You may have guessed this already, but I have been on a Chinese bike parts buying spree. It seems only right that I try and build my Quick Pro ER:One with as many Chinese-sourced parts as I can. This is somewhat to prove that Chinese products can absolutely do a great job, and partly to keep the build on budget. The crankset I bought from from Panda Podium, but all the other products below were sourced from AliExpress.

Crankset: CYBREI Carbon Crank & Carbon Chainrings

This is one area where you can save a decent amount of weight. CYBREI may be a “China brand” but these were not cheap. I could have saved A LOT of money by sticking with a regular Ultegra crankset. The cost for this CYBREI combo was on par with Dura-Ace! This one shaves over 200 grams compared to Dura Ace, so there’s that. You can purchase the crankset without chainrings or with regular metal chainrings, but because I’m a total tragic I opted for the fancy carbon fibre aerodynamic rings!

I’m still a little “old school” so I went with my usual 170mm crank length. Thanks to Pogačar the trendy thing these days is to go shorter, but I’ve not noticed any difference in my (quite limited) testing using 170mm and 165mm cranks.

Saddle: RYET 3D printed ultralight saddle with carbon base and rails

I’m no stranger to AliExpress or Chinese eBay saddles, but honestly I didn’t have very high hopes for this one. The padding looks plain weird and uncomfortable, and my previous carbon-railed saddle was a pain to fit. Riders seem to be raving about this particular design though so I took a chance and ordered it.

I have been pleasantly surprised! It’s super light at only 170 grams, it went on without any drama, and first impressions of the quality and comfort are great. I’ll reserve full judgement until I’ve completed a few long rides. So far, highly recommended.

Tubes: Off Bondage TPU inner tubes

Off Bondage is such a weird name for an inner tube company. Nevertheless, these tubes were an absolute bargain at only AUD $6 each. They are a high quality TPU tube with an 80mm aluminium valve stem and removable core. At only 35 grams they are 15 grams lighter than Continental Supersonic Ultralight Butyl tubes and five times cheaper!

Jockey Wheels: Alloy 11T pulley wheels with ceramic bearings

These I bought more for “bling” than a performance upgrade (or necessary part). They look ultra cool and spin so smoothly. If you’ve ever hand-spun a standard Shimano jockey wheel, you know they spin for all of one second. These spin and spin and spin and spin! Whether that makes any difference at all is debatable, but for less than AUD $20 delivered they were hard to pass up!

Not all of my China-sourced gear has been so good though. Here’s one that didn’t quite work out…

Cassette: GOLDIX Superlight 12-speed cassette

I purchased this cassette even though the reviews were mixed. The cassette looked fantastic when it arrived and was SUPER light. Way lighter than a Dura Ace cassette. Installation on my Elite Drive II Carbon wheels was easy, but that’s where the good news ended. I could not for the life of me to get it to shift smoothly.

I spent a good couple of hours adjusting the rear shifting to get it to running through the gears without skipping, but in the end I gave up. It worked “okay” to an extent, but would skip slightly when shifting around the middle of the cassette. Not always, but often enough to be annoying. I could not get it to shift anywhere near as smooth as a Shimano or SRAM cassette. For some people the less-than-perfect shifting wouldn’t be a problem, but for me it would have driven me crazy.

After a frustrating few hours, I binned this cassette and ordered a Shimano one!