What would you do? Building a new bike over a long period of time…

[MattAune]

Since most of the build/buy dilemma in this thread seems to pertain to fixies, I will add this. All of those brand new, awesomely priced fixed gear bikes you see are hi-ten steel. I would rather pay more for a good chromoly frame and build it up myself.

I would also buy parts one by one as I found really good deals instead of waiting until I had the cash to buy it all at once. Watch craigslist, or just tell dcv what you are looking for and he will be your own personal craigslist notification system. 😎

[GuyContinental]

This thread is unhealthy for my wallet… I have two high functioning, high spec (XO/XTR) 26″ mountain bikes (a SS and FS) and have no real reason to replace either but I WANT to build a new 650B bike, maybe just for the sake of new-to-me-ness…

[TwoWheelsDC]

@MattAune 80201 wrote:

Since most of the build/buy dilemma in this thread seems to pertain to fixies, I will add this. All of those brand new, awesomely priced fixed gear bikes you see are hi-ten steel. I would rather pay more for a good chromoly frame and build it up myself.

I would also buy parts one by one as I found really good deals instead of waiting until I had the cash to buy it all at once. Watch craigslist, or just tell dcv what you are looking for and he will be your own personal craigslist notification system. 😎

My brand news awesomely priced complete-build FG is 4130 chromoly (frame and fork). Most BikesDirect bikes are chromoly or aluminum…so they do exist, but yes, it’s definitely something a potential buy should look at very carefully.

[Drewdane]

I bought parts piecemeal as I could afford them, and built my new bike(s) once all the parts were in. Until then, the parts stayed in their packages.

[Drewdane]

@dkel 79942 wrote:

I don’t understand this, though I have observed it. What happens to the cost of labor for the company that builds the bikes? Certainly, they get components wholesale, but is the markup for components for individual consumers so large as to offset that labor cost?

Not to hijack this thread, but the reason I’m curious is that I’m interested in converting my 1980’s Schwinn World into a fixie, but based on the very limited comparison-shopping I’ve done, the price of the components (and I would need everything: the frame is all I would keep from the original bike) could be way more than a brand new, pretty nice fixie built by a good company.

That said, I still haven’t finished my dissertation (thank you, BAFS!), and I’ve promised myself (and my wife) I won’t work on a fixie conversion until I’m a Dr.

I always assumed the markup for retail parts sold individually add up to a heck of a lot more than a factory-assembled bike built using the same components sold in bulk to the manufacturer.

[Harry Meatmotor]

@vvill 80177 wrote:

Oh, it’s for a FG build? Then definitely go part-by-part. FG/SS builds are so easy to chop and change since there’s barely any cabling involved.

I’m in the process of reconfiguring my SS/secondary FG bike. Threw on a different seatpost, and I’m planning to finally switch out the front fork, front brake and stem.

Surprised no one else has answered this… I’m not an expert but I would say “yes”. As far as I understand it, bike shops build new bikes as part of their role as suppliers/distributors for a brand. So the labor cost doesn’t really go on the manufacturer, and yeah markup on components is huge. That’s one reason why people will buy mostly-assembled complete bikes online, strip them for the groupset and then sell off the frame/wheels.

It’s really quite a bit more complicated than that. The bigger brands (Giant, Trek, Specialized, etc) receive volume pricing on components that is much less than the wholesale price a parts distributor (QBP, etc) or smaller manufacturer gets (think, Moots, Rivendell, Alchemy, any small-time handbuilt framebuilder, or even small manufacturers using Asian-sourced frames, or foreign brands that you’ve never heard of, but only sell 10,000 bikes or less a year). Now, imagine there are smaller manufacturers (primarily in China, some in Taiwan) that are OEMs for the larger brands, who actually manufacture or just assemble the bikes that get sold at your LBS branded as one of the Big Brands. Imagine, too, that sometimes these smaller manufacturers have extra inventory of components they need to offload prior to a new model year of bikes being manufactured or assembled. The smaller manufacturer can hang these gray-market components (that they received at significant discount from regular wholesale because the Big Brand secured huge volume pricing) on a super cheap non-branded frameset, then sell directly through the internet, or through outlets like Nashbar, and keep the retail price near what a major brand would sell as wholesale.

There’s really actually two “major” assembly processes involved with most bikes. The first major assembly process takes place in China or Taiwan, where all the components are hung on the bare frame, and the components all adjusted (to an extent), and the bike is packed for shipping to some foreign market. As you can imagine, that assembly process is incredibly inexpensive, due to the cheap cost of labor in China and Taiwan. The second major assembly cost is bourne by the end retailer, where the mechanics in the back of the shop unbox and reassemble the partially disassembled bike, check for defects or damage from shipping, and readjust all the components. That’s still pretty cheap, as most competant mechanics can assemble a new bike in 15-30 minutes. If anything, there may be upportunity costs, but most shops just adjust their labor costs to account for new bike builds.

TL;DR those cheapo bikes you see for sale on the intarwebs are cheap for a whole slew of reasons, but the labor costs of assembly are not a huge driver of the final cost of the bike.

[hozn]

@dkel 80193 wrote:

I thought we just discussed how it’s cheaper to buy a complete bike than to build it up yourself! I’m so confused!!

Yes, it’s always cheaper to buy a bike complete, if the bike you want is available as a complete bike. My case is somewhat special because I’m buying frames (usu. direct from China) that build into what I consider equivalent bikes to ones that cost a lot more from name-brand companies. (The ones from name-brand companies have more market value, but they offer no actual added performance value to me.)

For example, buying an off-the-shelf titanium cx bike, say a Lynskey, would cost me $4,500 (on sale right now), but I built my Habanero cross bike for around $2700. (Granted, I could have bought a similar-spec Motobecane for under $2k, but I prefer the disc-only frame I have and I would have replaced the wheels and swapped out some other components so the price would have likely ended pretty close.)

Similarly, a the last price tag hanging off a carbon Specialized Roubaix Disc (with mechanical disc brakes) that I saw at Freshbikes was $5,000. (Granted that seems high; maybe they had upgraded to carbon wheels?) In any event, my carbon disc-brake road bike with 45mm carbon wheels and Sram Force cost me less than $2500 and that wasn’t trying hard to be economical (Sram Force is, in my mind, a fairly cost-ineffective group). A closer-priced stock bike would have been the Foundry Riveter, but that is still $2700 for a bike with alloy wheels and other components that I’d likely replace.

Ultimately, the question comes down to whether you can be happy with a stock bike or whether you will forever itch to “make it yours”. And if the latter is true, then you probably won’t save money buying complete (unless you’re good at selling all the parts you don’t want). Hope that makes some sense

[cyclingfool]

Bike builds rock! I’ve built up my last two bikes myself, the first one with help from the fine folks at the Velocity coop and then more recently by myself in the basement of my apartment building. I take great pride in having built my own bike, and it really helped me to learn a lot. For my most recent build, I even laced up and built my own wheelset. The experience, aside from being educational, makes me love my bike that much more since it’s not just something I own, but something I made and an expression of myself and my cycling preferences.

[hozn]

@cyclingfool 80216 wrote:

The experience, aside from being educational, makes me love my bike that much more since it’s not just something I own, but something I made and an expression of myself and my cycling preferences.

This is probably the best articulation of why you build your own bike. Building up a bike really does make it special.

[vvill]

Buying a complete bike is cheaper if you want exactly the spec of the bike, but as you get more expensive parts, you get diminishing returns, so you’re probably more likely to want to customize. Say if you want to change the spec significantly or reallocate where the money goes, it’s better to build it up yourself unless you are really confident about reselling parts. You might want to build your own $1000 wheelset for your bike, or maybe you’d rather spend $250 on a crankset rather than a carbon stem, etc. And of course there’s conspicuous consumption, especially with high-end bikes.

Your LBS can usually also re-price the bike for you with a different spec if it’s not too far off – I did this with my CX bike since I don’t have a very full complement of wrenching skills, and I wanted LBS support. (I ended up buying a new wheelset from them afterwards as well, but the price of the new bike + extra wheelset was still about half what it cost for a bike that comes with that wheelset stock!)

@Harry Meatmotor 80209 wrote:

TL;DR those cheapo bikes you see for sale on the intarwebs are cheap for a whole slew of reasons, but the labor costs of assembly are not a huge driver of the final cost of the bike.

Thanks for the better/more detailed reply! I think I generally understood the processes involved but I’m glad someone explained it more authoritatively.

@MattAune 80201 wrote:

I would rather pay more for a good chromoly frame and build it up myself.

Agreed – or an even nicer-than-chromoly steel.

@TwoWheelsDC 80188 wrote:

And I’m not going to reveal what I’m building until it’s done

Pfft. Tease.

[mstone]

@TwoWheelsDC 80203 wrote:

My brand news awesomely priced complete-build FG is 4130 chromoly (frame and fork). Most BikesDirect bikes are chromoly or aluminum…so they do exist, but yes, it’s definitely something a potential buy should look at very carefully.

beyond just the alloy involved, there are things like butting, seamed/seamless, heat treating, etc. “4130” covers a very large range, and if it’s not more specific than that it’s almost certainly on the lower end. doesn’t mean it’s not perfectly rideable, and even better for some purposes, but buyers should be aware that “4130” can cover chromium/molybdenum steel pipes as well as reynolds 525 butted tubing or 725 heat treated butted tubes–and that they should be paying significantly less for the former rather than the latter.

[vvill]

Ok in spending 5 mins assembling post quotes I realized I mostly just repeated hozn’s reply. 😮

[rcannon100]

Have to give the plug, if you volunteer at Phoenix Bikes, you can take advantage of Shop Night where you can bring your own bike into the shop, taking advantage of all of Phoenix’s tools and stands and buckets of spare parts. The next shop night is April 3rd (which I think is our FS happy hour).

[Steve]

@vvill 80177 wrote:

That’s one reason why people will buy mostly-assembled complete bikes online, strip them for the groupset and then sell off the frame/wheels.

Yea, it’s pretty crazy that you can get a $750-800 Shimano 105 complete bike off nashbar when the 105 groupset alone is probably like $450-500. Now that I write it like that, it seems that I have some shopping to do…..

[dkel]

I’m pretty sure my old Schwinn World frame isn’t even chromoly; it was a low-end version of the World Sport, so it’s likely high-ten steel. I’m not going to break the bank on super-nice components for it, either. I am quite eager to bang around with some tools, though, and I’m not going to take apart one of my other bikes, since I actually use them a lot. So mine will definitely be a learning project, and if it goes well, I’ll end up with a useful fixie (with a pretty, lugged frame), and I will have gotten my money’s worth out of doing it myself. And n+1 always applies, so none of the reasoning matters anyway.

[Author]

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