Cycleops
Legendary Member
- Location
- Accra, Ghana
If @SkipdiverJohn reads this thread be prepared for a very full answer!
You can buy new bikes?
Most of mine have been found in the dump.
You would be daft not consider 2nd hand. There are a lot of people who jump up on summer morning rush about and buy a new bike - then discover that it takes a good deal of effort to make that thing go up hill !!! - Hence a lot of used bikes aren't actually 'used that much'.........
What would worry about high end carbon frames is the amount of fakes out there now.
Another tidy one, also £20, came from a posh part of South London. Seller bought the bike in 1989 for his boy as a teenager, who clearly rode it carefully for a few years before moving out and leaving the bike behind. Same story, bike goes into the shed and gets forgotten about for the next 25 years until the old man decides to have a sort out. By this time the grown-up son has no interest in riding bikes, so it gets sold to me.
I don't worry about buying (or salvaging) secondhand steel. Any serious frame damage will be evident in the form of crinkled paint or visible misalignment of the tubes or forks. In my experience, most steel bikes, no matter how shabby and scruffy they may be cosmetically, have perfectly sound and safe to ride frames. I wouldn't trust secondhand carbon frames either, but then I don't like the look of carbon bikes anyway and have no desire to own one.