Cannondale CAAD5 slammed: Rim brakes and alloy frames aren't dead!

Great photos. Stem looks more reasonable!

I also switched from Swiss stop black prince to campag red and I was surprised how much better the campag were and am now a total convert.

Great pictures and bike, parking lots are a great spot - you also used a flash or additional light source?

Incredible looking bike. Prefer the -17 stem for aesthetics, but that’s easy to say when it’s not me riding it.

Honestly looks amazing tho.

Thanks! Yeah it was taken in my car park with just the fluorescents, no reflectors or flash or anything.

Thanks all! Yeah originally the LB pads were felt pretty good, but that was initial impressions riding around the car park and the city. At higher speeds and descents they needed a fair bit of hand pressure to get it to stop. I heard a lot of good things about the Campagnolo ones, not sure about rim wear but they feel actually quite soft. In any case a new rim is cheaper than new teeth…

Although the blue pads matched the frame, the red pads now complete the team USA colours… 😂

I’ll probably also follow up at some point with a review/thoughts on the EE replica brakes. So far they are actually pretty good, with these pads they really feel similar to alloy rims.

Impressive build, especially the 2:1 leaving on the rear wheel! Bike looks sick.

Were you at Richmond on this on Sunday? I sat on the wheel of a slammed caad5 with ee brakes but when I took a turn on the front I thought I saw it had a silver stem, although I may be misremembering!

Boom! Looks rapid and cracks me up how 20 years on and the industry is struggling to do much better than these machines, despite vast sums of cash being thrown behind aerospace carbon and disc brakes. I did something similar, though shallower rims and overall less stealth.

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Thanks! Yeah I was actually! I had someone on my back wheel for a bit who had a ticking noise, also were you wearing a white jersey with bits on it? If that was you I peeled off when you took a turn as I was trying to take it easier as I’m recovering from an injury.

Yeah I’m a big fan of discs but definitely the early 2000’s bikes don’t lose much to modern ones to be honest. In fact I doubt you will be able to get Sram AXS batteries when they are as old as my CAAD (18 years old). At which point you will likely have to bin it or do a hack to get it to work.

Funny how good mechanical shifting is when you route cables externally, it’s only when you try to route them through headsets it becomes problematic and leads to electronic groupsets which cost an arm and a leg.

Nice bike btw. One of my favourite Campagnolo eras was the 11sp before they went with the weird 4bolt cranks. Love silver spokes/hubs with carbon rims.

Not me in white but that was definitely my creaking CAAD12 making the ticking noise 🙄

Think I need to bite the bullet and fit a c-bear bb

Must have been you as I could definitely hear your BB 😅

This is so good, I'm a big fan

Actually I think I was going for something similar with my road bike so I would be a fan, yours is quite a lot better tho🥲

fuck I want a Cannondale now...

Any further thoughts on the EE replica's, and did you swap out the brake shoe bolts with aftermarket ones?

Oooff me likey!! Would exactly like this

Blue outer on the RD might be a nice detail

Not sure if it‘s just the fact of me nearing 40 but I start liking -6/8 deg stems more and more 😅

Sorry if I missed this but whats the final weights in this iteration?

I'm also very interested in this

Heya I have now posted a review here of my own thoughts on the brakes https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/390086/

Final weight was somewhere around 7.4-7.6kg. Could probably lose a few hundred grams by changing out the fork and a few other bits and pieces to be honest.

See above

Minor update....

So I saw this for sale and I couldn't resist. I've always had a soft spot for Campagnolo, one of my first serious road bikes had the 2010 Athena groupset.

This is the later post-2015 Chorus groupset, more or less the same as Record and Super Record but with slightly less carbon. Still quite blingy though...

The groupset looked like it had been taken off a bike that had a fair bit of use and had been store outside or in quite moist conditions. Shifters still worked perfectly fine but I made the jump and decided to pull these apart and rebuild them. I'm somewhat mechanically inclined and have rebuilt Sram 11 speed levers, there is a fair bit of info out there on how to do it too.

This is the left lever disassembled. Actually quite interesting, you can see the little round plate in the middle with the divots, the toothed plate with the two ball bearings fits into this and gives the correct stops for the shifter. Quite an interesting way to do this, as it's different from Sram and presumably Shimano as they rely on a ratchet and pawl style system. This gives it the distinctive clack sound.

Also what's interesting is that the central shaft the shifter mechanism pivots on runs on 2x ball bearings inside the shifter.

Right hand side shifter disassembled. You can see the shifter plate is different as it has a lot more indents and the shape is different, the toothed plate has springs for the ball bearings.

Now regreassed and (almost) like new. Just need to add new hoods. These were surprisingly easy to disassemble, only odd tool was a T15 driver which I had to buy. Compared to the Sram doubletap design, this has a few more parts but the mechanism seems a bit more robust.

I managed to wear the toothed gear on my Sram Force 22 shifters after about 5 years to the point that it would misshift, the ball bearing and indented plate system seems to be a lot smoother as all the Campag shifters I've ever used have been more long lasting.

Also managed to snag a Columbus Futura Calliper SL Fork on the forum, although painted in dark blue, this is a full carbon fork and supposedly quite light compared to the alloy steerer model that is on the bike now.

Stripped back to bare carbon... and lost about 35g just in paint! There were actually 2 paint-jobs in there...

Some slight chips/imperfections which I filled with epoxy

Then repainted in 2K clear coat matt


Once I cut the steerer I dropped another 24g, so in total lost 54g from repainting it...

Spotted you nabbed that and thought you'd do something good with it. I tried one on my 9 a while back, great forks but the ridge line is a little distracting.

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Ha! That's the lower coat I scraped off, that was quite a nice paint job. Did you also buy it second hand?

Here's what the new forks and groupset look like. Also managed to bag a matching NOS Campagnolo Hiddenset headset, they stopped making these a while ago. The UD layup of the fork I assume were intended to be painted as they aren't laid up for appearance, but I kind of strangely like the random patterns you get with the layup and the bare bones functional look

Also the -17deg stem is back... I was recovering from an unrelated back injury (gym related I swear!). The bar height on this doesn't seem to make a difference to me, have taken it on a non-stop 100km ride and didn't have any issues.

Beaut! Straight forks look really nice. What a transformation from when you got it.

Tremendous work. The campag really looks good.

Loved your CAAD2 as well - what did you do with the 808s?