Is it me, or the folks I ride with, that a bike needs to meet the purpose it's for - not silly money ?

[Dogtrousers]

If I had a tenner for every thread I've read about this, I could buy a new (slightly better) bike.

You'd have more money than sense.

 

[mustang1]

Wisely(by luck rather than my far reaching intuition🤣), I bought a Surly Cross Check maybe 10yrs ago before the fashion craze.
It’s been used with skinny road tyres and done the job fine, mtb tyres as fff(fatties fit fine) and now is a gravel bike ie has gravel king semi slicks for the canal and child transport duties. A great do it all bike, I struck lucky.
Buy what you need/want if you have the dough if it makes you happy, we live but once.

Ditto. I had spesh tricross and focus mares before the CX/gravel/adventure bikes kicked in.

 

[PaulSB]

Not all expensive bikes are great bikes. I've seen quite a few engineers pick apart carbon fibre frames due to poor manufacturing quality and dangerous construction. I remember Cervelo being extremely poor quality frames from Asia and pretty much junk status. That may not be true now as with most European, US, Canadian brands etc they don't manufacture anything themselves they just choose the paintwork and components and get them built in Asia for them and they may change factories frequently to whoever is cheapest at the time or maybe they would choose a better factory if people have noticed how poor quality their bikes were previously.

A few years ago when I was looking at the bike industry and even translating Chinese text to English from Chinese forums and manufacturing sites you would read a lot of interesting information from their perspective. I remember the Chinese were happy that Bianchi was charging so much for their bikes in Japan when the same bikes under their Chinese branding were so cheap. They seemed to enjoy the fact the Japanese were being ripped off and exploited and were amazed they would pay those prices.

Marketing is all about extracting the most money from people and some consumers are quite resistant and always looking for value and others are more focused on brand as a lifestyle/image type purchase. I've seen so many videos now on youtube where people buy components direct from China from the higher quality factories and configure a bike for around £2K that matches bikes costing £6-10k from a bike shop over here. That is a huge saving if you are prepared to have an unknown brand on your bike. Sometimes the factories in question also make western brands and sometimes they are simply much better than the factories western brands use like Quest Composites which Canyon and Trek use which are mid-quality at best.

My brother gave me his wife's old bike a Exodus Genie as he knew I liked mucking about with old bikes. This was bought some years ago for the princely sum of £30 plus £8 postage with free cycle computer from Sterling House. Just a basic high tensile steel mountain bike with rigid steel forks and V brakes. Strong and safe and every component is easy to replace. There is nothing proprietary about it at all. No butted tubes to be a weak point, I'm sure every tube is plain gauge. The type of bike they send to Africa for various bike charities to give poor people a transport solution. To many here I'm sure a terrible bike but almost indestructible and very comfortable. It has pretty much no value over here so you can ride it anywhere and not have to worry about theft and overload it for shopping etc and all components are cheap to replace. Looking at the bike its pretty much on all its original components though. There is however bar tape wrapped around the stem and handlebar connection so maybe that isn't gripping that well so they improvised a solution. Maybe the chain has been replaced but can't see much else. I don't know how much it was used of course. I can't remember when Sterling House did the £29.99 bike offer I would guess around 15 years ago. Looks like the L39 model here. An ideal candidate for a ebike conversion too as both the main frame and forks would be suitable for a hub motor. The denser steel material would hold a hub motor axle much better, you may not even need a torque arm.

Just making the point bikes don't need to be expensive. It's not the end of the world if a bike is a little heavier and a little slower for the same effort especially if you are trying to get fit and lose weight anyway. Lower gearing compensates for a heavier bike.

View attachment 693197

A couple of quick comments on this. I've had a Cervelo since April 2017. It's a beautiful machine and one I think I would be very hard pressed to replace. In that time I've never met anyone with a bad word to say about Cervelo. I've read these quality comments before and as far as I can tell they can all be traced back to Hambrini. I'm not sure how much credence one can give to a YouTuber whose prime objective will be to increase his followers.

I know nothing of the bikes from Sterling House which is now Sports Direct. You're not making a fair comparison with this example. I did 68 miles, 15.9avg today. Absolutely impossible to match that on a £40 MTB which probably cost no more than £20 to manufacture.

The ethics of buying a £40 bike are very questionionable. The UK national minimum wage was £5.73 in 2008. Who was being exploited somewhere outside of Europe to allow a bike to be manufactured and sold for £39.99 which nets to £34?

 

[bonzobanana]

A couple of quick comments on this. I've had a Cervelo since April 2017. It's a beautiful machine and one I think I would be very hard pressed to replace. In that time I've never met anyone with a bad word to say about Cervelo. I've read these quality comments before and as far as I can tell they can all be traced back to Hambrini. I'm not sure how much credence one can give to a YouTuber whose prime objective will be to increase his followers.

I know nothing of the bikes from Sterling House which is now Sports Direct. You're not making a fair comparison with this example. I did 68 miles, 15.9avg today. Absolutely impossible to match that on a £40 MTB which probably cost no more than £20 to manufacture.

The ethics of buying a £40 bike are very questionionable. The UK national minimum wage was £5.73 in 2008. Who was being exploited somewhere outside of Europe to allow a bike to be manufactured and sold for £39.99 which nets to £34?

I was actually thinking of Luescher Technik on youtube. He did a video showing the very poor and dangerous design of the Cervelos and also I believe he has a video showing the very poor build quality of Cervelo frames in general unless that is Hambini for that one.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yajCXeNTbqk


The thing about cheap steel bikes is they are made by robots in many factories like fuji-ta, in fact up until a few years ago it was only steel frames that could be made by robots although maybe now aluminium frames can also be robot made.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1hd2GZQxWs


Carbon fibre frames is where most worker exploitation goes on because each frame requires many hours of assembly and it cannot be automated. This is Quest Composites own factory image for CF production. They make frames for Canyon, Trek and possibly other western brands. As you can see its a horrible working environment, people squashed together sitting on small tables rather than proper seats. This is the situation for CF as its so expensive and labour intensive to make each frame. You can make 100s of steel frames for the time it takes to make one CF frame. There is pretty much a 0% failure rate for basic steel frames, the manufacturing technique is very refined and the end user returns are almost non-existent. There was a figure by fuji-ta that they had 3x as many people working on carbon fibre frames as any other material despite only being 0.2% of their output by volume. I may have remembered that wrongly but it was as a statistic something like that. Quite a staggering statistic. I'm not sure that is still true as I don't think fujita do as well for CF as other factories. Many factories use third party smaller factories to hand assemble CF frame parts to reduce costs and these get final assembly in larger factories. A lot of factories now buy in raw frames and just finish them in house. So you may get a frame hand made in Cambodia, Vietnam etc that goes to Taiwan for finishing and painting so it can then have a 'Made in Taiwan' sticker. Far more exploitation with CF bikes because of the huge amount of labour involved.

 

[Hicky]

Ditto. I had spesh tricross and focus mares before the CX/gravel/adventure bikes kicked in.

I tried a mares before I bought my van nic, I didn’t like it but then again I didn’t like the other carbon bikes I tried, however the practicality of it wasn’t lost on me and it was a great price!

 

[Chislenko]

This is another reason whilst majority of my cycling is done with just me and my bike.

I'm with you.

 

[matticus]

Carbon fibre frames is where most worker exploitation goes on because each frame requires many hours of assembly and it cannot be automated. This is Quest Composites own factory image for CF production. They make frames for Canyon, Trek and possibly other western brands. As you can see its a horrible working environment, people squashed together sitting on small tables rather than proper seats.

View attachment 693394

Interesting response there.

 

[Ian H]

I don't tend to notice what bikes folks are riding. I do notice riding skills or lack of them.

 

[Alex321]

A couple of quick comments on this. I've had a Cervelo since April 2017. It's a beautiful machine and one I think I would be very hard pressed to replace. In that time I've never met anyone with a bad word to say about Cervelo. I've read these quality comments before and as far as I can tell they can all be traced back to Hambrini. I'm not sure how much credence one can give to a YouTuber whose prime objective will be to increase his followers.

I know nothing of the bikes from Sterling House which is now Sports Direct. You're not making a fair comparison with this example. I did 68 miles, 15.9avg today. Absolutely impossible to match that on a £40 MTB which probably cost no more than £20 to manufacture.

Sports Direct are now owned by the same people as Evans Cycles (Fraser Group), and sell (part of) the same range of own-brand (Pinnacle etc.)

 

[Dogtrousers]

Not only did I see someone riding a more expensive bike than mine, but I saw them looking snobbishly down their noses at my bike and giving me funny looks.

I soon wiped the grins off their faces by powering past them as they struggled uphill. ... OK I do realise that I've pushed the bounds of credulity a bit too far there.

I'm not really a paranoid fantasist.

 

[Jameshow]

Not only did I see someone riding a more expensive bike than mine, but I saw them looking snobbishly down their noses at my bike and giving me funny looks.

I soon wiped the grins off their faces by powering past them as they struggled uphill. ... OK I do realise that I've pushed the bounds of credulity a bit too far there.

I'm not really a paranoid fantasist.

I do that on many occasions!

Poor guy on giant TCR caught by me in steel tourer with camping kit! Didn't ask where I had come from!

 

[matticus]

Not only did I see someone riding a more expensive bike than mine, but I saw them looking snobbishly down their noses at my bike and giving me funny looks.

I soon wiped the grins off their faces by powering past them as they struggled uphill. ... OK I do realise that I've pushed the bounds of credulity a bit too far there.

Ah, the old pee-stop ambush!

 

[Dogtrousers]

Ah, the old pee-stop ambush!

I think that's about the only time I've ever been known to overtake another cyclist.

I had a bit of a victory on Saturday going up Brasted Hill (National Hill Climb Champs venue 1931). Some guy zoomed effortlessly past me but I found him admiring the view at the end of the steep bit but before the actual top, which I reached first. So I won. Eat my dust, fit person.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Not only did I see someone riding a more expensive bike than mine, but I saw them looking snobbishly down their noses at my bike and giving me funny looks.

I soon wiped the grins off their faces by powering past them as they struggled uphill. ... OK I do realise that I've pushed the bounds of credulity a bit too far there.

I'm not really a paranoid fantasist.

Is this where I bring out “I ride a recumbent, I know my place…”

 

[Moon bunny]

Not only did I see someone riding a more expensive bike than mine, but I saw them looking snobbishly down their noses at my bike and giving me funny looks.

I soon wiped the grins off their faces by powering past them as they struggled uphill. ... OK I do realise that I've pushed the bounds of credulity a bit too far there.

I'm not really a paranoid fantasist.

It is a general rule on cycling forums: The more “entry level” the bike, the faster the cyclist riding it.