Short post today! After five years of using 160mm rotors on my rear wheel, I’ve returned to 140mm. My F10 Disk originally come with a 140mm rear rotor (160mm in front) but I swapped it to 160mm for more braking power. It was not needed. The descents in Italy showed me clearly that 140mm would have done fine. And the first thing I did to the bike when I returned home was to swap it back to 140mm.
The key push was neither weight nor aerodynamics. It was wheel sharing. My wife’s new bike utilises 140mm rear rotors. We have the same cassette type (11-34) and so sharing and swapping wheelsets is largely seamless (minus a slight RD tweak or two)… if the rotors match!
Getting it done was pretty simple. Three wheelsets had to be tweaked. The Enve and Alpinist were easy because they were centerlock. But the Extralite wasn’t – it utilises 6-bolt rotors and Shimano does not have a 6-bolt 140mm option. Scoured high and low for one until I read from a few bike forums that Shimano’s 6-bolts are 160mm and above, aimed at the MTB crowd.
And so, I got the SRAM CLX-R 140mm (pictured above). First ever SRAM product for me. (I am a Shimano person.) Works great. Wheelset sharing is awesome. Alpinist have gone onto my wife’s bike, while the Enve is back on my bike in sunny flat Singapore.
