as you can see it's a lovely day so time to Tinker
with some bikes today I'm putting a 200 pound group set on my lovely race bike
this is L2 RX which is a 12 speed performance carbon group set from AliExpress it was about
200 pounds and it came with rotors brake calipers cassette chain everything you
need to get going so I did an unboxing and a first look at this group set so if you want
to check out that video first it will be in the description down below this does mean I'm taking
off the sensor Empire Pro a different 12-speed group set you can get for very cheap I've been
testing it for a while it's going to be going on a different bike don't worry the testing
is ongoing without further Ado let's strip this down put this on and see how it performs
foreign
of the old group set sensor Empire Pro 708 grams for the shifters and mechs and this
L2 RX turns out to be a little bit heavier on the scales of Destiny 744 grams for the
next and the shifters bear in mind though I've left the um I'm being lazy I left the cables
in so that will account for a few grams but on the whole very close they almost weigh the same
now I realize this is personal opinion subjective
um and it's going to be hard for this to come across in video but the quality of these shifters
they feel very premium they feel more premium than the sensor ones the hoods feel nicer quality
they don't rattle flickers and shifters feel very positive what I'm trying to get across is that
they feel better than a 200 pound gripset part we would expect to feel and they look better too it's
also worth mentioning that these are heavily inspired by the shape of campagnolo shifters
whereas these uh more their own unique thing this shifter shape is going to be completely down to
personal preference some people might like this more especially if you're used to using cam pack
I've never actually owned a bike with Cam pack before but just ridden loads from uh past Workshop
experience but on the whole these look pretty much the same the shift has come with a piece of gear
cable already installed already fitted into the shifter I'm going to be using the existing Alters
that are already threaded through my frame for two reasons one they're probably still all right
because I haven't actually ridden this bike that much and it's a nice closed system two I really
don't want to have to do the internal routing on this Frame again here's one thing that's a bit
annoying there is only one option when it comes to installing the gear code table one port on
the shifter so the little hole where your gear cable ferrule will go into the shifter you have
to go on the inside of the handlebar whereas the sensor group set you have two different
options you can either go inside the handlebar or around the outside if you go around the outside
it's a smoother curve for the cable to go around which is very important if you have handlebars
with internally rooted cables the smoother curve makes a big difference when it comes to shifting
performance here you've got to go on the inside which is uh a lot tighter and still the cable
length is okay thank God for that I have to redo the whole thing hopefully it'll still shift nice
foreign now the brakes here are Z race br005s which are a fairly newly released break from
zedros they have a hydraulic Reservoir inside but they're cable actuated along with most of the
brakes that are available on AliExpress these are supposed to be fastly improved from the previous
versions and I know a lot of you have asked if I could test them so um now we are testing them
they came with the gripset package which was 200 pounds all in brake pads look gold they
got their gold it must be good if they're made of gold generally speaking though it's advised
to change these brake pads to Shimano ones um or something that will fit usually you can improve
performance over the stock pads that come with these kind of bricks so uh yeah I'm gonna test
them as is because that is uh fairer I want to use this exactly as the package that it came with
thank you one more time here there's a blue suits Blue's healthy right there blueberry
strange but the rear Mech is perfectly indexed straight out of the box
or the uh plastic wrapping it didn't come in a box front Mech it feels like there's quite a lot
of resistance in the system compared to the other sensor group set but it has a few trim positions
and it works so I think what we need to do now is go outside thankfully it stopped raining I
really didn't want to ride these brand new brakes in the rain so happy days I was wrong he's riding
well it stopped raining now so first ride impressions pretty good it shifts well really
well super smooth front Mech felt a little bit sticky in the stand but actually when you're
riding it I haven't noticed that shifts really quickly and exactly how you want it to I need
to adjust the front cable a little bit because the trimming positions aren't exactly right for
exactly where you need them to be there is one big problem though which I've just noticed you
can't reach the button to shift down when you're in the drops at all now with campaign group sets
you have a button that in most cases you can reach it in the drops without any problems which is a
very important feature particularly if you would like to ride fast because if you're riding in the
drops you need to be able to shift gear usually to a harder Gear with this group sir you can't
unless you've got like really abnormally long thumbs I've got pretty big hands and thumbs and
I'm miles away from it so uh that's a negative on the plus side the shifters do feel nice to use the
thumb buttons are right to use when you're sat on the hood the rubber feels like it's good quality
and the end of the shifter would be very hard for you to slip off it's got quite a pronounced
little bump at the top so you're definitely not sliding forwards off the edge of them if you hit
a pothole or something like that you can shift two gears with one push of the right hand paddle so
an excellent feature which the sensor group set is missing you can only shift one gear at a time it's
a very light touch so if you don't want to shift two gears you have to be a little bit careful or
I've have it I've had to be a little bit careful uh not to push it too far because then you end up
with two gears going and sometimes you don't want that now the brakes yeah I'm gonna wait till I
get home to show you the problem and I gotta ride up a massive hill now so I'll be uh you know out
of breath bad for video making these brakes are strong after making fun of the pads earlier I've
eaten my words they're gold and they're amazing they bite much more even in the wet than the other
brakes that I was using which were the junetech f1s Taiwanese break here's the problem though
rear one's fine front one once you've braked once the cable won't return now this isn't
a problem specifically with this brake it's a problem because this Frame is internally rooted
internal routing means that the cable has to run inside the handlebars through your stereo tube
into the fork and then out of the fork connecting to the brake there's lots of twists and turns
there and while it kind of worked okay with the other brake caliper clearly this one needs more
cable to be pulled for it to work therefore if it gets stuck and it doesn't return your front wheel
is just kind of always breaking a little bit now this could probably be improved with some
compressionless brake housing but I have worries that compressionless brake housing which isn't
very twisty it's quite rigid wouldn't actually fit through these handlebars and forks anyway
so these brake calipers don't work very well on this bike but I can switch back to the other ones
and still use the shifter's max so I'm going to carry on testing this group set for a few weeks
when I first built this bike up it was about
seven kilos now it's got the weird group set on let's see
what to say what does it say 8.43 okay it's heavier with the group's head was 200 pounds
any questions please put them in the comment section down below and equally any suggestions
or things that you'd like me to test put them in that comment section and thank you for watching