Originally Posted by zonatandem
We submit design/specs/componentry, the custom builder then builds it.
It equated the same as buying a suit off the rack vs. to having a tailor make a suit to fit you.
In this example you're reducing the framebuilder to a contractor, or even worse a pieceworker. What you get when you pay for a custom framebuilder is not just the skilled hands. With the best ones you get the skilled heads as well. There's a helluva lot of information learned about what works and what doesn't over the course of 20 or 30 years and 3000 frames.
From e-R's interview with Grant Petersen/Rivendell Reader:
I think the line in the sand came when one of my clients, Rudy Sroka, who was also a good friend of mine, was on the first American team to be invited to the Tour de L'Avenir, which for those who don't know, is the amateur Tour de France. He wanted the bike to be 76 degree parallel, with an 11_ inch bottom bracket, the shortest chainstays possible, and a minimum fork rake. I made the bike because I thought that, "Well, bike makers make bikes to order and this is what Rudy asked for." He was my pal and an accomplished racer, and I figured, well I'm not going to argue. The bike looked great; you couldn't tell from the side that it was queer. It was what he wanted. He had enormous success on it, but when he went to the Tour de L'Avenir, which was his first taste of European stage racing, he lasted three or four stages. There, the team manager, Mike Neel, said to him, "If you ever get invited back to Europe to represent America in the stage races, don't bring that bike. Or if you ever find out I'm the coach, don't bring that bike.
Rudy related that story to me and at that point I said to myself, "That's it." None of this stuff ever made sense to me. I didn't know how to say no. I was still getting the information for my other customer's orders that said they liked their bikes the other way (with the inane geometry). The real racers and the National team guys, all wanted it to be this way, meaning more rationally designed. So I stopped making bikes to order and I decided to use my experience from the sport and say, "Look — there are two people in this equation, and I know more about the design than you do. I will design the bike to fit you perfectly. The result of this will be based on what I think will be correct for a bike." Rudy's was the last frame order I filled in which the client spec-ed the geometry and the key numbers. In other words, from the beginning I thought many of the so-called custom frame orders were coming through with requests for design elements that were contradictory with good handling and balance, and the incident with pal Rudy and his Tour de L'Avenir experience galvanized my decision to, once and for all, make my frames my way."