Aerozine Titanium Axle Road Skewers

Here's something for the weight weenies. Aerozine's titanium quick release skewers help shave grams from your bike; they are 80g lighter than the standard Mavic quick releases which they replaced on mine. There's a couple of ways of looking at it: either you are paying £375 per kilo of weight saving (which sounds ridiculous) or for only thirty quid you're reducing the weight of a component by 66% (which sounds quite impressive).

Aerozine sent us quite a selection of their weight-saving bling including jockey wheels, seat-post clamps and headset spacers, all of which are available in a wide range of colours. We got the 90s-tastic electric blue set but you can choose from green, pink, gold, orange, black, red and silver to suit your bike. These blue skewers definitely don't suit the red and black of my bike, but in the name of providing you with the unbiased opinions which you expect from road.cc, I braved the disdain of my club-mates and fitted them anyway.

I've used skewers that looked like this before, the type with the ultra-skinny levers and exposed cam mechanism; they came with a set of inexpensive carbon wheels and were a classic case of cost-saving disguised as weight-saving. Those levers were utter junk - opening and closing the lever made a horrible scraping sound and I had zero confidence in their ability to perform their (rather important) function, so they went straight in the bin. So I confess to having expectations that were not the highest when I fitted these.

However, I can report that these are rather better made - opening and closing was smooth and silent, thanks to the hard plastic washer between the sliding metal pieces, and you can get them nice and tight without the feeling that something's about to break. The thin lever is obviously not the most ergonomic; you are certainly sacrificing a little here in the name of weight saving, but it is perfectly usable nevertheless. Once installed, I didn't find they needed adjustment or retightening.

The department in which they come up a little short is, well, length. Specifically, the front axle could do with being several millimetres longer. The dropouts on my race bike's carbon fork are not unusually chunky, but the length of the front quick release axle is such that there are only about two and a half turns of thread engagement. The skewer only makes it about half way through the (tiny) knurled nut when fully tightened. The rear skewer is of a better length, giving around eight turns on my frame before it's tight. With the quick release lever in the closed position and the nut removed from the other end, I measured the length of the front skewer from under the quick release flange to other end as 122mm. Compare this to your existing skewers to see whether these would suit your bike or not.

At the front, this is an annoyance because simply unscrewing enough to clear the wheel retainer tabs means the nut comes off altogether, with the attendant risk of the springs flying off into the bushes never to be seen again. Much more seriously, two and half M5-size threads is an awfully small amount of material to keep your wheel in place and I would be concerned at the risk of these stripping, with dire consequences.

The axle is titanium (of an unspecified grade) whereas all of the other hardware (including the nut) is 7075T6 heat-treated aluminium. It is the threads in the aluminium nut that I would be most concerned about as although this is one of the strongest grades of aluminium, its ultimate tensile strength is around 60% below that of most grades of titanium (and some way below that of good steel).

In summary then, these are well-made and significantly lighter than standard quick releases, but can only really be recommended for bikes where the front dropouts are slender enough to allow proper thread engagement.

Verdict

Decent machining, smooth action and super light, but the front axle is too short