Well I for one am proud to buy good products made in the USA. I won't buy junk just to support USA manufacturers, but if a product is good and suits my needs, I'm willing to pay a premium for the privilege of rockin' it pro-Am style. I've made an effort to this insofar as my budget allows ever since I scrimped and saved to buy a new Yo! Eddy Team Fat Chance back in '92.

That said, I roll 3 made in USA frames (Schwinn, Mountain Cycle, and Lemond), 1 Canadian (Dekerf) and one I assume is Taiwanese (Novara).

I'm still looking to be able to buy an American car; of the 24 cars I've had in my life, I've never owned an American (and only 5 Japanese)...unless you count the rebadged Renault that was passed off as an AMC ('83 "Alliance", my first car, and still the only new car I've ever had)! I'm happy to say that Cadillac and Lincoln and Ford all have cars now that I'd consider buying, and might even be able to afford soon. That Lincoln MKT in white, with chromies, is so lux...so lux.

Sixty Fiver - go ahead and run the numbers, do the analysis. It's all speculation on all our parts without solid forecasts and a model that would show you with some relative degree of accuracy whether it would be feasible or note. My gut feel is not, but you don't make multi-million $ decisions on gut feel.

The reason the small boutique guys can stay in business is simple - low volume, low overhead, niche product with loyal customers -- and they probably aren't planning to get rich either.

billy - I work with a frame builder and one day will inherit the business so I understand the small end custom bit of things and that if you are good you will make a living... but won't become wealthy by any means.

This little bit of pondering was caused by my perusing Rivendell's site and seeing that a US made frame was about 15% more than a Taiwanese frame which then begs the question... why doesn't Rivendell use the services of local builders more than they do ?

Going a little farther I thought that if bicycle were being produced on a larger scale that 15% differential in price would be reduced a good deal and people would at least be buying a North American made frame and fork with a bunch of outsourced parts as there has never been much domestic production of modern derailleur and IGH systems here.

Whatever happened to the concept of "global economy"?


Quite frankly, I don't care where in the world my bicycles and bicycle components are made.

My newest frame is a HASA, a Taiwanese brand. Not an American brand made in Taiwan, but a Taiwanese brand made in Taiwan ... and I like that for some reason. I also like the frame and the price.

Four of my nine bikes have American built frames. Not sure about a fifth:
2004 Trek 520. Not sure if the new 520s are still being built at Waterloo.
2000 Voodoo Rada. From some research Voodoo shut down around 2001 and re opened around 2004 with their shops in Asia.
1999 Santana Stylus. Limited edition single built to test Easton's new SC7000 tubes.
1990 Trek 750. 750 and 790 models were built at Waterloo until 1993 from what I understand.
1992 Trek 1200. Not sure about this frame. Has a USA decal, but I suspect it at best was assembled in the US.

My other four bikes were all built in Asia. They are all very nice frames and their quality is on par with the US frames.

There is the answer. 15%. I presume they meant for same quality and after shipping, quality control check, defect, etc, their cost is 15% lower from Taiwan vs. outsourcing to local shops. When there are penny cutting happening in market place, 15% sounds impressive amount at the end of day for their pocket. I mean, people get in line and wait hours in freezing cold (BlackFriday), to get that kind of discount on products... (That's all there is really, from normal sale to blackfriday sale isn't that far off).
And you know what would be the "smart" thing for people who get "mass" scale sub contract out to do on frames? Go to china, make it, submit it to the assembler.
What US need to concentrate now is to stay on top of curve. Not trying to revive manufacturing that can be easily done outside. Innovate, engineer. While it might have looked like bloom of US was due to manufacturing, it really was the innovation and engineering that derived it. Do something like Brompton did. Do something like Bikefriday is doing but never settle down and keep moving.
We could go and argue about how we should have protected farming, etc if you are talking about jobs disappearing, etc back in the time of industrial revolution.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Scaling it up to the size production that you would see in these Taiwanese and Chinese factories would add many costs and complexities that a lone builder or small shop building a few frames a week would never have to deal with. Where I work, the price per hour that the final customer sees, is many times greater than my per hour salary -- because it has to include management, benefits (not just health, but all the many benefits employees get), overhead, indirect labor, insurance, fee, etc, etc, etc. And,we didn't mention all the tooling required to mass produce frames, which change each year - did we? You don't think those asian factories are doing this by hand with the same tooling the small frame makers here are, do you?

Your 15% quickly becomes a much greater differential when you scale up -- and perhaps some economy of scale will offset some of that - but it would be overwhelmed by the things being added - at least until you got ot a critical size.

And that's the frame. You're forgetting assembling the bike, inventory and warehousing, shipping, and on and on.

15% is not the answer - not even close.

Sixty Fiver - that's what I meant by run the numbers. You'd need a full scale business plan/case with enough detail to get financing (not easy) to actually understand if this would be feasible or not. Maybe there would be a middle ground -- between the size of a one/two person operation and the mega factories in asia - that would work. But the number still wouldn't be 15%.

In the last year or so I got into the hobby of metalworking, as in the benchtop machine-tools.
This provides a good perspective on "what things cost from where", as you can often find tools and accessories that are functionally equivalent but made in different countries.
The differences I've observed are WAY more than 15%.

Most of what I have is Chinese-made, just because that was what I could afford.
The slightly-better-quality stuff is often Taiwan-made, but costs ~1.5X what the China items do.
The top-quality stuff is US, Germany or Japan-made, but usually costs 3-4X what the China stuff does,,, and sometimes costs 8-10X or more what the China stuff does.

The level of quality in the US/German/Japan stuff is much better, it's true--but for a hobbyist, the China stuff works just fine for a lot of things.

There's always guys on metalworking forums saying how dumb it is to waste money on China junk and how you really should only buy USA-made tools, but I couldn't afford the hobby at all if I had only bought the top-quality stuff.

Additionally,,,, if for whatever reason you happen to want a bench-top mill or lathe--you are almost forced to buy Chinese or Taiwan, since those are the only sources of such machinery nowadays. The last USA company that made bench-top mills stopped making them in 1961, nearly 50 years ago.
So,,,,,,,
--You can pay top-dollar for a restored US-made one on ebay (on the occasions when they come up for sale, which isn't all that often), or-
--You can buy an unrestored US-made one on eBay and then spend the next months/possibly years also looking for the pieces to get it working again (which you may never find), or-
Or you can order a China-made one and a truck drops it off at your house in a week, and most likely it will have all the pieces included and work right when you plug it in.

For me the choice was easy: I wanted to build stuff, I didn't want to play junk dealer. If there was a comparable US-made product I would have considered it, but there was no such thing.
~

Billy, I totally agree. I've done some work with China for mass production strategies, etc on goods (requiring metal working) vs. in US. It's kind of funny that minimum batch acceptable there mostly is in thousands vs. hundreds here in US for similar things that need to be done. (and funny enough cost nearly same... so cost of real simple part for short run can be as high as 10x in US vs in China).
That 15% is actually from SixtyFiver's comment I just quoted and taking what he wrote at face value.

https://www.ecovelo.info/2010/01/05/back-in-the-u-s-a/

Read a little history. Back in the 1600/1700's England (UK) pretty much created the Industrial Revolution. They owned machinery and manufacturing. The US slowly stole the technology and built its own manufacturing base, resulting in the demise of England's.

The situation is not much different now, except China is taking it from us, just like we took it from England. Natural thing - always happens, always will.

Get over it. I like my Taiwanese Jamises.

However, I did just buy a NiteRider 250 headlight, made in California (I'm sure with lots of foreign parts.).

Sixty Fiver - I will bet you a year's salary that this guy's prediction is completely wrong. BTW, his schtick is to try to make money by selling marketing plans to bike retailers...he's not an analyst any more than I"m going to flap my arms and fly to work tomorrow morning. He has no qualifications to comment on global economic, manufacturing, and financial trends.

Sixty Fiver you do hit on one important point. We need to bring some jobs back home even if it means we have find a way to put leverage on American companies to do so. Because sooner or later as our neighbors fall out of the job market the whole mirrored ball will come crashing down because we simply will not be able to afford the products because we don't have the paychecks to do so.

Britain and much of Europe retained it's manufacturing capacity after North America "stole" the technology... they are now in the same boat in that they have become service oriented economies and have lost much of their ability to produce any of their own basic commodities.

Until the 80's England was a net exporter of bicycles and now they are also buying 99% of their bicycles from Asia.

Remember, this applies to everything.

Macroeconomic fail. The shift of low-cost jobs to Asia doesnt hurt developed economies in the long run - it merely shifts jobs to things like service and knowledge-based positions. There are enough studies to support this. Look it up.

Ignoring the trashy department store bikes, was there really a time in the last 60 years where anything other than high-end bikes were made in the U.S.? The Trek 300's I made in the '70s were firmly in the mid-range. Trek really didn't make that many of them. The idea of making anything other than high-end bikes in the U.S. really died out with Schwinn. Gas-pipe Varsitys were pretty expensive in comparison to what was available from Japanese companies. Seems to me that we've gone back to the norm. I think people are starting to realize that we've gone too far shipping production overseas, but probably not for low-end bikes.