that is almost exactly the same as the G068, down to the 55 mm fork offset. I learned that the same chameleon blue/purple paint is an option, so I put in an order for that, and it should ship in the next few weeks.
Thus my time with this G068 frame is ending, and I’m going to sell it – look for the listing in the Classified section on this site soon – but I won’t be selling the problematic fork. No, it turns out that SPCycle is able to make a fork that will almost certainly fix this issue, and it should’ve been like this from the start: a fork with a grub screw on each leg, not just the driveside one! I reached out to SPCycle to see if they could make such a fork, and David replied that they could, so I ordered one and it arrived just a few hours ago, exactly as I hoped (see the picture below).
So, whoever buys this frame will also receive, as far as I know, the ONLY such fork currently in existence. If you’re planning on ordering a G068 frame and you’ve read this far, then email SPCycle to see if they can modify your fork like this. Though if SPCycle is reading this post, I am begging you, please make this modification standard if it isn’t already. EDIT: based on klindsey's post below, it seems as though the dual grub screws may already be a stock feature - I hope this is the case and no one else has to deal with this issue!
