Weight comparison for my mountain bikes

Weight is not the most important consideration when it comes to cycling performance, as discussed previously in one of my older blog posts.

Having said that, I still weigh the components of my bikes whenever it's convenient to do so.  By doing that, it gives me the information to know whether it'd be good value for money, or not, to upgrade a component, or swap something over from one of my older bikes.  Nevertheless, it's not something I pay a large amount of attention to these days, having understood how important (or rather how not important) bike weight is on cycling performance. Still, it remains slightly interesting to me, hence this comparion.

I recently bought a Specialized Epic Evo as a new full suspension mountain bike.  I already own a 14-year old first generation 26 inch-wheeled Giant Anthem full suspension MTB and a Scott Scale 29-inch wheeled hardtail MTB.  I thought it would be interesting to compare the weights.  For all of the bikes, I've made some improvements to make them lighter, prioritising the items that would provide the best value for money (best gram saved per £).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the carbon-framed Scott Scale hardtail is the lightest of the three.  Most of the difference is coming from the frame, obviously, but I'm also running SRAM XX1 carbon cranks on it, and these are a fair bit lighter than the alloy Shimano XTR cranks on the other two.

What's most interesting is that my Giant Anthem is lighter than the Specialized Epic Evo, despite having an alloy frame, alloy wheels, and a triple chainset (versus the Epic's carbon frame & wheels, and 1x transmission).  Although the Anthem's wheels are on 26", which helps, I think it still shows that alloy wheels can be very light. The 3x9 transmission of the Anthem is also almost as light as the Epic's, despite the hefty triple crankset, but this is helped by the 11-32 XTR cassette, which is about 60% of the weight of the Epic's enormous 11-52 cassette.

Finally, the other big difference comes from the Epic's dropper post, and the Epic is the only bike that has a dropper.  That alone adds about half a kg.

Despite all this, I'm happy with the Epic's build and 10.9kg (23.9lb) total weight.