Originally Posted by
UniChris
My own experience with department store bikes has indeed not been bad - the one I had in college in after, and the used one I picked up recently for a relative.
But I don't discount the reports of trouble from others, or that the components are often flimsy and non-standard. Stopped on a trail once to try to help someone put her front brake back together and was a bit frustrated how finicky and flexy the parts were.
How long ago was your experience with HelMart bikes? I have to work on them at my local co-op constantly and have zero respect for them. I would rather the people buying them saved their money or bought a far better used bike. Among the things I see on a constant basis are bearings that are both soft and brittle. The bearings grind down to dust or a hemispherical shape in the bearing cup. Of the bearing cup, often they pull apart which trying to extract them. They feel like they are cross threaded...and they are...but the threads are actually separating. Steel crank arms round off while still attached firmly to the crank spindle. And crank spindles have come to me looking like finials that you find on the top of some wrought iron fences. They have also come to me dangerously cracked
Untitled by
Stuart Black, on Flickr
This particular one was cracked on both sides in exactly the same place. It’s a laceration waiting to happen.
And there is a general reality that coincident with the switch to importing just about everything, we've seen a switch from solid basics to silly features. I can remember in some other contexts as a teenager being frustrated that the "name brands" only offered extras I coveted in the mid to high tier models, while some of the lesser known imports that were coming on the market offered them by default in their magazine adds. It was only when I finally saw some of those products in person that it became clear how crummy they were in terms of their capability to fill the basic need. And I've seen that again and again - the established brand comes with 3 attachments 1 of which might actually be useful, the budget new arrival has 20 attachments all odd and all likely to break on the first or second attempt at use.
Blame those Big Box stores you want people to buy bikes from. The features that they add are meant to bring people in to buy a bike that won’t do what they are advertising them for. A low end mountain bike from a bike shop can’t be sold for about $100 but it is much more trail worth then those BSO mountain bikes are. That’s the problem with HelMart bikes...the price. Twenty or 30 years ago, $100 could get you a fairly good bike. Today that $100 buys you a $50 bike from 1990. They cut costs on HelMart bikes so severely that the metal they are using is more slag then iron.
There are fairly good bikes out there. They are the lower end bikes at bike shops. But they cost $500 which is a very fair cost and good value. But the uninitiated wants to spend only $100 and they get what they are paying for...basically nothing.