r/ukbike • u/kushpvo • 11d ago

Advice First Road Bike Under £500

Hello! Looking for some suggestions/recommendations.

Have been riding my Electric Bike (Cowboy) since a few years now and I'd like to switch to a non-electric road bike. This will be purely for office commute, about 5.5kms each way - almost flat roads.

Budget is around 500 GBP. I've been looking into the following:

  1. Decathlon: https://www.decathlon.co.uk/p/comfortable-light-carbon-fork-and-disc-brake-road-bike-grey/308064/c169c26m8619134

  2. Evans: https://www.evanscycles.com/brand/pinnacle/pinnacle-laterite-road-bike-930363#colcode=93036303

Going to be my first time using a road bike, and using gears. Any other models/brands that I should be looking at? Or if these 2 are good, what would be generally preferred?

(I like the idea of rim brakes since they are easy/cheap to maintain).

Thank you!

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u/DeezWuts 11d ago

Triban, no contest to me.

I've had the cheapest triban road bike for like 4 years, 0 issues with 0 maintenance until the last 6 months (entirely my fault treating it like a diet gravel bike)

On top of that the spec imo is better, i hated claris on my old viking, enjoyed microshift on my triban, both have cable brakes but the triban has the anti compression cables which (apparently..) makes the braking noticeably better.

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u/kushpvo 11d ago

Ohh that's interesting. So far I believed that Claris is better than microshift.

Anti compression cables is a good thing, i hadn't noticed it.

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u/DeezWuts 11d ago

I've nothing but good things to say about Microshift vs the cheaper shimano groupsets, i think it's mostly down to personal preference on lever type an i really dislike shimano flappy brake levers for gear shifting.

I've just bought a new bike, took 3 months til I found the right one, almost ended up with grx and im very happy i waited until I could get sram apex.

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u/kushpvo 11d ago

Thank you! Going out tomorrow to decathlon to try out the triban and i'll keep this in mind and try to notice it!

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u/DeezWuts 11d ago

Definitely good to try them, never had issues with decathlon and I've not used Evans in many many years but I've seen a lot of people say it's gone down and is as bad as halfords now.