Originally Posted by
UniChris
Make one shifting assembly from thicker metal rather than two from what they do. If you can do 21 speed that works even momentarily for $129, you should be able to do 8 that has some service life for $250.
I’m not getting your point here. Your first sentence makes no sense.
I'm not actually arguing for single speed in the US market, but speaking as someone neither young nor fit who rides centuries on such...
You do it for fun or the bragging rights. You also probably didn’t load your bike up with clothes for commuting or groceries or other items.
Ironically if you look at "the world" you do see a lot of single speed (two foot gear is underappreciated) - but again, I don't think it's actually necessary to pare things down that far.
If you look in the world where single speed is used extensively, those places tend to be in relatively flat areas. Other places that have hills may have people riding single speeds but people riding there tend to do it as a challenge.
But, again, you haven’t identified any item on a bicycle that could be pared down so as to get the cost
of a durable bicycle below around $500.
But notice how share bikes are often 3-speed tanks, yet very popular.
About those. We got a mess of them from the local ride share when Lime and Uber killed the ride share system in Denver. We sold a few of them for $10 but we had a whole bunch more that we couldn’t even give away.
It's what being able to use index shifting demands in terms of manufacturing accuracy and adjustment from the derailleur. Give the rider a continuous control, and they'll quickly learn to accomplish whatever getting the chain on the sprocket they want and having it run there smoothly is going to take on that particular day.
Instead of a mechanism that needs adjustment to stay working, you have a mechanism that needs a few minutes worth of learning to ride with.
You keep going on about index shifting. It’s not that expensive nor that hard to keep operating. The expensive part...the research and development...was paid for long ago. You seem to think it adds hundreds of dollars to the price of the bike. It adds pennies, if even that.
You have the perfect model of how to make a budget bike in the HelMart Heavys (and similar). You end up with a bicycle that is heavy, unreliable, too expensive to fix, and is a danger to its rider. Making them a bit better and doubling the price probably would only make a bike that is slightly better. My co-op scraps hundreds of these kinds of bikes per year. Even with free labor and reclaimed parts, they aren’t worth the effort of even stripping the parts from them. I took about 6 tons of them to the scrap yard last summer.