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Carbon Goodies

Posted: Jan 03 2010

My own personal carbon sequestration program started with the carbon Vertex with the custom paint, but it had to include some primo carbon components.

I splurged on a set of the Race Face Next carbon cranks in the fall of 2008, one of the earliest production runs. Lighter than XTR, stiff and unfortunately they did suffer from a warranty failure of the spider at the chainring bolt holes. The ones pictured are the warranty replacements which, so far, have been great .

If you're a full on weight weenie, swapping the RF BB for an XTR BB will save you about 25gms and get you a very smooth spinning set of bearings. So far I've had no issues with XTR BB's.

One of the things that you do need to do with Next cranks is slap a bit of Crankskins clear protector on the arms if you have enough pronation that your heels rub your cranks. The clear coat is not all that hard a surface so it is easy to get lots of heel scuffs in a short time. The Crankskins keep them pristine.

The other thing that changed on the Next cranks between my first set and the warranty replacement set were the Turbine Rings in place of the Team Rings. That's a big improvement in shifting and avoiding chain suck, as every tooth has some shaping so there are no sharp square edges with machining marks to grab onto a gritty chain.

The other big investment in carbon sequestration on my Vertex was the DT Swiss carbon rimmed wheelset I had the West Van store build up.  The DT XRC 330 rims were in fact 330 gms each, and from what Ciaran said, they were the straightest, roundest rims he's ever started a wheel build with. If you don't need to tweak the tension to make the wheel round it sure is easy. I'm not a big air grabber on my XC bikes, so I'm not too worried about riding these carbon rims. They have a weight rating of 90kg so I am right at the upper edge of that limit, but they haven't wavered a bit from being true and wobble/hop free. They're tensioned up near the max for these rims too (1150Nm) so they are as twangy tight as the XTR wheels. Paired up with 240S hubs (28H front and 32H rear) instead of the super tweaky 190 hubs, I've added the 9mm thru axle to the front hub and have the 36 point star ratchet and 10mm thru axle for the rear hub but haven't installed them yet. The wheels weighed 1360ms with rim tape.The bike has the other usual carbon goodies, Race Face Next SL bars, Race Face Next seatpost, FSA OS99 CSI carbon wrapped stem, even a carbon fibre top cap on the stem.

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