Originally Posted by
berlinonaut
This may be true if you consider maintenance as "fix if something is broken". If you follow the inspection guide in the manual the routine swapping of parts like stem and fork parts in relatively short intervals make it definitively far more expensive. Plus you loose your warranty on the frame if you do not get a stamp in your book for a yearly inspection with a birdy dealer.
The required parts-swapping may seem to be a bit on the paranoid side of life (and therefor up to everybody's own judgement) but I've read a couple of incidents with those (and other) parts breaking even on newer birdies w/o mistreatment, therefor it doesn't seem to be totally irrational.
Regular parts swapping plus yearly inspection make it an expensive bike in terms of high running cost (plus a high price to get one at first). If you are willing to take the risk with parts breaking plus you don't care for the warranty on the frame (or you do not have any as you bought second-hand) you can run it cheaper.
Well: every part related to frame, stem and fork is non-standard (aside of the suspension). The front hub is uncommon at least as is the seat post. The racks are non-standard. The rims and spokes are uncommon. And so on and so on. I'd assume there are more non-standard-parts on a Birdy than standard ones. Standard is basically the rear hub, everything regarding shifting and breaking, the saddle and the bar. That should be pretty much it - most of the rest is more or less non-standard or at least uncommon. There's nothing wrong about that in my eyes - that's the price you have to pay for a special bike.
The front hub I use is an Ultegra, it fits without any modification whatsoever. I could fit any 18 inch or 20 inch rim with regular spokes. I could just as easily use an origingal Sora hub, or a Dura Ace, or XTR, they all fit. A hub with a narrower flange width will allow a tighter fold, but the difference is negligible.
The funny thing is that neither of my bikes ever required any adjustment or repair of fork or neck parts, and this is on bikes which were ridden daily, and ridden hard at that. Nearly every full suspension mountain bike has model-specific parts, and models are updated with regularity, meaning that replacement parts for a particular model and year can be impossible to find. The so-called less reliable parts of early Birdy bikes can be replaced with parts from later models, as the two variations of the bike both remain in production today. I can buy a new fork assembly, neck, clamp parts, fork pivot bushings, and other parts for any Birdy of any model year, which is something not so easily done for other bikes.
I bought a new set ore spare pivot bolts and bushings, but after years of hard riding, the original parts still work properly, and have not needed replacing.