Originally Posted by
buddyp
Thats correct -- thats why he needs to deal with someone that does know what fits.
IMHO "Perfect" Fit is a personal thing and takes years of dialing in. A bike shop and all the fit equations in the world will only get you fairly close. A custom fit or frame is only as good as the information you can feed into the fitter and that is typically contained in bike that you have been riding for years and tweaking until it feels just right over the long haul. There are too many noise variables in a blind fit to do any more than get you on the right size frame. As a rider improves the time they spend in the drops versus in the hoods changes, thier body flexibility changes and thier riding preferences change.
An example of all this - I recently bought a new bike, I decided to do a blind fit. We got the right size frame and then dialed it in over about two hours in the shop. When I got it home it was a little different then the bike I have been riding for years. I took the new one out with my wrenches for a metric and at teh end of the ride I compared it to my old bike and all the adjustments were just about the same (within the measurement error anyway).
A side note - a friend of mine told me a story of a friend of his who was hired by one of the primier boutique and custom bike builders. This individual came from a lean manufacturing culture and improved the cycle/build time for a custom bike from 2 weeks to 1 day. What they found was that the market would not except that because buyers did not think that the bikes were no longer custom, so now they just hold the order for a few weeks. The moral of this story, custom is mostly about making people feel special.
IMHO - the OP should seek out a good end of year special for well under $1K (something like a Trek 1000), ride it, tweak the fit, figure out your riding style and if your hooked and the Trek doesn't get it for whatever reason (and that could simply be that you want something more "custom" between your legs, there is a lot to be said for vanity
) swap it out, you may find you want that $8,000 Cervelo, Serotta (whatever) just because it turns heads and makes you "feel" great and if you "feel" great you ride great. If you spend $2500 on a very good road bike it will be hard to part with it when you discover you really wanted a hybrid. I suspect I will get a lot of disagreement on these points but heck - that's life.