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How To Make Your Road Bike Lighter Without Upgrading To A Carbon Frame
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Apr 1, 2025
Saving weight from your road bike will always make it feel more lively and will make riding up those hills much easier. However, rather than spending loads of money to go and buy yourself a brand new carbon road bike, instead you should consider some of these upgrades as a slightly more cost efficient way to drop some weight and some of them are completely free! Cycling Weekly's Sam Gupta has pulled together a bunch of tips for you all to explore as a way to drop some weight from your bikes. Which are you going to try?
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0:00
We all want to save more weight from our bikes, right? Well, after building up my new Armanda
0:04
I thought I would share five ways that I'm planning on shedding a few grams, but
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they might not be in the way that you would expect. First off, I'm going to start at the seat post
0:16
The first thing that we can all do is mark where our seat post height is, pull out the seat post
0:21
from the frame, measure the minimum insertion, and then add that to the bottom of your marked
0:26
seat post height because what you may end up with is a section of seat posts that can be cut off
0:33
I've already done this myself and I ended up being able to take off about 10 centimetres
0:37
worth of seat posts which saved me a fairly decent 30 grams. For what is essentially a free win
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I don't think that's bad at all. But it doesn't just stop there because I have found a solution
0:51
to my fairly unattractive seat clamp collar. Instead of the original unit
0:55
I found this Pro Performance Seat Clamp, which isn't actually going to provide
1:00
any sort of weight saving, but it does just look a whole lot better
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And if you want one for yourself, then I have left a link down in the description below
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Before we move on to a different area of the bike, I do want to share one more recommendation
1:13
which I myself won't be doing, but it could be ideal for one of you lovely viewers
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and that is to look at a specialist seat post manufacturer like Doremo
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Now, Doremo is a Spanish brand and they make some incredibly lightweight components
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For example they make a 350mm 27 post which comes in at a claimed 80g which is seriously light They also make though proprietary posts for the likes of the Tarmac SLA so this gain isn just reserved for those with standard components Wheels are often
1:49
seen as the place to drop weight, but what if you already have a set of swanky lightweight wheels
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Well, you can't forget all of the things that are attached to your wheels. Firstly, the tyres are a
2:02
pretty large component and they obviously sit right at the very edge of the rotational mass
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So weight saved here can return much larger gains in ride and acceleration feel. So if you're running
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some all-season tires like I am in the form of the specialized S-Works Mondos, then consider opting
2:20
for some summer specific jobbies like these GP5000 TTTRs. These are going to save me about 200
2:29
grams compared to the Mondos, which is great. Of course, this is a change that I'll be making when
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the roads get a little bit drier, but the savings don't stop there. Cassettes actually carry a fair
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bit of mass to them, since there is a lot of metal work going on there. So, if you do have the funds
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it could be worth looking further up the range and getting a cassette which adopts a more advanced
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construction method and makes use of fancier materials. For example, the difference between
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this Ultegra cassette and this Dura-Ace cassette is 62 grams. Yes, it's not cheap, but as a way to
3:04
drop a fair bit of weight without needing to adopt a whole Dura-Ace groupset, this in my eyes is
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money well spent. I have also done some digging and found a pretty decent price on a Dura-Ace cassette
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which I linked down in the description The other component to consider on the wheels are your rotors and this is where you could end up spending a lot of money but for a much smaller gain Again I won be doing this one myself
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but if you do want to be as cool as Tali Pagaccia, then you could opt for some carbon tie rotors
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Compared to Ultegra spec rotors, they'll save you about 16 grams per wheel for a total saving
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of just over 30 grams, which is obviously very small, but maybe this one is more about the bling
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factor. Saving money and weight don't always go hand in hand, but when we look at the cockpit of
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the bike, there is an opportunity to do just that. I've been running the Garmin Edge 1040 Solar for
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nearly a year and a half now, but despite the vast amount of functionality that this thing provides
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you just cannot escape the size of it. So downsizing to a 540 or an 840 will not only be a
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cheaper option but it reduces the weight by nearly 46 grams and that's not bad at all
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If you shop around then you can often find really good deals on hedge units and I've linked a really
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good one down in the description. That's not the only thing that can be done in the cockpit area
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because much like how I was able to save weight by removing excess seat post length
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I can also do the same at my head tube by removing excess steerer tube length. I can also replace
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these alloy spacers with carbon ones for an albeit very small saving, but these carbon spacers
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only cost a few pounds. For those of you running integrated computer mounts like the one that comes
4:57
with the Roval handlebars it could be worth investing in a 3D printed option instead For the real weight weenies out there some aluminium mounts can actually weigh significantly more than a 3D printed equivalent
5:10
If we take the Roval 1 as an example, the standard unit weighs 53.3 grams
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while a 3D printed alternative comes in at 26.1 grams. That is certainly an easy win and again, can often be cheaper
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There are other things that most of us can do to help shave weight off our bikes
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like adopting a carbon bottle cage. Thankfully, these no longer have to be super expensive
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For example, if we compare a fairly standard bottle cage with a carbon one
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there's a potential saving of about 20 grams per cage. Now, for an upgrade that doesn't need to
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cost the earth anymore, I think this is one well worth going for. One which certainly is not for
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the masses and is reserved for those true weight weenies with money to burn, a carbon tie chain
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rings. They are eye-wateringly expensive, but after seeing them on Tani Pagaccia's bike
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I really can't stop thinking about them. However, these rings will never be going anywhere near my
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bike. For me, they just cost too much money to justify putting them on an aluminium bike
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but I think we can all take a second to just admire quite how pretty they are. In total then
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across all these little changes, I think I'm going to be able to save a not insignificant
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300-400 grams. Most of these savings have either been free or only cost sub-50 quid
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It's the big ticket items like the cassette, head unit and tyres which will up the price
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But as mentioned, deals can always be found on these things and I've done my best to link all
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of those down below
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