First proper ride with the new GeX today, 3 hours gravel and road. It performed flawlessly, all gear changes were quick and seamless, braking was great, basically nothing to say but good things. I swapped bikes with another rider who has Sram Force, he thought the GeX was just as good, pretty much the same.
My most pleasing feature was the shape of the shifters, much more comfortable than any of my previous Sram or Shimano, perhaps because I have smallish hands, I'm not sure, but I found them really comfortable.
I've done my build slowly, my first time fitting disc brakes and an electronic groupset, so I had a few learnings. Some key points and info about my build:
- I had to back off the K, lower limit screw in order to initialse my gear 1
- I set up the gears, nicely indexed on the workstand, but during a short test ride I had to fine tune 2 or 3 gears, but this was really easy
- The weight of the groupset was a tad lighter than my Sram Rival groupset
- I'm running a Sram Eagle chain with a Spedao 11-50t 12 speed cassette, working well and very very light for the money
- I did not need to bleed the brakes at all, had to shorten the hoses, insert new barbs, connect and go..... all good out of the box
- The groupset comes with a bleed kit, nice touch
- For shortening the brake hoses I bought a tool from Aliexpress, makes it so easy to cut and insert the barb, great investment
- Total cost with brake hose tool, groupset and cassette ~$530 USD (I already had a chain
Next step is to see how easy it is to swap between wheels, one 12spd, one 11spd
Nice finishing touch to my Gravel bike:
- Waltly Chinese Titanium frame
- Wheeltop GeX groupset
- Lun Grapid 650b wheelset
- Spedao lightweight cassette
- Uno Aliexpress lightweight bars and stem
- 160mm Xcadey power crank
- Oval chainring, Stone from Aliexpress
- Kactus lightweight rotors
- 2nd set of road wheels from Speeder Cycling
- Branded stuff includes Sram chain, Pirelli Tyres, SMP saddle and XTR pedals (half price sale)
