Dear All,
Just wanted to show off the new bike and share a few thoughts on self-building as opposed to buying a complete bike. This is my payback for 2 years of sucking tips from Bike Forums and not contributing much!
I started collecting components for this build in about 2009 (!) and only really got going this year for a variety of reasons. Here are a few things I learned along the way which I hope may be useful to others.
1) The quality of freely contributed discussion on every bike component you can imagine is incredible on bike forums! I was able (after a few months reading) to really choose a good blend of price and trusted performance for my bike. The intended usage is rather heavy duty touring off the beaten track by the way. Thanks to all for contributing!
2) Building a bike can be very, very, slow..... I would have loved to do this if I had a real workshop space to do it in. Building in an apartment (on a white rug in the living room no less...) was unnecessarily stressful.
3) There will be problems.. especially if you get others to do things for you. I had a rather unsucessful wheel build from a local place here in France which depressed me for a while:
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...ild?highlight=
I think that if you are going to build then go the whole way! In the end I bought Schraners book on wheelbuilding and was able to borrow enough tools to fix things up the way they should have been. In the end the only thing which was done by a bike shop was the headset pressing. Even then when I turned up they had tried to stick me with a carbon fibre spacer with a markup of about €30!
4) You will learn alot... I had a bit of a panic about frame alignement during the bottom bracket installation. This was solved by experts on the Mechanics forum and by growing a pair and getting a bigger spanner!
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...ame?highlight=
5) There will still be things you haven't thought of. For example I completely forgot a brake hanger in the initial build and still have one minor problem to solve (the lack of a barrel adjuster on the XT rear derailleur. I also discovered that SRAM chains ship too short to use on a LHT with low gears! It turns out though that others have of course solved all these problems previously and a little searching on here goes a long way.
6) It is not true that self building is necessarily more expensive. It does however require patience to find products at good prices on sale. Incidently, I bought a lot of parts from an online store in Germany who ship all over Europe who I would strongly recommend. PM me for details as I am not sure if blatant commercial plugs are OK on here? This does not bode well for your LBS of course, which is a different issue. My final price was ~€ 1543 with all shipping and the odd bits of bike shop work. As compared to ~€1100 for a stock LHT without racks and mudguards and a significantly degraded component list.
Here is the final component list- comments, or things you would have done differently are welcome! I completely understand that it may not be to everyones taste!
Part List:
58 cm dark green LHT frame
Brooks honey B17 saddle
Brooks honey leather bar tape
Nitto noodle bars
Velo Orange Grand Cru Stem
Velo Orange Grand Cru seat post
Cane Creek 110 headset
Shimano UN55 bottom bracket
Stronglight impact triple chainset
SRAM chain
Shimano Tiagra front triple derailleur
Shimano XT rear derailleur
Shimano Dura-Ace downtube shifters
Shimano 11-36 deore cassette
Problem Solvers brake hanger
Cane Creek SCR-5 brake levers
Cane Crek SCX-5 cantilevers
Shimano PD-A520 pedals
Tubus Cargo rear rack
Tubus Ergo low rider front rack
Schwalbe Marathon performance tyres
SKS P45 Chromoplastic mudguards
Mavic A319 rims
DT Swiss Alpine III spokes
Shimano XT 36 hole hubs
And now to the pictures... and a long tour in the summer!
cheers,
Jim
