[ggm]

There's nothing wrong with continuous improvement but when you are trying to fine tune something in the flat portion of an exponential scale, and lets face it, even the most expensive bike shown here is 1/2 the burden of an ICE engine car, you have to ask yourself: is this optimisation really the core problem?

I argue: it's not. It's polishing. It's functionally a bit time-wast-y compared to reductions in the cost, and price of ebikes.

I tell you what I'd like as a bike rider: I'd like the post evergiven/covid supply chain behind my brake fluid fixed. It's insanely expensive to replace brakes and gears and wheels on a street bike these days: I ride a Movida 200 which is a pretty average, low end disc-brake unit with fluid breaklines, and I am up for a horrendous cost in parts to replace: the labour I can understand, this isn't a zero-work job. But the supply chain fragility in bicycles is truly scary: I paid twice the base cost of my (admitedly secondhand) bike, repairing it these last 2 years.

I know: I should learn to do this myself. I did once long ago last century take apart a sturmy-archer 3 speed hub gear, and remake it, and I did have no left over parts. Amazing. Some of the springs were like fairy-floss. Now, I have old person shakey hands and to be frank I'd rather pay a hipster to do it for me, but the parts cost is just obscene. I'm not paying his tattoo costs, this is some anonymous bike part warehouse in the cloud, which is ripping us all off worldwide.

[Gigachad]

Low Tech Magazine has always been more of an entertainment blog with creative and unusual solutions. Their stuff rarely seems to be practical or reasonable but it is a fascinating read anyway.

>I paid twice the base cost of my (admitedly secondhand) bike, repairing it these last 2 years.

Because the base price of a bike is just about nothing. So it makes sense that skilled labor quickly overtakes the cost. And you usually get a hefty discount on the price of the bike when you buy it second hand considering just about everything on the bike excluding the frame is a consumable item.

[paulcole]

I paid about $1,000 for a steel-frame touring bike about 15 years ago. I commute/run errands for a few thousand miles a year on it. Every 2-3 years, I get it overhauled at a cost of about $500. Other than that, I’ve replaced wheels and tires a few times and break pads on average about once a year, plus the occasional random issue.

So for me, the cost of maintenance quickly outpaced the cost of the bike. But it’s still a pittance compared to the cost of car ownership.

I would say don’t learn to do maintenance yourself unless it’s something you enjoy. I enjoy riding my bike but hate tinkering with and fixing things. My bike is to get me around, not be a source of grief and annoyance.

[dylan604]

>But it’s still a pittance compared to the cost of car ownership.

I'm not really sure where the unrealistic expectation of zero dollar expense on maintenance of a bike comes from, but it seems the norm. No matter what though, it is still pennies on the dollar for any kind of expense from a car. The most expensive thing I can do for an upgrade to my bike is to have hydraulic brakes installed, and that's <$400 with paying for the labor of someone else to do it. Like you said, brake pads get replaced, but the set for my biker are <$20. Yes, it's not free and definitely non-zero, but it rounds to zero when compared to car ownership.

[samstave]

My bike cost more than my car. I have a $7,500 bike, a $3,000 bike and two $400 bikes... my car was $5,000 and I put more miles on my bikes than any car...

Bikes suck for a few things - weather and only one person and no storage.

I am a pro-dealer of Fox Shocks products and am looking to becoming an Orbea dealer - potentially opening my own shop.

Also, I am designing 3D printable components based on my being a daily biker for two decades.

--

Also - you can go to importYeti.com and look up bike suppliers supply chains, shipments and native chinese/taiwanese manufacturers (Taiwan produces a F-ton of bike frames....

You will see differences in pricing >$1,000 just based on the quality of components.

Some modern bikes have apps to tune their performance, blue-tooth wireless shifters, brakes etc.

I love bikes - but they arent as cheap as one may think (if their looking for performance on top of convenience...

Then just look at the prices of spandex biking clothes.

[detaro]

> but they arent as cheap as one may think (if their looking for performance on top of convenience...

The same would be said by someone explaining why they spend so much on their Porsche ;)

admittedly e-bikes have higher initial costs, but even there $7,500 gets you something far up the fancy end.

[paulcole]

I’ve never owned a car or even driven one. So I don’t have a good sense of the costs there. I guess I don’t even see the bike as having costs, it’s an investment in moving myself around and feeling good.

[hollerith]

>I guess I don’t even see the bike as having costs, it’s an investment

Well, sure, if you want to ignore the standard an unambiguous meanings of "cost" and "investment" for poetical reason.

[paulcole]

Yes, that's what I was doing. Great job picking up on that!

[leemailll]

what kind of service cost you $500? that's pretty high unless you replace a lot stuff

[paulcole]

Shop near me is $275 for an overhaul:

> We’ll take apart your bike piece by piece, overhaul the bearing systems and put it together again. Then we’ll perform a full-tune up, install new brake and shifting cables if needed, and give it a thorough cleaning. It’ll ride like new.

http://gladysbikes.com/mechanical-service

I always tell them to just replace anything you’d replace if it was your bike. Generally after 3 years there’s something they replace like rebuilding a wheel or something. I’ve always been very happy with the service and value because other than light cleaning and oiling I don’t put any effort into maintaining my bike.

The mechanic (same guy I’ve seen for the past decade) told me (in a backhanded compliment sort of way), “This is really a testament to how well a bike can hold up with no maintenance other than an overhaul every few years.”

[samstave]

Mikes bikes does a full service which is $500 - and yes bike techs have a lot of mechanical knowledge, like for example using various spacers to change the geometry to suit the riders body/grip/posture etc.

And then for certain things you need multiple spacers, or you can only mate this handle-bar with this type of headset/stem etc...

Bikes are fn awesome machines.

[midoridensha]

What kind of weird brakes do you have on your bike? I can easily buy Shimano Ultegra (which is pretty high-end) brake calipers on Amazon for roughly USD$65, and a big bottle of brake oil is less than $15. Cheaper-brand or lower-end calipers are of course, cheaper, easily less than $50 each. And brake calipers aren't something you normally need to replace anyway. Pads are easily available too, both name-brand and Chinese knock-offs that probably last 1/3 as long for 1/10 the cost. What supply-chain problem are you referring to? I don't see any.

[ggm]

It may just be rumour, but the units Movida chose appear from what a number of people tell me, to be fragile: You should just be able to replace the brake fluid. You wind up losing things, because they don't come apart as well as they should and they don't go back together as well as they should.

OK, so "wear the risk" -great: I take my bike in to the shop, and either I get it back at 3:30pm or.. its 3 months for replacement parts to make it, assuming the supplier has parts. Or, I have to ditch them and go back to cables. Or, an alternate vendor which means new levers, and pipes, and disks, and pads and ....

[midoridensha]

Again, I have no idea what you're talking about. What brakes do you have exactly? There are only a handful of manufacturers (Shimano, SRAM, Tektro/TRP, Hope, maybe a couple others). And no, you shouldn't be losing anything. Bleeding is easy: you take connect a hose to the caliper, and a cup to the level/master cylinder, and pump some new fluid in there with a syringe. (In practice, it's somewhat fiddly and can be a little messy if you're not careful.) There's no parts to lose, except the screw that seals the master cylinder, and maybe the bleed port screw on the caliper if it doesn't use a nipple.

[ggm]

They're Tektro. That "in practice its somewhat fiddly" bit sounds like where I am.

I'll go canvas my options with some other stores. Who knows? Maybe I'm being sold a line of guff here?

(and its a Merida 200 not a Movida. I was having a bad hair day)

[midoridensha]

I have Tektro on one bike. They work fine, but maintenance on them is more of a pain than Shimano. I'm probably going to swap them out for Shimano later, because the Shimano brakes on my road bike are so much easier to work with.

[PascLeRasc]

Your brakes use mineral oil, and you can use any kind of mineral oil you want in there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63VIuPiX3CA

[schoen]

> What kind of weird brakes do you have on your bike?

Apparently hydraulics, instead of cables. Cf. https://www.bicyclehabitat.com/how-to/disc-brakes-101-pg362....

I have hydraulic brakes on one of my bikes too. They feel great (so accurate and responsive!), but I'm glad I haven't had to get them fixed yet...

[midoridensha]

I AM talking about hydraulics in my post, I even specifically mentioned brake oil, something hydraulic brakes require for a simple bleed operation.

Hydraulics are great, and I have fixed mine. The parts are NOT a problem to acquire at all. I will say, however, that bleeding them is a bit fiddly and a pain, compared to bleeding car brakes, in my experience. I've done bleeds on both Shimano and Tektro brakes; the Shimanos were definitely better, but still not as easy as car brakes. Which is why I happen to know Shimano caliper prices off the top of my head: I'm thinking seriously about swapping the Tektro calipers for Shimanos because they're easier to work with, both for bleeds and for pad changes (the Tektros require removing the caliper from the frame; Shimanos do not).

So again, I'm wondering what the OP is griping about. There is no supply-chain problem with hydraulic brakes that I can see.

[schoen]

Sorry, I didn't realize that you had understood that and were talking specifically about hydraulic maintenance. I have bikes with cable-actuated brakes and also one bike with a hydraulic system, and I've done maintenance myself on the former but not the latter. I personally think of the cable version as comprehensible and maintainable and the hydraulic version as black magic; hopefully that will change intentionally. I was imagining that other people would probably feel the same way about hydraulic brakes ("great, but hard to understand and totally infeasible to maintain at home"); my apologies for misunderstanding your point!

[midoridensha]

No worries! Have you worked on car brakes before? Bike brakes aren't any more "black magic" than those, though again I will say they're more fiddly in my experience, because getting all the air bubbles out can be a pain sometimes. I've bled countless car brakes and it was always fairly easy with a helper to pump the pedal, but my experience with my 2 bikes has been more troublesome. I'm not sure what the problem is, considering cars have rather complex systems with multiple master cylinder reservoirs (2, for redundancy), 180 or 360-degree bends in the brakes lines, and now ABS systems, but getting all the air bubbles out of my bike systems turned out to be a bit of a black art, and it differs by caliper position (front vs rear) and hardware mfgr. The $20 brake bleed kits on Amazon are pretty good though, including all the stuff you'll need.

The nice thing about hydraulics is that, once they're set up, they're good until you need to change the pads usually, and even then the fluid is probably fine unless it's old. Rim brakes, on the other hand, need constant adjustment and fiddling just to keep them from rubbing, as the pads wear. I don't miss them one bit.

[Karrot_Kream]

The fiddliness of bleeding a hydraulic brake line is exactly why I stick with cable actuated disk brakes on my bike hah. And even if the front wheel gets knocked out of the brake a bit it's trivial to go home, put it on the stand, and move the wheel around.

Hydraulic brakes are definitely fun but my bike is a compromise between low effort and utility. I'm running a 2x right now and running a barend shifter up front because my height and bike geometry means I often knock the front derailleur cable out of place. I should probably just switch to a 1x at this point.

[ggm]

You live in Australia? You have not had any problems securing bicycle parts here in Australia these last 2 years?

Cycle shops I ask in, say parts are a nightmare or were, the last time I asked. Maybe its about market size, maybe they just don't want the hassle.

Where you are, and your budget, affects availability of things. Are you in my market?

[midoridensha]

I'm in Japan. I've only checked Amazon, but I didn't see any problems getting parts there. I'd recommend looking at online sellers instead of local shops. Local shops aren't motivated to look for anything beyond what their preferred supplier has in stock.

Back in the US during Covid, I needed a new derailleur hangar because I bent mine, and wanted it quickly so I could go riding again. My local shops all said it was hard to find and expensive, and I'd have to wait a month just for them to install it (and they wouldn't sell it to me directly) for a small fortune because they said it needed to be specially bent (it didn't). So I found an online shop that had it and bought 2, got it in a few days, and installed it myself. Sorry, but after that experience, the people saying "support your LBS!" can shove it.

The other thing you should be aware of is that the exact part you're looking for may not be easily available. So if you want to replace a whole caliper, for instance, you'll probably have a much easier time finding a compatible caliper (probably a newer design) than finding another of the old one. Mfgrs are constantly updating their product lines, so it's frequently cheaper to just get something newer rather than an exact replacement, though of course there's limits here (you can't easily change from a 10-speed drivetrain to an 11-speed one, for instance, but you can easily mix-and-match different 11-speed cassettes). For hydraulic brakes, on road and hybrid bikes these days, they mostly all use the same flat-mount standard, with a few different rotor sizes.

[anotherboffin]

Maybe OP is “stuck” with shitty hydraulics from a lesser-known vendor for which it’s difficult to get the parts? I’d say they look into the cost of getting the whole system replaced, my Shimano low-ish end hydraulics have worked fine for years and as you’ve mentioned, parts are easy to get.

[ggm]

Tektro HD-M275 front and rear. When I go online, its ali, ebay and grey market suppliers mostly, not a heap of returns from recognisable Australian bike shops.

Maybe its my bad timing, buying a 2nd had bike when it was end-of-life for one model of brake, and now it needs work, people have moved onto the next 'best thing' and I am behind "can't get the parts"

(I know one respondent disagrees and says they are both easy to fix, and easy to get. I am just reporting both what I was told and what I find when I look. "easy" is very contextually defined in both cases. It would be very easy for me to confuse myself, order the wrong bits, or manage to dismantle but never re-mantle things.)

[midoridensha]

This is an addendum to my other reply to you. I only briefly googled for this model, but my guess is that it's an older model. It should be possible to find a newer product (either from Tektro or better yet Shimano, which uses the same kind of mineral oil as brake fluid so you can probably reuse your lever if you want, if it's the caliper that needs replacement) which is compatible with this system's mounts. You'd be better off doing that than trying to get an exact replacement: newer designs are usually better anyway, plus they're frequently cheaper since they're current production.

[anotherboffin]

You should be able to stay away from most repairs if you check your brake pads regularly and make sure you change them before they fully wear out.

In addition, do know that the discs and even brake fluid will need to be replaced at some point to keep things working well, hope this can avoid a bad surprise!

[mnky9800n]

Also I don't really understand what the difference between the tiagra and Ultegra brake levers are except in comparison to like bottom rung stuff. But to each other I can't seem to tell a difference.

[midoridensha]

Ultegra is better, of course :-)

But you're making an invalid comparison: the real comparison is between Ultegra and 105. The two are functionally the same, but Ultegras are a bit lighter and use better materials (probably carbon fiber handles, for instance). The year I got mine, the 105s were physically larger too, so the internals weren't as advanced; not sure about today.

Tiagra is a 10-speed shifter, while Ultegra is an 11-speed, so they're certainly not compatible at all. You can assume that Tiagra will be even more cheaply-made than the 105.

[samstave]

There is a bike shop in Marin that does some custom bike work, one of which is replacing these famous brakes which cost $1,500 PER brake, and one of the things he needs, which they dont manufacture any longer is a single washer that is specific to that brake - and since you cant get these parts any longer, the brakes are nuts expensive...

[gorjusborg]

The problem is the mindset behind the choices.

You don't need disc brakes. You don't need carbon frames, or even aluminum ones.

These things are marginally better performing than their predecessors, but we want things to get better and better forever. That is exactly what makes it unsustainable.

We'd be better off settling for good and sustainable than best and unsustainable. That's all.

[harha]

Well you don’t need disk brakes until you do when the car pops up in front of you.

There’s a bunch of people who would gain more from losing weight than whatever the marketing department of the bike company tells them, but it’s great to have this choice. I’m having just as much fun cycling as I do reading up on the tech and tinkering with my bikes, that’s time I’m not spending on being interested in cars.

[derbOac]

I'm not going to vilify disc brakes because it's good to have choices and disc brakes are a good option.

However, I've always had this hunch that if you were going to actually quantify the percent of times in which the stopping time difference between a rim brake and disc brake actually was the deciding factor in serious cycling accidents, my guess is it's very very very low. That is, my guess is the car appears so suddenly it doesn't matter what brake you have, or the accident would have overwhelmingly been best prevented by approaching the intersection differently to begin with, or it doesn't involve another vehicle at all, but instead involves loss of cyclist control.

I guess it's not so much the disc brakes I take issue with, it's how new bike markets seem to lurch from one new component type to another so completely without serious weighing of actual costs and benefits in use. So you end up in this situation where new bikes all have disc brakes without rim brakes even being much of an option anymore. Even when people are interested in them and have legitimate reason, the dynamics of the bike market is such it pushes them away from it.

I guess I feel like something is different about the current bike market compared to other markets I'm familiar with. It feels to me like there's this market pressure due to various factors (bike manufacturers, sellers, cycling community discussion dynamics) toward some form that's hyperoptimised for use cases that aren't realistic in general. Maybe this has always been the case -- the skinny tires of the 1980s were pushed using unrealistic theories and test conditions -- but my sense is it's getting worse overall.

[harha]

Oh yeah fully agree some things are just silly and not having the option for rim brakes isn’t good either, if you live somewhere dry and safe you’re probably better off with nice rim brakes than cheap mechanical disk brakes that aren’t properly adjusted.

Another annoying one is internally routed cables.

Some good things do happen though, e.g. thru axles, small and light TPU inner tubes.

[gorjusborg]

Yeah, I agree. I don't think we should stop improving things, and I don't think we should stop leveraging solutions we have come up with. I would say, be honest with yourself about what you need and understand that you are making trades.

Don't reward companies that want to push disc brakes (for instance) as a reason to ditch something that fits your purposes.

It's easy to cherry pick scenarios where a piece of tech would save you over the alternative, but life is holistic. We can adapt. The first step is to decide that it is worth trying to.

[hammyhavoc]

Oh no, not his tattoo costs.