Seemingly the best entry-level road bicycle.

For those looking for a road bicycle that they can buy just to try out for a while, in order to determine if they want to commit to the sport of cycling, this is the bike for you. This bike was designed to give you the most performance for a road bicycle under $200 with the Shimano Rear-Derailleur RD-A070, Shimano 7-speed freewheel MF-TZ21, and the light Aluminum frame being the best things out of this bike. The Shimano front-derailleur is satisfactory, but only for a little while. More on that later. So basically, for around $170-$180, this is the best you are going to get. You can find a $180 road bicycle on the Walmart website, but those Walmart bikes are not as good as this one in terms of weight and part quality. So, even though this road bicycle is the best option for the money, it's still definitely a "you get what you pay for" situation. I bought this bicycle for $173 in March, and now 2 months later, I am having to replace the front-chainrings and the front-derailleur because of how cheap they are. Oh, and do not get me started on the tyres that the bike came with. As soon as I got the bike, I replaced the cheap tyres with some Vittoria Pro Tech 3's and I have not gotten a flat at all, even after daily use of the bike to get to school while riding on top of not so good city roads with bumps everywhere. So as long as you replace the tyres with something like mine, you should not get a flat unless your tyre pressure is very low and you hit a huge pothole. I have rode into some potholes while not getting even one flat, so that's a plus. So anyway, I had to replace the front-chainrings and front-derailleur because of how bent they both have gotten over 2 months of riding, and also because my local bicycle mechanic showed me how weak these 2 parts are, which is what happens when you buy entry-level bikes. With all of that said, it doesn't matter because the frame of this road bicycle is top-notch (~25 lbs, which can be lessened by upgrading to better, lighter parts; mine's currently 19 lbs, and will be even lighter as I upgrade), as mentioned before. This bicycle frame uses extremely light aluminum material, most probably the 6061 aluminum frame that most $300 or $400+ aluminum road bicycles come with. And this is the main reason that this under $200 road bike beats all the rest, because you will be able to upgrade this road bicycle with better front-chainrings, front-derailleur, shifters, seat (buy a new seat with this bicycle, please, for your ass' sake), tyres, and that is about all you would need to upgrade to match those $400 bicycles on Amazon in terms of component quality; but the best thing about this is that you would be spending much less than $400 for essentially the same bike. Or if you just wanted to match the components on that "Vilano Shadow Road Bike - Shimano STI Integrated Shifters" on Amazon, you would just need to upgrade the front-derailleur, shifters... and that's about it! This would make the total cost of this bike at around $250 , which if you include the $20 tax from Amazon ($320 in total), it makes this bike from eBay around $70 less than that Amazon bike, all while giving you essentially equal performance for your money. And now that I think about it, this is an even better deal because this road bike comes with 3 front-chainrings, the smallest one being the easiest to pedal, good for climbing steep hills; the middle chainring being the not so easy but not so hard mode to pedal in; and the largest chainring being the one that you would use to go as fast as you can. That Vilano Shadow road bike on Amazon only comes with 2 front-chainrings, a medium and large sized pair, effectively making it useless if you want to climb steep hills. So, all of these reasons make me conclude that this is the most "bang-for-buck" entry-level road bicycle, of which you can then decide to upgrade if you find out that you like cycling like me. If you happen to not like cycling as much to really get into it, you've only wasted $170/$180 , compared to paying $320 for a supposed "entry-level" bike... And yes, you can get a road bicycle for less, which is why I mentioned Walmart, but again, like I said before, buying a road bicycle with such horrendous parts and a frame that weighs much more than this bike, will probably make you guaranteed to decide that cycling is not for you, which does not make sense, right? So instead of buying that $130 road bicycle on Walmart to then end up hating cycling because of riding a bad bike, buy this bike for less than $200 which will give you a much better cycling experience, not as good as a $700+ road bike of course, but good enough to give you a significantly close taste to what it is like to be a full-on road cyclist with a light bicycle and going fast enough to feel the thrill of road cycling. Those Walmart bikes will not give you this experience, making it not worth paying $50 less if you are not getting the full experience. So there you go; it's worth it.Read full review

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