Despite the dictatorship of modern carbon bikes, with their delicate and untouchable frames and their total integration that establishes a small dictatorship in terms of components, the fever for weight and building the lightest bike has never gone away. Modifying the different elements of the bike, often with a drill in hand, becomes a useful tool to scrape off every gram.
Drillium, or how to achieve the lightest bike by scraping off every gram
The construction of ultra-light bikes, about a decade ago a real fever, was relegated to the background as bikes became more aerodynamic or with the arrival of disc brakes and fully integrated wiring that significantly fattened all market models.
However, there are still enthusiasts of the lightest bikes as demonstrated by the publication of Jason Holder, editor of the well-known cycling website Bike Radar, presenting a fully tuned Trek Émonda RSL to face the North American climbing championship and in which he highlighted the intense drilling work of some components in what, so given to looking for names for everything the Anglo-Saxons, have called drillium.
What they call drillium is nothing more than taking a drill and drilling holes in the surface of different components, in presumably non-critical areas, trying to eliminate unnecessary material and thus subtract grams from these components.
A practice that, however, is as old as cycling itself, even in the 70s and 80s of the last century the standard components of some brands came drilled from the factory looking to subtract those grams. It was not uncommon at that time to see the bikes of some of the best professionals in the world, like Eddy Merckx or Luis Ocaña, with levers, plates and other elements of the bike completely drilled in ultra-light models that they reserved for mountain stages.
Already in the early 21st century and with internet forums in full swing and the power to boast of the lightest bike, real specialists began to appear to achieve incredibly light assemblies based on some of the lightest frames of the time like the Scott CR1.
On that basis, ultra-light components from elitist brands were chosen, often with the weight of the cyclist limited. However, building record bikes still required resorting to drillium applied to levers, derailleur and shift plates, to brake bridges or even to the saddle itself which, in most cases, was nothing more than a thin sheet of carbon without any type of padding.
In addition, the derailleurs and levers were usually disassembled, hence these light bike specialists usually chose Campagnolo, which historically has allowed the disassembly and repair of all its components. After this, they replaced parts like springs or pins, with titanium as the protagonist and that, drill or file in hand, they reviewed each part susceptible to being fine-tuned a few grams.
Nylon screws, ultra-low profile tubular wheels, titanium spokes, titanium cassettes or aluminum of very short duration -on which the drill also passed- completed the set of these record bicycles. A whole art that today seems forgotten with brands imposing fully integrated sets on their bikes or electronic changes over which it is difficult to customize anything.
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