Fomas road king deluxe

Since I came back from UK, I wanted to ride bicycle for daily commute. I have been riding my brother's octane for past 3 months and I had wonderful rides. In octane I even did Bangalore to Chennai in 20 hours. After 2000 km octane started to breakdown, the gears started to slip, the frame was creaking. It had never happened before but the frame had started to fall apart. It was time to buy new bike.

In market there is huge variety of bikes to choose from. Road bike, hybrid, mountain........ Many variety and at wide range of price. Considering that near Bangalore there are barely any off road track, mountain bike was absolutely useless. Even if I find a hill and go off road I wouldn't get time to do offroading everyday. Even if I want to go mountain bike, I would rather buy an expensive mountain bike than cheap one. The mountain bikes in the range of Rs.15000 are so bad that if I take it off road it won’t last very long.  Now the choice came to either road or hybrid. Hybrid bikes are great but why stop at hybrid when I can go lot faster in road bike.

The problem of Bangalore roads being horrible during rainy days and picture of me doing cartwheel on a pothole during my school days came to my mind. Well that will be painful with loads of puncher to increase my problems.  For an excess cost of about Rs. 50 a month and some heart ache repairing the punchers, the road bike would beat the mountain bike by large margin. Another problem is, with Hybrid bike my back would be saved. With road bike I will have to have strengthen my back a bit more. After some considerations I decided to get a road bike. The idea of going faster than most motorbike appealed to me than all its negativities put together. On road bike I could save 1 hour every 100km. Finally road bike for the win.

After the choice of bike type, even bigger problem................ which bike to buy. The cost of road bike ranges from Rs 3000 for a mach to over Rs2lakhs for a triathlon bike. My budget was probably at lower end. So low that when I went to some of the well known bike shops they turned me down saying you have to get lot more money before trying for a road bike. My budget was, Drum roll..........My budget was Rs.10000. after doing some research on internet I found that they were quite right. My budget was way too low. My requirements were it has to be a road bike with gears and reasonable weight. Cycles with such requirements and somewhat close to my budget were, BSA cruze, Fomas road king deluxe, firefox road pro and one by hero I forgot the name. All of them are quite bad, but then my budget was quite low, so I had to choose the best among the worse.

Gears, the gears are probably most important moving part on the cycle. The gears on all the bikes I had chosen were all quite bad. Kruze and firefox road pro has brifters, but then it was below the lowest range of shimano. On the ranking board of shimano groupset, it wasn’t even listed. So the gears were not the point of choice for my cycle.

With my experience from hero octane, I know that frame is something that should last very long. So frame was very important for me. Now the choice of frame also was dominated by roadpro. It has aluminium alloy frame that meant its light. The Kruze also has alloy but not as light as roadpro, but still good. The fomas had steel frame but it was amazingly light. Not as light as roadpro or Kruze but somehow I liked it a lot. It felt better than the other two when I rode.

Rest of the components like brakes, hubs, crank and bearings etc had nearly no point because all of them were equally bad. You won’t know when it will fail, if you are lucky it won’t fail, if you are unlucky then god save you.

Finally after going through all these qualities for nearly 3 months, I finally decided on fomas road king. There were 2 reasons for this choice. first, the cost. It costs Rs.11800 MRP. It was second lowest on my list and it had good components. Also there were many of these available on second hand market. Second reason, the frame was excellent. It suits my height perfectly and the ride was very smooth. Even though the gears are terrible, it isn’t so bad that it will stop working(hopefully). So fomas for the win. I wasn’t so happy with my choice because it was way too expensive for what I was getting. So I decided to buy a second hand. I got mine for Rs.8000 which included a pump btwin 7 count computer lock, couple of tubes, helmet etc. So finally bought fomas that feels OK.

After buying this, I was not a happy man. I have got complaints. To start with, the handle bars. The handle bar is attached to the frame by aluminium stem. The genius who designed has done such a wonderful job that they have used HT bolt to tighten them. The stem is not great quality aluminium either which can take the beating. It is some local aluminium casting shop job. The result of a strong bolt with weak flange results in flange being ripped off. The thread on the stem is like butter, it shears off at lightest pressure. I tried to re-tap the thread to a 7mm bolt, but even that sheared off. So I ended up changing the entire stem to a local steel stem. If you are a designer which one would you design to break first a Rs.5 bolt or Rs.200 stem. I am sure it is not just my bike’s fault. This will be the problem of many fomas owners. Next are the rims. It has good rims, double walled etc etc. But my front rim happen rip off on the side. I don’t know the reason for failure, I am guessing my previous owner had really abused it, but still the rims should not break off like that. So I am not happy with the rims.  After doing about 2000km the rear wheel started to wobble. After examining it, I realised that the inner race of the bearing had come lose. The reason for that is, the there is no lock nut for the rear bearing cone. It is not a big issue, the wheel still works, but there is lot more friction and I have to tighten every time it starts wobbling. Because if this the bearings will not be sealed hence dirt gets into it and poor bearings have to work in harder conditions.  It requires just an extra nut to fix. Its just poor quality construction, It won’t make big difference in cost. Well rest of the parts are working just fine uptill now. To be honest the quality of the bike is absolute crap, but then for 11000 bucks you cannot expect an audi ebike. So for the money I paid I got a nice looking geared road cycle, but I just have to fix a thing or two every now and then.

In all I am happy that I got fomas road king. It is not the best bike, but I can easily keep up with people who ride 10 times more expensive cycle than mine. 

tags: fomas road king deluxe, cheap road bike in india, road bike, cycling, bangalore, cycle, buy, review.