You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
As winter will soon be upon us, and my need for a new bike, the time has finally come around to upgrade a fair bit. Unless i'm missing something there's no bikes out there other than perhaps the Merida Big Trail or Orbea Laufey h30 that really speak to me.
The plan now might be building something over the winter. My current bike will do fine and it's old enough that I'm not bothered getting it all muddy but I fancy something new to roll out next summer. I don't want to go mental on price, frame wise i'm hovering in the region of £300 quid, so Cotics/Stantons etc might be out the window. It's my first new bike since 2004 so I don't really want to go second hand. Preference would be steel (that's the moon on a stick bit), slack, longish fork and probably 29er. So far i've found:
On One Big Dog (if the price comes back down from £700......not sure what that's about)
Marino something or other from their UK store. Not confident to go custom just yet, but it's based on what comes into stock again (hence the lack of hurry here)
Is there anything i'm clearly missing?
Thanks
Edit: Other option is I just go for the Sonder steel bike when that comes back into stock, but I kinda had my heart set on a build
Don’t rule out Alu. Sonder do some good frames. Transmitter maybe? £300 I think.
Not really a stealth ad as such as I’m not selling yet but I’ve got a carbon transmitter and really rate it. Maybe selling later in year.
This caught my eye as a nice alu option
https://www.bike-components.de/en/bc-original/Podsol-29-Hardtail-Frame-p76824/
And this looks ace value in steel
https://nordestcycles.com/en/product/britango-2-frame
‘Kin’ell!
That Nordy - phoaaaar!
I’m going down the custom Marino route - I’m told it’s shipping at some point next week. £399 delivered with headset and seat clamp included (no paint as I wanted to get something done custom locally here in the U.K.). That’s butted 725 tubing - 4130 is cheaper - and I went for internal routing / tapered headtube etc etc.
If you’re not sure about designing custom geo you could just find a frame you like that’s more expensive / not in stock and copy that geometry over to a Marino. Lots of the ‘standard’ ones in stock have almost ludicrously long reach and 62 degree headangles etc from what I remember when looking.
I’d allow 3 months at least from order to delivery though - I think they’ve been overwhelmed with orders, had lockdowns and they had a ‘factory’ move mid Covid as it was originally based at Marino’s home but his wife is high risk so he moved it all to rented premises which delayed a lot of stuff (fair reason for moving though).
Dialled bikes price Albert is about £300 not sure if they do 29er though have not looked in a while. Really liked my PA