The argument for why you should buil your own mountain bike is fairly simple. Off the peg mountain bikes, like their road bike cousins, often include sub-par components to keep prices down.
Components from off the peg bikes often don’t last, and/or don’t satisfy the unique fit requirements or preferences every rider has. Quite often, the cheaper parts wear down or break, resulting in your spending more money to get the quality and fit you would have included if you had build the bike yourself.
Components from off the peg bikes often don’t last, and/or don’t satisfy the unique fit requirements or preferences every rider has.
And sometimes these cheaper bike components don’t break but just perform poorly. And you live with it.
So, with the price of off the peg mountain bikes often exceeding 5 figures, does it make sense to build your own.
Take a look at a preview of Rossiter’s post and determine for your self if it makes sense to build your own mountain bike. His arguments translate perfectly to the mountain clan cousins of his road bikes.
Want the Best Bike for Your Money? Build Your Own—You Could Cave Thousands
By Warren Rossiter, originally published Feb 16 by bikeradar
Over the years, I’ve tested thousands of off-the-peg bikes, and while some have come close to perfection (I’m talking about you, Giant Defy Advanced SL 0), there’s always something – even if it’s the smallest element – that’s not quite right.
By building your own bike, you’ll get exactly what you want, and every element of it will be right for you. Plus it can work out significantly cheaper if you go DIY rather than buying an off-the-peg bike.
That’s particularly tempting when you consider that top-end road bikes and gravel bikes from the major players now comfortably command five-figure price tags.
I could build (and have built) full-on superbikes for much less than that figure. Nothing is stopping you, either – whatever your budget, you can get exactly the bike you want and make savings too.
Looking around my admittedly overstocked garage, all of my favourite bikes – my Giant TCR, Cannondale Topstone, Mosaic RT 1TR and Parlee Z-Zero – have one thing in common.
All of those bikes started life as framesets and were built up with the parts I wanted. Yes, of course, any bike can be upgraded along the way to get it to where you want it. However, with the escalation in bike prices over the last decade, it’s now a better time than ever to shop around and build your own.
The simple economics of selling complete bikes means savvy product managers have to look for places where they can save a dollar or two to make them competitive. That means you’ll often see incomplete groupsets, usually stepping down a level on the cassette or chain.
Read the rest of the story at bikeradar.com.
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