I emailed the sales email at Wheeltop on 11/17/2023 to ask “Will the shifters for road and MTB be cross compatible with the rear derailleurs? Will it be possible to use the road shifters with the MTB derailleur?“
The reply came within hours: “Hello, this is EDS Aftermarket. Sorry, these two are not compatible.“
I thought this was disappointing, stemming from my interest in these products being the ability to tinker with them, and use them on older bikes. MTB bikes with 3 chainrings. Bikes with 9 speed cassettes, that I may want to upgrade to 11 speed. Bikes with 10 speed Campagnolo cassettes.
My excuse to myself for a $400 outlay for an electronic system was the flexibility. The derailleur was configurable from 7 to 13 cog cassettes! Amazing. If it didn’t serve the function needed for one bike, maybe it could be adapted to another. After a positive experience adapting my MTB version (EDS OX) to two different MTBs, I was thinking I would like to try it on the Frankencrosser, which has a poorly working bar end shifter, an old Shimano 105 derailleur that has a limit of about a 27 tooth cassette and a road crankset that limits the small chainring to a 39 tooth. Definitely a candidate for a Wheeltop EDS derailleur and the larger cassette cogs that would be thereby permitted. I thought half-heartedly about kludging the flat bar shifter onto the drop bar several times but never really got around to it.
When Wheeltop teased the road version at a price of $457 for the cable brake aluminum version, well….that was enough to pique my interest. Thus my email to the sales contact. It might be a more interesting product if it provided me several options to mullet the bikes. Maybe the road 2x derailleurs on my commuter and the MTB 1x (optimized) derailleur on the Frankencrosser would be cool? I was very disappointed to see them apparently not permitting cross-compatibility.
I admit I was more than a little dismayed to see that when the cable brake groupset became available for sale it was listed at €649, which is about $709. That is a steep jump up in price. And with the news it wouldn’t be cross-compatible took away many potential fun applications on my fleet.
Well, it is Taipei bike show time and I ran across this very interesting assertion in the Velo writeup by Alvin Holbrook.
Wheeltop says their shift levers pair with their wide-range mountain bike derailleur, though they suggest that there will be a ready-made alternative for drop bar folks who want a wide-range 1x gearing coming soon.
https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-gear/wheeltop-eds-tx-taipei-2024/
Maybe they’ve realized that the creativity in bike-builds that is common to the gravel bike market right now should be embraced?
Maybe they’ve realized that with three pulley-cage length variants already available for the MTB EDS SQ, they have ready made gravel bike groupsets for either adventure or racier builds?
Sun Dappled Forest 