Originally Posted by
Landgolier
As you can tell from my sig, I don't really think it's necessary for anyone to buy a new bike, but your initial proposition was just as penny wise and pound foolish as the "self sealing" tube you bought at target. At some point I hope you get tired of swapping those out and just invest in some good quality tires that will hardly ever get flats.
The obstacle to cheaper new bikes in this country is the cost of labor for the final setup (at the shop) and the cost of carrying lots of sizes and models. The big box stores get around that with incompetent assemblers and one size fits all bikes, and do a lot more volume than any shop can match. The parts on the Target bikes aren't really that much worse than what's on a $350 bike shop bike. Fault also lies with the consumer, who stupidly buys crap they don't need like triple cranks and suspension while opting for a bike with much worse basic components (seat, tires, etc...). Talk to anyone who sells bikes and they'll tell you that what they can sell you for $300 is a huge compromise between what's actually good and what the kind of people who buy the cheapest bike in the shop think they want. Any shop rat worth his salt knows that treaded tires and suspension are all but useless on the road, no entry level rider needs 24 speeds, and that what people think is comfortable the first time they ride it and what they really need to not be hurting after a ride are two different things, but they don't have an hour to explain all of this to the consumer, and the consumer doesn't really have time to listen either. So you get the kind of cheap bikes shops have now, which look like people who know nothing about bikes think bikes ought to look and have features they think they want, but are actually highly impractical. Meanwhile in Europe you can get a good basic town bike for the same price, and it will have a sane number of speeds, proper tires, fenders, probably a rack, good provisions for lights, and will not be prone to breakdowns.
Local bike shops roundly refuse to sell self-sealing tubes. After five or eight tubes in five months, I can assure you that I intend to buy better tires for the Next bike. I had already decided I'm putting either hybrid tires or just plain road tires on the thing. Yeah, I'll buy the tires from an lbs, and I'll be sure and ask about tires that resist punctures from briars, brambles, and titantium pokey things. I've also discovered, whilst changing out the tube last evening, that several of the spokes on the rear tire are loose. I don't yet own a spoke tool; I'm probably going to start by buying one and tightening the spokes myself, just to give myself experience. If the wheel begins to look something like the square wheel that "frameteam" seemed to be saying he once welded to an All-Pro frame, I'll take the wheel and bike in to a shop and let them straighten out my mistake.
The process appears time consuming but not all that difficult, so long as I don't merrily twist away at any one spoke till the wheel forms into a pretzel. The Next bike, by the way, was little more than an impulse purchase--one of the factors influencing my desire to not only buy the bike for $20.00 bucks in a destroyed condition, but to then spend something over $100.00 making it work, was the 'sexy' design of the frame. I thought it would be "cool" to ride this bike. Chalk that up to latent mid-life crisis syndrome; other guys have don far worse while in their second childhood phase. I'm over that part of the enchantment with that bike, but I did factor in some practical elements, as you will note later in this thread.
The rant about prices was superfluous. But frankly I have been to close to a half-dozen bike shops in the area now. If any of them have bikes for less than $500.00, they don't put them out on the floor. In one shop in Maplewood Missouri--a St. Louis suburb essentially populated by working-class and working poor people, although sandwiched between somewhat more-affluent communities--the cheapest
wheel I could find on display was several hundred dollars. If they have cheaper ones, they hide them in a storeroom. I lived in Maplewood for years. I knew the shop from my time there, and know it is roundly loathed by it's immediate neighbors because it caters to the upper-middle-class/wealthy tastes and pocketbooks of Webster Groves, Brentwood, and Clayton residents rather than to what the less-than $40,000.00/year average Maplewood resident could ever afford.
When I lived in Maplewood, I was less than five miles from my workplace for most of my time there, and I used public transport and bicycles to get to work. After walking into the Maplewood shop once, in 1988, I laughed, walked out, and walked down to K-Mart where I bought a bike that served me quite well for the next four years as a commuter vehicle. I rode the bike as-assembled at K-Mart, never knew a darned thing about "bicycle tune-ups", "fitting" a bike to fit me, or even that it is unhealthy for a bike to be stored in the rain. And made it work, with only occasional tube replacements. Was the bike basically junk? Probably; it certainly was by the time it endured four years of basic neglect from me. I think we left it by the dumpster when my first wife and I packed my things to set up housekeeping together.
Am I singing the praises of K-Mart bicycles? No. Just pointing out that despite the sudden claim of people in this threat that "Oh, there are affordable brands of 'good' bicycles out there"--I don't see that as the first option offered to folks new to cycling. I don't see newcomers like me presented with good basic transportation at an affordable price. My perception is that we are offered eye-candy and bling at a premium prices. Bicycles essentially suitable only for a triathlon athlete, racer, or someone who wants to leap over logs while riding down the side of a cliff. I didn't even get my Next bike for that reason; I got it because I thought the 27 gears and the rugged tires would be more effective when I rode to a job I had on Illinois Route 111, where there are several steep hills and a lot of gravel shoulders that the All-Pro weren't navigating very well. (No, I am not a big 'vehicular cyclist', not on a state highway where the slowest drivers usually barely honor the posted 55 MPH speed limit, and where plenty of SUV and semi-drivers go WAY faster than that when they can get away with it).
I've picked up several magazines on bicycling; the magazines have plenty of pretty-good advice on bicycling, but ye gods! the prices for even very basic stuff! Again, way, way more than the 'affordable' prices posters on this thread are suggesting are out there. Most of the "New To This Forum, What Bike Should I Buy?" threads I see are filled with advice like "It's good to have an expensive hobby"; "Don't spend less than $500.00 on a bike"; "Make sure you drop a couple hundred bucks on bike shorts or you'll die of infected saddle sores", and so forth. Frankly, I think it is a bad thing to have expensive hobbies, I don't think of my bikes as just a hobby anyhow, and I don't feel I can or should be spending $500.00 on a bike plus hundreds more on clothes and accessories.
And, since the 1970's, or so I'm told, bike frames and parts have been made by a relatively few factories located mostly in Asia. My "lousy" All-Pro frame was probably made on the same assembly line that made steel frames for name-brand companies. My suspicion is that the only difference between my All-Pro frame and many other steel frames of the same era are the decals and original retail source of my bike versus those so-called "good bikes". I don't question that the moving parts may have been shoddier, but I have stood my bike up next to other older bikes with similar geometrical forms and I really can't discern the differences. A little more curve in one front fork or the other, a bit of difference in where on the headset and the standover tube joins, but no obvious differences.
And yet, my All-Pro is denounced in this thread as having "the worst frame ever built". Really? Tell me why. What is really so different between my 1970's 10-speed all-steel All-Pro bike and, say, a 1970's, all-steel, 10-speed, Trek bike (assuming Trek made bikes in the 1970's). Why is is such an abomination to fix this All-Pro bike up with good parts, if the frame is in basically good shape and it fits me well? I'm derailing my own thread--and I've kind of digressed from my originally point in this post about what constitutes fair prices--but please enlighten me. I really don't understand. Thanks!