My dream road bike

30/06/25 20:19 Filed in: Gear

I tried to get Llewellyn to build me this bike, but he wasn't interested in working with the electronics side of things and said if I conquered the digital side I should get back to him. So nothing yet. Probably ever!

What do I want? A traditional road bike with downtube shifters that are electronic. I was imaging doing it with Di2, in which case the push and the pull of the levers would have to enact different actions. But lately I think AXS is the way to do this, so the levers would have one direction of motion that mimics the click of the shift button on the AXS brake lever (left lever for higher gear, right lever for lower gear, both levers for chainring shift - all programmable from the AXS app). One would probably have to gut an AXS pod shifter for a MTB or the shift mechanism in the road levers to accomplish this easily - short of building the whole thing from the ground up (would have been pretty straightforward in the Di2 space as a Hall-effect sensor or even a magnetic reed switch connected to the shift lever would have sent the signal up the wire to the derailleur). To make this happen would require a nice set of downtube shift levers and a means of turning them into a nice feeling RTC motion (return to centre - every push springs back to the starting place) all while preserving the water-proof nature of AXS shifting. Hence why I haven't done this.
Then I'd need some brake levers that aren't shift levers. To look traditional it would have to be rim brakes, but I like discs and think a traditional metal frame with small round tubes and downtube shifters with hydraulic disc brakes would be nicer to ride. That's actually not too important to my vision as good rim brakes are good and any disc brakes I might come up with that have non-shifting levers for drop bars are also likely to not be the best of disc brakes.
I never had indexed downtube shifting. I went straight from 6 speed friction shifting with downtube shifters to 8 speed STI shifting on the brake levers. At this point I'd happily forego the whole digital shifting experience if I could get some nice 12 speed downtube indexed shifters in Record or Red flavours to go with the rest of the group. That'd be awesome and lovingly anachronistic.

Why?
Why not!

Michael Hanslip Coaching

If you want to go faster, you have to pedal harder

My dream road bike