My 12-year-old daughter has gotten into cyclocross this past season and will likely do some more gravel and cyclocross next year. Her bike is a Fuji Thrill with the Microshift Advent 10-speed drivetrain and she's asked if she can convert to drop bar but not sure of the best path forward. The current setup uses Tektro hydraulic brakes and I don't want to go cable.
Thoughts? I'm not looking for high end components so if there's some budget combo of like Tiagra shifters and GRX derailleur, I'm all for it. I do have a spare set of GRX 600 calipers laying around.
by JoshTaylorUSA
6 Comments
I think microshift has a road type shifter for the advent, but I don’t know the if there is compatibility with the hydraulic brakes
Have you thought about buying a new used bike? Switching from flat drop bars you’ll probably need new bars, shifters , cables , stem, bar tape, and a break bleed. If you can do all the work yourself it’ll probably only cost you $200-300. If you bring it to a shop they’ll charge $150-250 for that kind of labor.
On top of the cost, the geometry of the current bike might not work for her in drop bar form.
If you are looking for a personal project it could be fun but costs add up fast on these projects.
Options aren’t great.
– Gevenalle HX brake levers with some microshift thumb shifters attached.
– TRP Hylex brake levers and Microshift bar end shifters.
I would buy a quality inexpensive 1x system- cassette, rear derailleur, and hydraulic brake levers from Shimano…like grx600 level.
Or I would suck it up and buy mechanical disc brakes and use Microshift Sword levers with your current drivetrain…though those may be too big for smaller hands.
You will need to really experiment with cockpit geometry to make a drop bar work, if the pictured bike is what fits your kid.
Nice. My daughter also got into CX this year and am going through a similar process. Needed up finding an older Ridley CX bike. There’s usually a good 2nd hand cross market locally.
I think the best budget hydro group is GRX400 or 600. Shifter size is still reasonable for smaller hands.
SURLY CORNER BAR (or cheaper knockoff versions).
For the sake of the conversion you could go with cable-actuated hydraulics like Juin Techs.
If you’re more willing to hack and bodge, Russ from Path Less Pedaled indicated that the Advent/Sword shifters are compatible with a Deore M5120: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs6jqJX19bM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs6jqJX19bM)
If this is the case, it might be possible to get a set of GRX400 (i.e. ten speed) brifters to talk to an Advent X shifter with a Wolf Tooth Tanpan. The shift quality degradation will almost certainly be worse than the braking degradation from going to cables or cable-actuated hydraulics.