BMC TM01 Initial Review

As of the writing of this review the TM01 is starting to show up in bike shops across the country. There are some interbike reviews, but I don't think many of them hit some of the critical considerations one must make when choosing a new bike. This review does not cover ride quality as I have little time on the bike and that has been limited to the trainer.

Opening the Box
I ordered a size L Ultegra TM01. For me bars, saddles and wheels are a personal thing. After trying a lot of offerings I know what I am looking for when I choose a bike and BMC offered no level of bike that had what I wanted. Generally speaking, you get more value buying a complete bike, but in this case I knew that a good portion of what I was buying would be changed. I have not made the leap to electronic shifting and as a road racer/time trialist, I would go with electronic shifting on my road bike before I went with it on a TT rig.

The bike comes mostly assembled from the factory and is thoughtfully packed and well protected. The parts box for the bike is a little unusual if you have not dealt with BMC before. They provide a large 8-1/2 X 11 installation manual as well as an installation DVD.

In addition to the installation manual and DVD, there are stem parts, aero covers for the brakes and cables entering the top-tube, aero-bar parts and my favorite:

14 lbs of reflectors, a headlight, taillight and a bell. None of which could possible be mounted on this bike because of the bar and seat tube shapes.

Appearance, fit and finish

This is my third BMC and with the brand you expect a certain level of quality. I think that is why I was so disappointed with the RaceMaster that I owned. My ProMachine was top drawer, but the RM just seemed cheap and ill-conceived from the start. For that reason I left the brand for a few years and was somewhat reluctant to give them another shot, but I am glad I did. The finish on the bike is as good as I have seen on any bike. First, the appearance is amazing. The naked carbon is gorgeous and the contrasting super-white logos and team-red trim set this bike off. To me it is very tasteful and I like it better than the total stealth-look which I think has been overdone in recent years.

There are many neat little details to the bike that you would not notice unless you spent a little time working on it. Every part goes together with (enter cliche') Swiss-Precision. Even pressing in the BB30 bearings was a different experience as there is not a micron of extra space. My initial impression of the quality of this bike compared to my prior two TT rigs (Cervelo and Cannondale) is that the BMC is far superior. One last note is that I love the way BMC stamps their torque settnigs on ever component on the bike. There is no questioning how tight a bolt should be tightened.

Building the bike
I typically wait until I have all of my parts in before I will build a bike - especially one with internal cable routing. However, I have been without a TT rig for a while now and need time in the saddle to make sure I am properly adapted to the position. This could mean a lot of extra work, but with the BMC it is so cleverly put together that changing cables is not that big of a deal.

The instructional DVD is outstanding.

There is a mechanical and an electronic shifting section. Under the mechanical section you see the chapters listed above for each part of the bike. So you can watch the entire DVD start to finish or if you have questions about a specific portion of the assembly you can go directly to that part of the DVD.
The DVD shows you the best way to route cables through the frame making the internal routing go very quickly. Additionally they tell you the torque settings or if grease or friction paste needs to be added. There are a lot of little tips for adjusting parts that you probably would not think of unless you built these bikes on a daily basis. I wish every manufacturer would do this.

As for the build there were three things that were somewhat unusual. The first being the cable routing through the frame. All of the cables except the front brake cable go through a cut-out behind the stem which is not unusual. I have created a separate post on cable routing which you can find here.

What is more challenging is getting the lengths of cable right to make sure that the cable cover fits over the cables. The cover is small so the cables have to be of perfect length or the cover will not fit and the cables will be exposed. If you are using a longer stem and your extensions are forward this will be easier to accomplish. However with a short stem and your extensions pushed back, this is going to be very challenging. Nokon cables would be a good option here except that there are no cable stops and the bike was designed to run the housing all the way through the down-tube. The big point here is to make sure that before you cut your cables be sure you have your fit dialed in or this could become a ton of repetitive work and if you go too short, you are going to need new cables.

The front brake cable routing is very clean and runs through the side of the head tube (you can route through either side). The only thing to remember is to cut the cable 15mm shorter than you normally would to allow for the brake hardware.

The second thing that is unusual about the bike assembly process is the location and setup of the brakes. While fork brakes and under BB brakes are not new, the BMC does have some unique setup features, one of which is a major draw back to the bike for me.

The front brake mechanism is integrated into the fork. There is a plastic cover that goes over what you see above and gives a very clean leading edge to the fork and head-tube. There are several things to be aware of here. I'll start with clearance. Many manufacturers are moving toward wider-profile rims. These brakes and the chain stays have no problem accommodating this however I will share some concerns that I have. One concern is the way the brakes are setup. If I understand the instructions correctly, the brakes are to be setup with only enough cable tension to allow them to rest on the stops when the brakes are not being activated. What this means is that there is a set limit to how far open the brakes can be. This means you can't adjust the brakes with cable tension. The one thing the instructional DVD misses is how to adjust for this. I could not see another way to adjust the brakes so I took some washers out of the pad holders. There were 4 of them so I think this might be the way the width is to be adjusted. While this is not hard to do, if you are going between small profile rims and wide profile rims, it means you have to take the pad holders off every time you swap wheels. I don't like that at all. Especially if I like to warm-up on course on my training wheels to prevent a last minute flat on my race wheels. Even on a trainer, I would be hesitant to use my racing tubulars and typically use a training wheel.

The next concern I have with the brakes are the pad type that was chosen. BMC only offers Shimano and SRAM options on these bikes so I totally get why they use Shimano style pads. However, here is why this was a bad decision - you can't get to the 2.5mm holding screw to slide the pads out without removing the pad holders. They are located behind the fork on the front and behind the chainstays on the rear. So even if you do not use different width wheels, if you go from carbon specific pads to regular pads, you have to go through this step. The obvious solution is to replace these with Campy style holders as they slide out and do not need removal.

The above issues are annoyances, this one however is a major problem with the bike in my opinion.

What you are looking at above is the drive-side chainstay and my Quarq. If you will look closely at the 9 o'clock position on the chainring you will see the brake pad mounting bolt. Guess where it is located? Yep, behind the chainrings. Oh, yeah, it is also uses a min-torx bolt and I see absolutely no way to tighten or loosen this without removing the crank! Seriously, every time I need to adjust the pads I have to remove the crank? I think if you ran a compact you might be ok, but I can't imagine that many people would go this route.

This is the single glaring mistake I think they have made with the bike and it is signficant. If I swap to Campy holders then pad swaps will be taken care of, but the bigger problem is that I typically run my race wheel closer to the seat tube cut out than I do my training wheels. This means the pads have to move........I guess this now means the cranks has to be removed.

The final unusual part of the build is the saddle clamp.

That's right, this bike with all of its advanced technology uses a 13mm hex head bolt to hold the saddle on. When I first saw this I though I had to be missing something, but when I installed the saddle I was amazed out how well it worked and how simple it was. With my Cervelo I had to use 3 hands to mount the saddle, get it level and then tighten it all down. The Cannondale had an even more bizzare mechanism that I never really got the hang of. The only problem I had here was that I do not typically keep open end wrenches in my bike toolbox so I had to dig one up. One word of caution, I am using and Adamo which has a good sized gap between the rails and bottom of the saddle so this could be difficult to get out with some brands of saddles. (update I also tried a Fizik Arione Tri 2 and it worked well).

Sizing and fit of the Bike
I'm a 58cm in most bikes and have an unusual setup for someone that is 6'4. The L is the biggest bike that BMC makes and I was pleasantly surprised at how broad of a range of setups were allowed. Bike manufacturers focus on stack and reach, but what they miss in my opinion are those riders that need options for distance behind the bottom bracket. With myopic steep seatpost angles the bike makers try to shoehorn everyone into a forward position. Cannondale was the only company out there that I felt did a good job of addressing this with the Slice. Not only could you run a steep angle, but you could also run road-bike like angles as well. The BMC is not quite as slack, but I think most riders can make this bike work.

I tried to get on a Shiv and Trinity, but neither made a bike that would work with my position (although I assume the new Shiv offerings would). I was really happy to see that BMC allowed the buyer to use any bars that they wanted and I was also happy that they opted for a forward and rearward saddle option. This is accomplished by changing the hole used for bolting the clamp to the seat post.

The bike comes with a 31.8mm clamp which means you can use about any bar you want to with it. The stem is very well thought out and uses a series of wedges and plates to get your bar to the correct position in space. There are 32 different configurations and I would wager that you could probably get a couple of additional spacers in there if you need to. BMC provides different lengths of bolts depending on how many spacers you are using. It was very easy for me to do the math and figure out what I needed to do and on my second try I had the correct mix of parts to get my bars in the right place.

The only surprise for me was that the bike was a touch longer than I thought. I ended up using setup # 9 in the picture above so I might have run into problems if I needed to move back any more. But in reality, I would probably need to be on a smaller frame if that were the case.

Aerodynamics and such

How slick is the bike? I have no idea and there is no way to know until I can get it to the tunnel. Do I think it is going to be fast? I believe so. From my trips to the wind tunnel I have a general sense for what is fast, but you never know until you run it. The cable routing is well done and on par with the latest generation of TT bikes. The brakes are well-hidden from the wind. The nose is very clean although not overly thin. The down tube is very thin and looking at the contrast with the BB shows just how thin it is.

I feel pretty comfortable with these sections, but there are a few I am not sure about. First is the cutout for the front wheel on the down tube. This idea has been around a few years and Felt has even had it on their AR road bikes, but the argument against this has been that when you are riding the front wheel is consistently moving from side to side negating any benefit. One thing I have noticed is that the front wheel tucks into this area much tighter than on any other bike I have seen and the cutout is also relatively small and shallow.

The second area that I question is the rear-wheel cutout. The curved section of the cutout is actually very small. The arc stops at about the height of the front derailleur and then straightens out until the seat stay/seat tube intersection. I'm not sure why BMC chose to do this. Conventional wisdom is to tuck the wheel in as long as you can. This also means that the distance from the seat tube to the tire is consistently changing which I really don't understand. This was not something that had to be done. There is not a limit with the seat tube that dictates this shape, it is purposeful and I hope that the BMC design team made this decision based on sound tunnel data.

The last aero attribute of the bike that is different than most bikes is the incorporation of trip strips  on the leading edge of the fork blades, down tube and seat tube. These have been around  on airplanes for a long time and work, but I'm not so sure they will on a bike. The aero folks I have spoken with believe that the issue has to do with yaw angles on bikes versus faster moving vehicles. A plane for example is moving  at hundreds of miles per hour so the yaw angle is almost always close to zero. So the trip strip's distance from the leading edge is constant. However, bicycles experience a wide range of yaw angles meaning that relative to the wind, the position of the trip strip changes on the surface it is attached to. If the positioning  relative to the leading edge is important, then the wind direction being something other than zero would change that.
 Do they help? I do not know, I am sure there is benefit at zero yaw but in the real world I doubt it.


Early opinion
There are some things I would change about the bike. The brakes being the first thing. However, I think overall BMC has done an excellent job with the TM01. I believe the bike will be on par aerodynamically with the latest generation of bikes. There could be some race-day concerns with the brakes and the cable routing will take some time to get right. The biggest thing that BMC did well in my opinion was the thoughtful design of the bike in allowing a wide range of positions to be used. Once I get my new bars and final setup in place, as well as some time in the saddle on the road, I will update this review.