bicycles is now a Felt dealer and our first few bikes have arrived. This one, an FW35, is the first one I pulled out of the box to build up. It's an interesting bike, and it is really stinking small, but Felt actually makes two bikes smaller than this one for women, the smallest of which is a 650c wheeled bike.
It's always bothered me that companies will take a frame, paint it pink, but a big squishy saddle and a short stem on it, and call it a "woman's bike." It appears that Felt has taken the idea of making a bike for women a little more seriously. There are five different bikes in the line up specifically for women and with all of them their smallest size uses 650c wheels. While some might groan at the idea of a bike with 650c wheels one needs to understand the finer nuances of bike geometry and realize that once a bike gets down to a certain size the top tube can no longer get effectively any shorter (by this I mean making the seat tube angle steeper to shorten the measurement of the top tube length isn't the same as actually reducing the effective top tube length, come see me and I'll draw you a picture to show you what I mean, or maybe in a day or two I'll edit this entry with an inserted crudely drawn rendering of what I'm talking about) and the head tube can only get so short meaning once you hit a certain point the front end of the bike can't get any lower. The result of extra small frames with 700c wheels is very slack head tube angles which make the bike handle quite poorly due to an excessively long trail number, and a front end that is too high for shorter people.
Another thing Felt manages to do is put 105 10spd components on a sub $1400 bike which is nice enough, and they also don't assume that women are weak (which they aren't) and they spec an affordable woman's bike with a double chainring with the understanding that women are often very serious cyclists and don't need to be pandered to with equipment that betrays their ability.
It's a nice "little" bike.
2 comments:
Does this bike have 2 sets of brake leavers?
The second set of levers referred to as "interlevers" are an innovation that arose in the world of cyclocross where the racers would often find themselves need brakes while riding the tops of the bars. The don't affect the primary brake levers in any way. They seem at home on a woman's specific bike because a lot of women tend to sit more upright and find themselves on the flats of the bars quite regulary. Also, with smaller and weaker hands on average many women complain about not being able to get decent leverage on the STI levers from the hoods and can't always reach them from the drops so the interlevers offer another option for braking without the issues of reach and provide excellent leverage on the brakes themselves for efficient braking. I meant to comment on this feature in the bike review but forgot.
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