Running with the Orca’s

Our next review is all about the Orbea’s premiere bike model, the Orca. In brief, the new Orca has been redesigned for 2011 to be stiff and yet give you a smooth and carefree ride with looks that spur your curiosity.

Orbea, by returning to its glory years has once again become an absolute looker. The Orca shows it carbon roots and clean lines in a frame that is both aerodynamic and comfortable with a redesigned toptube, seatstays, chainstay’s, and fork, it is here where Orbea has knocked 64g of drag off the frameset making it 14 percent more aerodynamic than the previous 2010 model.

Orbea did this by making the fork blades, seat and chainstay’s as narrow and fit as tight as possible to the wheels reducing the expression of the front of the bike.

Of all the Orca’s innovations the engineers had to draw from, they employed nature’s most aerodynamic shape, the ‘droplet’ to shape the head tube which houses 1 1/8 x 1 ½ bearings and in the seat post of the Orca keeping air moving freely through the frame.

The Orca also adopts DCR cable routing, which is a low friction system using GORE’s Ride On sealed cable systems. The Orcas cables are run discreetly on the downtube and encased in clear GORE cable housing protecting the cable form the elements and grime.

The Orca has been released in two editions, Gold and Silver. The Orca Gold employs Orbea’s highest quality carbon fiber blend, which has the most high modulus fiber in it - 70 percent of the frame is made up of M40J fibers - in turn producing the lowest weight and highest stiffness found in Orbea’s road line. A 53cm Orca has a weight of about 900g and costs starting at $8374.99. It is available in frame sizes of 48cm, 51cm, 54cm, 57cm and 60cm with available Shimano GDi2, Dura Ace, or SRAM and Campy component groupo’s.

The Orca Silver uses the same aerodynamic features, Attraction damping design, cable routing and size run, but is built with a lower modulus blend of carbon fiber, which in turn produces a slightly more compliant frame with a weight of 1050g, also in a size of 53cm. The Orca Silver is offered with Shimano Dura Ace or Ultegra, and in a SRAM Red or Force groupo at a cost starting at $3999.99
We have an entire size run in the Silver Edition of the Orca and a few from the Gold Edition, but even if we do not have your size or groupo choice in stock, we can always measure you, and order the size, color and groupo package you desire.