Microshift Centos 11 groupset

Taiwan's Microshift Centos 11 groupset is priced and specified to take a fight to Shimano's 11-speed 105 groupset. Unfortunately the build quality isn't up to that of the Japanese giant, as evidenced by rattles and jammed shifting, and with Shimano's current discounting the pricing is not attractive. If it fits your specific use case, the ergonomics straddling Shimano and Campagnolo might work for you.

As we found in our May 2017 comparison of 105 5800 with Ultegra, Shimano RRP has scant relevance to what you can obtain the products for online: RRP for 105 5800 shifters is £225, but online they're typically £137 from a UK seller. With the Microshift shifters' RRP of £198 but nowhere near the wide distribution and market muscle that Shimano has, you are hard-pressed to find a Centos 11 price lower than £145 – and that's from a Taiwanese eBay seller. I did find one UK seller offering the Centos levers for £120, but that's possibly a one-off low price.

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While we're talking prices, the Centos 11 front mech is £31.99, the rear mech £48.49, and the 11-25 cassette £46.99.

Weight-wise, for the whole groupset Centos and 105 are pretty much on par – so kudos to Microshift for achieving parity with Shimano there.

Standard setup

Microshift's website offers little in the way of instruction for setup – its videos refer to previous models with external shift cables exiting the lever at the side. I run a cycle service business and have installed/maintained many road bike groupsets, and found the installation of the Centos 11 levers was easily done following standard practice.

The clamp bolt is located on the top of the hand grip area and is accessed by peeling the hood forward, which does make it a bit of a pain to get to – you definitely need a ball-ended hex key. This also makes it near-impossible to torque accurately, even if you knew what the torque spec was; I couldn't find it referenced anywhere.

One point of note is that there's a brass ferrule installed in the shift port, so you need to pay attention to ensure you prepare the gear cable outer nicely for a flush fit with the ferrule.

There's a port marked 'cable' with an arrow, where the gear cable inserts. This is easily accessible and would make for easy maintenance in future, when you need to replace it. Brake lever reach is adjusted from the top underneath the rubber hood. There's nothing special about the derailleurs, again installation as per Shimano. Bolts come Loctited, which is a nice touch.

Mix and match

Microshift has made all Centos components fully compatible with Shimano, so the cable pull ratios for gear and brake are identical. A meta-analysis of online comments from Microshift customers shows a lot of successful mix-and-matching going on across 11-speed Shimano groupsets of varying ages.

(Note: cable inners and outers used for this build were made-in-the-UK Fibrax, both Shimano-specification/compatible. Chainring was a compact Shimano Tiagra 4600, chain was Shimano HG601 105 11-speed.)

The 11-speed 11-25T cassette is indistinguishable from the Shimano version, uses the same lockring tool, and performs just as well. It's about 40g heavier despite being drilled out to save weight. Two other options – 11-28T and 11-32T – are also available.

So far, pretty much on par with Shimano 105 5800 on price and weight.

Four gears at a time

The major feature of the Centos 11 groupset is the shift lever operation. You can shift into larger sprockets/easier gears four at a time, with a sweep of the large lever. This does mean pushing the lever nearly 90 degrees from its home position, so those with smaller hands might not be able to realise this benefit, particularly from the drops. Using the thumb button you can quickly dump three gears at a time with one press – this is the standout trick of the Centos 11.

The thumb lever is quite prominent, and can be easily accessed from on the hoods or in the drops. So to go from smallest sprocket to largest you need three full sweeps of the large lever; to go from largest sprocket to smallest it's four presses of the thumb lever. Shimano takes four sweeps of the large lever to get from smallest to largest sprocket, and it's 11 separate clicks to get back into the smallest.

This to me is the raison d'etre of the Centos 11: more shifting bang for your buck. The ability to rapidly accelerate through gears without clicking all 11 sprockets, from in the drops with your thumb instead of fingers (thereby not compromising sprinting grip) is really the selling point of Centos 11. Does that limit the attraction to criterium racers? Possibly.

For front shifts, again there's quite a lot of throw required to get into the large chainring. In the smallest chainring there are two trim positions headed towards the large ring, and once there, one trim position down before you drop to the small ring. Once back in the small ring, there are then trim positions either way. The front mech is braze-on or clamp type, 34.9mm with 31.8mm adapter.

On the road I found the front shifting to be perfectly adequate, but I have large hands. On the turbo trainer doing a workout that required repeated front shifts under maximal load, I found the occasional missed shift up into the large ring, which was frustrating when you only have 12 seconds to ramp up to maximum watts and hold it before going back to idle. I should note here that my turbo-bike is steel framed with not the stiffest bottom bracket in the world, so under full gas (circa 900W instantaneous power according to a meter) there's a fair bit of flex going on. This is likely to impact shift quality while being highly unlikely to occur out on the road.

On the road I quickly adjusted to the different shifting layout. Shifts were more of a Campagnolo feel, where the feedback through the lever and buttons is more prominent than Shimano. The feel of the hoods was comfortable and the slightly more SRAM-esque upper hood section made for nice aero-position grips.

Rattle and jam

Two aspects of the Centos 11 were disappointing. Firstly, a tiny rattle came from both levers when my hands were off them and on the tops or drops. This sounded like a minute washer was vibrating in each lever, a disappointing annoyance that didn't go away despite checking the cables and installation setup. The issue was definitely not down to a sticking brake or shift cable not fully retracting, which is a common cause of lever rattles.

Secondly, and more seriously, I found an occasional jam in rear shifting using the thumb lever. When in the second or third-largest sprockets, trying to shift into smaller ones, the thumb lever would refuse to move. A simple shift using the large lever into the next-largest sprocket up freed the mechanism allowing shifting back down the range. This would happen maybe once or twice an hour. After a lengthy video demo of both the rattling issue and discussion of the sticky shifting with a Microshift engineer in Taiwan, I returned the lever for analysis and a replacement lever was installed. This lever had the same washer vibration issue and the same thumb lever jam issue – although not as frequent as on the first lever.

An analysis of other Microshift Centos 11 reviews – journalistic and end-user – reveals largely positive experiences, and none identify specific issues with the Centos 11 groupset – although, that said, it is a fairly new release. But we can only review what we've got in as fair and impartial a manner as we can, and unfortunately our review sample and its replacement didn't perform in the manner that we would expect. Microshift was very helpful during the process, and I look forward to testing any future versions of the Centos 11 groupset to see if the issues are solved.

> Find more road.cc reviews of groupsets here

No doubt should you purchase a lever from a UK reseller and suffer either of these issues a warranty claim would be justifiable, but it's time off your bike and an annoyance you don't need. Microshift advised that the rattle issue would be resolved in 'the next generation of design'.

My overall impression is that if Microshift sorts out the two quality issues I found, the Centos 11 is a decent option compared to Shimano 105 if you are looking for a different shifting layout and function. If you are a criterium racer then the ability to quickly dump a lot of gears could well be the competitive edge – but if the lever jams you'll be left cursing.

Verdict

Disappointing quality lets down what is a good alternative to Shimano's upper-mid-range 105 11-speed groupset