Ok, so with the rather less than shiny new purchase clamped into the work stand it was time to assess exactly what I had here – was it the bargain of the century or a total disaster of a money pit which was going to cost me far to much to fix? The truth as ever was somewhere inbetween these two extremes. As mentioned in the last post the bike did have a couple of obvious issues which I’d noticed straight off the bat when I viewed the bike which had helped me drive the price down a bit. The first and most glaring problem was the front wheel was massively out of dish. It wasn’t buckled, but the rim was so offset to the left side that it was almost rubbing on the fork blade. Closer inspection of the wheel when I got the bike home revealed that most of the right hand spokes had little or no tension at all, I could literally turn them in their spoke nipples with light finger pressure. Sure enough winding a bit of tension on started pull the rim into roughly the correct dish, but this wheel obviously needed properly re-tensioning and re-dishing and that was going to be beyond me. It made sense to get the back wheel checked as well so off both wheels went to …… you guessed it my wheel building mate Ian who loves a challenge with some more vague promises of beer related payment for his services.

To get the TCR mobile in the mean time I snagged a cheap set of disc brake wheels locally off Facebook Marketplace and set off for a first exploratory ride. I must admit this first foray was a little underwhelming. The disc brakes far from being the powerful upgrade I was expecting were woeful. The lever’s felt spongey and the brake squeal especially at low speed was horrendous. The Shimano Ultegra Di2 gears worked ok, but again they didn’t elevate the riding experience to new heights of amazingness. I pressed the buttons and the cogs swapped ok, but I wouldn’t say the shifting was measurably better than my faithful fully mechanical 105 setup on my usual roadbike, in fact if anything it was a bit worse because the shift was quite slow when dropping down the cassette at the back and sometimes required a couple of stabs at the button before anything happened. So if the two main reasons for buying the bike the disc brakes and the electric gears were a bit of a bust was it all doom and gloom? Well no, there were other grounds for cautious optimism. The little TCR felt fast and nimble. The turn in was sharper than Sharon Stones ice pick, and the carbon fibre frame felt stiff and responsive. The way the bike picked up speed out of a tight corner was particularly impressive and made a marked contrast to my Ti framed Sabbath which has a much more relaxed geometry and an all round more sedate feel. Giant market the TCR as their more racing oriented roadbike and I could definitely tell that this was a frame designed to go fast in that uncompromising way that told you that backache was on the horizon, but so were lots of Strava PB’s.

With the maiden voyage done and the areas for improvement identified the TCR was clamped back into the workstand to address some of its issues. First the brakes. With the wheels off I took a close look at the callipers and pads. The previous owner had told me he’d had the bike ‘professionally serviced’ which had cost him ‘a lot of money’ just after buying it and then had only ridden it a couple of times before realising he needed a bigger frame. Looking at the crusty calipers and badly glazed pads I was forced to wonder exactly what the poor guys money had got him. The front brake caliper was so filthy that with the pads out a gentle press of the lever confirmed only one brake piston was making any effort to extend. Five minutes with a cloth, some brake cleaner and a couple of cotton buds solved that issue. The genuine Shimano pads did look quite new so they were de-glazed with some coarse sandpaper and were good to go again. Deciding a full fluid change was advisable the faithful bleed kit was broken out and some nice clean mineral oil pumped through the system. The old fluid was black, gungy and disgusting – clearly it had been in there for years ….. ‘Professionally serviced?’ hmmmmmm I really don’t think so, oh and the pads retaining pin was missing and had been replaced with a split pin which was so mangled that it looked as if it had been used as an angry gorillas stress toy .

With the back brake treated to a similar regime of cleaning, de-glazing and fluid replacement the brakes felt (at least in the work stand) much improved so it was onto inducting myself into the mystic art of electronic gears. How hard could it be? after all I have spent a lot of my more recent professional life plugging laptops into airliners and watching progress bars march across the screen as various bits of software disappear into the bowels of the aeroplane so after watching a couple of quick YouTube videos I felt well equipped to just dive into fiddling with the Ultegra Di2 gears on the TCR without really having a clue about what I was doing 😎

This little box on the chainstay meant some previous owner had updated the TCR with a wireless bluetooth module which let me download the Shimano App and talk to the bike via my phone instead of plugging in a laptop. If you’d told me 20 years ago that one day I’d be updating my bicycles firmware using my mobile phone I’d have , well to be honest I really wouldn’t have had a clue what you were talking about – its a strange world we live in but that’s progress I suppose!

Anyway, after the usual orgy of account setup, password creation and connections to the bike I discovered that all the Di2 modules from the battery to the shifters were way past due a software update which they duly received via the magic of bluetooth via my phone. The app also showed be that the rear derailleur adjustment was cranked as far over as the app settings would allow which made me wonder if that was the cause of the slightly erratic shifting at the rear.

Having a play with the settings seemed to improve things a bit so I took the bike for another shakedown ride. After another 60km or so around my local lanes I could take stock again. The brakes were most definitely better, still not the amazing ‘lock a wheel’ with a thought experience I’d perhaps been expecting but they now had decent power and modulation and didn’t scare the local wildlife away because they sounded like a banshee from the pits of hell every time I pulled up to a stop. The gears were better, but no amount of fiddling with the adjustment seemed to make the downshift in the middle of the cassette really consistent, the rear mech does show some significant battle scars so I think the next step is to remove it and check the rear gear hanger for alignment, and have a really close look at the derailleur off the bike and check it for damage.

The last change I made to the bike after this second ride was to remove the remote satellite shift buttons installed on the bar tops. They took up space where I like to rest my hand and I’d found that after seeing if they worked ok (they did) I just didn’t use them. Removing them meant I needed a special tool for disconnecting Di2 cables, but having a small 3d printer at home saved me the £12 my local bike shop wanted for a proper one ! again it makes me sound old but if you told me that one day I’d me printing my own tools from molten plastic….. blah, blah, blah 😄

Removing the buttons meant new bartape was required, but again the bar tape on this ‘professionally serviced machine’ looked like it had been applied by Homer Simpson after a bad day at the Springfield Nuclear Powerplant so that was no great hardship.

My third decent ride on the TCR was when it all really started to come together and I at last started to see the bikes potential. The real game changer was getting the original wheels back from Ian. He had pronounced the rear wheel as good to go with just a quick check over for trueness and spoke tension needed, but had confirmed that the radially spoked front wheel had been so badly out of whack that he’d basically had to start from scratch with it. How it had got so wildly out of dish and tension is anyones guess (*cough* pro service *cough*) but after discarding the rock hard and rather cracked Giant own brand tyres and fitting some Continental GP5000’s with standard inner tubes because I just don’t trust tubeless setups at 80-100psi the bike was transformed. I’m always shocked at how much a decent set of wheels and tyres transforms a road bike, I remember the appreciable performance bump on the Sabbath when I fitted the 9Velo carbon wheels and couple of years ago, and getting the TCR back on its Giant branded carbon SLR wheels was a similar revelation.

Back on the wheels that the mega brains of Giant had chosen for it the TCR which had already felt fast and eager when rolling on the eBay cheapo Mavics fairly flew along. Looking at the Strava data when I got home I’d been setting personal bests up almost every local climb I’d gone up which was a testament to the bikes light weight and snappy power transfer. The carbon rims seemed to soften the ride a touch as well leaving me feeling less fatigued when I got off the bike, but that might be me just getting used to the new racier position I suppose. Compared to my trusty Ti Sabbath the Giant is clearly much more of a no compromise machine. From it’s aero carbon seat post with it’s hidden clamp to the sculpted smooth lines of the carbon frame It’s a bike designed to go fast, to make you want to stay in the big ring and down on the drops squeezing every bit of power out of those quads. It tempts you to lay off the brakes and attack the corners where its straight bladed fork and steep head angle promise a sharp turn in and oodles of front end grip if your brave and committed enough to exploit it.

As the autumn sets in around these parts of the UK with a vengefulness that makes me remember how much I dislike riding in the wind and rain the TCR has been hung up out of the way from a hook in my garage roof for now waiting for the fast summer roads to return. It’s the Moulton’s time to shine now with its mudguards and full suspension making it much more suited to the winter roads than the skinny carbon hoops on the TCR or the Sabbath. Come next summer will it be the Carbon wizz kid I’m reaching for or will I return to the almost as quick but steadier comfort of the eternally good looking Ti frame? Not sure, but its going to be fun having options!