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Moving this to its own thread as not to derail where it started.
*trigger warning. If you get upset by how much bike stuff costs, that’s fine, this is not the thread for you. We/I don’t care what you could buy with the money instead.*
Someone mentioned it wasn’t possible to spend £30K on a bike and whilst I probably agreed, I thought it would be (loosely defined) fun to see how much one could spend on a bike. Here’s what I got.
RRPs used, and assumes all labour for assembly is free)
Specialized Kenevo SL Frame, Motor & Battery plus extender – £7,200
Custom paint job £1,500-£2,000 but really could go to the moon…
Rulezman Dorado – £3,500ish
EXT EStoria – £1,150 – OEM shock, say £500 so £650 total, plenty of scope for tuning £££
SRAM XX Cassette, Mech, Chain & Shifter Pod – £1,400
Cane Creek EEWings Ti eBike Cranks – £1,500
CK ceramic Hubs – £1,350 (thanks @rickdraper
Enve M70 Rims – £2,400
Berd Spokes – ~£500
Trickstuff Maxima Brakes £1,100
Intend Aero Rotors – £200
AXS Reverb – £800
Tyres, those Tacky Chans were £75 each RRP, they’re as good as any for the purpose of this £150
Crank Brothers eggbeater 11 Pedals – £400 (or £300 ish for a set of bling flats)
Chris King Headset – £200
Reserve Valves – £50
5DEV Ti Stem – £350
Dward Designs Ti Spider, Chainring, Seatclamp, Jockey Wheels, Topcap – £600ish
Rev Grips – £100
Specialized Power Saddle £350
Thomson Ti Bars £400
There’s a few other trinkets (ti bolts for example, but i CBA pricing all that up) but that’ll get you a working machine
All this is off the shelf too, custom stuff from a legendary builder may tip you over the 30k mark but the above comes to around £24.5K
For clarity, this is just for fun, NOT my next project!
Any advance on 25 grand?
I look forward to seeing your full build as a magazine feature in a few weeks.
It'll still need warranty after 12 miles
Just ask Dangerholm how much some of his stuff cost to make.
Only person i know who'd spend 10+k on flat bar gravel bike.
Road CC did a £30k road bike
https://road.cc/content/feature/most-expensive-bike-you-can-build-2023-290809
Add another grand to that road bike, now super record EPS is out…
surely e-bikes are cheating on this exercise?
A Silca pump and some Silca cleats will add another £500 to that.
look forward to seeing your full build as a magazine feature in a few weeks
As part of a £25k bike group test where it's pitched against an "analogue" carbon fibre road bike in your favourite team colours and a hand built custom rigid steel hardtail. 😜
weeksyFull Member<br />It’ll still need exchanging after 12 miles
FTFY 😉
I’d start with a Lotus/Hope track frame. You can easily add £5k plus for wheels. I’d say £25k is not hard given you need a custom titanium printed front end too.
Just ask Dangerholm how much some of his stuff cost to make.
Only person i know who’d spend 10+k on flat bar gravel bike.
A lot of that expense comes from his elbow grease, so not considered here, and as for how much he spends (rather than a brands marketing budget these days) I don’t reckon it’s much at all.
surely e-bikes are cheating on this exercise?
Aren’t they always 😀
I’d go for a beryllium hardtail, those frames were $25k back in the nineties
I’d start with a Lotus/Hope track frame. You can easily add £5k plus for wheels. I’d say £25k is not hard given you need a custom titanium printed front end too.
IIRC that’s roughly what they will sell you one for, but no one had bought one when I spoke to Hope about it @ Bespoked a couple of years ago, though they had 2 buyers in the far east making enquiries)
Pff, you could easily beat that with a load of stuff from R2.
Pff, you could easily beat that with a load of stuff from R2.
Go on then, put some imaginary money where your mouth is!
Not really, there was that gold fat bike for a million a few years ago, but they aren’t off the shelf bikes, so don’t really count.
£750 jockey wheels for your build
£1000 pedals (rrp)
https://www.garmin.com/en-GB/p/731136/pn/010-02503-21
£600 computer
Needs some telemetry - ShockWiz equivalent for coil fork and shock, TyreWiz, BrakeAce.
Tyre inserts.
Bentley Components top cap.
Fasst Flexx handlebars.
Hand guards.
Mudguards front and rear.
Replace all frame bearings with SKF solid oil.
Invisiframe, RockStop downtube protector.
I’d rather spend £30k on banishing hand guards from the MTB world.
Bentley and Dward topcaps are about the same money
Fasst bars are about the same price as Ti thomsons
Mudguards front and rear.
You can't put mudguards on a £25K bike.
Must say I'm disappointed by the tyres, only £75 seems quite low-budget by comparison!
or spend 10x less and get a functionality similar bike
slash 9.7 , carbon fir 2.6k
(id actually wager the slash would get you down an proper enduro stage faster)
or spend 10x less and get a functionality similar bike
Bet you’re fun at parties.
Must say I’m disappointed by the tyres, only £75 seems quite low-budget by comparison!
doesn’t seem to be a daft expensive option here, think £85-90 is the upper limit for RRP, those I mentioned were just ones that came to mind. Even the expensive ones get discounted too.
bet you’re fun at parties
I bring a bottle of Aldis specially selected Prosecco & put it against any of your fancy champers
ive got tech4s on one bike & deore 4pots on the other, the tech4s are soo nice to use and i get a bit less hand fatigue, but if im being honest at ~4x less the deores do me just as well
its great that we can spend a fortune on top end kit, but its more great that you can get such great stuff on the cheap!
Bold of you to assume you’d be let in.
Is it bad the only bit of that list that actually bothers me is this:
or £300 ish for a set of bling flats)
Chris King Headset – £200
Reserve Valves – £50
I mean wtf, none of those things offers anything at all over a component at half the price!
Dynaplug Covert bar plugs, think they’re about £125.
Wolftooth things must be twice the price at least because they're Wolftooth?
(I had to Google the forks then promptly said "yeah that's fine")
I’d start with a Lotus/Hope track frame.
Yes, can easily beat 30K on a track bike but is that in the 'rules'?
The WX-R is also around £25K just for the frameset and although the Factor is more of a complete that was rumoured to be around £60K. Add wheels such as Mavic IO, custom bars/stem as you suggest and hitting £40K all without even having to spend money on gears and brakes!
I mean wtf, none of those things offers anything at all over a component at half the price!
Even if everything was half the price, you’d still be looking at a 12-13 grand bike 😉
Literally nothing on that list doesn’t have a much, much cheaper, similarly functioning, alternative.
I suppose what surprises me is these are mostly relatively available, ‘click for next day delivery’, off the shelf parts (fork and paint job accepted), and that you don’t need to spend long on Vitals bike of the day page (search ‘Blesius Bikes’, a shop in California that seems to knock them out pretty much weekly), or on some of the above brands insta pages to see that these sorts of builds are far from uncommon.
EXT EStoria – £1,150 – OEM shock, say £500 so £650 total, plenty of scope for tuning £££
If you buy from Mojo they will revalve/retune your shock as part of selling it to you all at no extra cost.
They'll even do it multiple times if you're really not happy with it.
They'll also swap either or both of the two springs that it comes with.
😉
Some people have way too much time on their hands 🙄
Meh, I’m ‘wasting’ my own time, rather than anyone else’s.
You forgot quarq tyrewiz electronic valves.
I sort of consciously left out any sort of telemetry/recording devices, as all the consumer stuff is kind of playing at it, if you really wanted to go full data acquisition, you’d be looking at 6 figures, plus the salary of the person doing the recording.
That and they aren’t integral to the bikes function. As pointless as a £350 stem is, you do still need a stem.
Literally nothing on that list doesn’t have a much, much cheaper, similarly functioning, alternative.
Absolutely and I'm somehow fine with that £350 stem yet I find that £50 Valves exist or that flat pedals cost l significantly more than clippy ones a little offensive.
£500 spokes? Yeah I'm OK with that.
I get that it's just me being weird!
Thing is, it's easy to make an attention-grabbing product by taking a no limits attitude to cost. Diminished returns aside it should be a good result. But what interests me far more is the point where you're at the vast majority of the performance and durability but a fraction of the cost. Very hard to pinpoint that point and it's subjective, maybe that's why the interest. Andrew on NSMTB writes some good stuff about the high-low approach to building bikes.
Anyway, £25k bikes, crack on if you can I say... Would be an amazing bike, and interesting to know what a relatively 'blind' test would say about it.
Must say I’m disappointed by the tyres, only £75 seems quite low-budget by comparison!
doesn’t seem to be a daft expensive option here, think £85-90 is the upper limit for RRP, those I mentioned were just ones that came to mind. Even the expensive ones get discounted too.
Get yourself some NOS white Onza porcs on that bad boy
Ah wait, then you'd need 26" wheels so swap the rear for a NOS Tioga Disc drive pro on a Mavic 117 ceramic, the front a NOS 3dv Ringlé bubba hub on same rim with titanium spokes. Whilst your at it swap the frame for one of the 6 original Yeti C-26's, the forks for some titanium IRD's anodised by Leni Fried, the brakes for 3dv Grafton Mag-Lites and the levers for 3DV Grafton Re-entry levers.
Weirdly it seems to show how affordable bikes are. We are in F1 steering wheel territory or less than you’ll spend on extras buying a Ferrari. <br /><br />
My mtb cost less than a tenth of that. But it’s all there on my bike.
Kapz headset top cap...I got one made specially for my 50th ...£85...some are a bit more...so add that to the list
Would be an amazing bike, and interesting to know what a relatively ‘blind’ test would say about it.<br /><br />
I wonder this about all of the mega priced bikes and components along with plenty of sensibly priced stuff. <br />I’d imagine that the huge majority of us couldn’t tell the difference between one tyre/fork/shock/groupset and another in blind testing despite what we tell ourselves and others.
and as for how much he spends (rather than a brands marketing budget these days) I don’t reckon it’s much at all.
Ah, ok. Because he isn't spending this fictional budget, it doesn't count 😀
I want to see @Stevet1 do a money no object retro bike project... move over Dangerholm
We can get up a bit on tyres: Rene Herse Fleecer Ridge in 29x2.2, Endurance Plus casing are £101 per tyre. Won't be as good in practice unless you're eBikepacking the Tour Divide, but who said this was a logical exercise anyway...<br /><br />
or spend 10x less and get a functionality similar bike
That looks a cracking bike. Why the large price reduction (£4.4k to £2.6k)? I’ve not been looking for a new bike, but, seeing that makes me lust after one, it actually loks like the type of bike I like. My current FS bike is a 2006 Santa Cruz Superlight, 26”, 18 speed etc. I’m debating whether to get rid (its worth £250 tops), and get a loan to buy that Trek. Any thoughts on it?
OK I'll admit, I'm surprised that came out so "cheap".
Maybe add a fancy power meter? Doesn't matter whether they actually work on eebs or not.
Thought I'd stumbled across a Fresh Goods Friday thread for a minute there 😛
Anyone come up with a non-Eeb version yet. Be interested to know what the priciest frame would be.
I could only find Unno frames.. blimmin hideous - https://www.unno.com/dash/ about 4K
They do have one called the Horn, which is admirable 😀
https://www.btr-fabrications.com/products/pinner-frame/#frame-options - £4.2K .. getting there
Be interested to know what the priciest frame would be.
I'm sure Tom will report back with a conclusive verdict soon, but you can pay £5,150 for an Atherton frame with some custom geometry tweaks.
https://www.athertonbikes.com/am-170-frame.html
And it's a bike I'd actually want to own, unlike the Unno.
But what interests me far more is the point where you’re at the vast majority of the performance and durability but a fraction of the cost. Very hard to pinpoint that point and it’s subjective, maybe that’s why the interest. Andrew on NSMTB writes some good stuff about the high-low approach to building bikes.
I've been wondering about about the 80/20 rule and if it can be applied to buying bikes and bike parts.
By that I mean the idea that you should be able to get 80% of the performance if you spend 20% of the price. So does that mean that a £2000 bike is 80% as good as a £10,000 bike? Is a £400 bike 80% as good as a £2000 bike (and 64% as good as a £10,000 bike)?
I guess the difficulty in answering that question is what is it 80% of? Like, how exactly do you measure performance?
I’m sure Tom will report back
Actofive Ptrain CNC I think, custom builders notwithstanding.
€6,750. Plus Shock.
https://www.actofive.com/parts/p-train-cnc-hpp-frame-kit-size-s1
Ooh yeah, that's nice and not far short of the eeb.
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well, my go to standard off the peg Ti jones frame with nice build bits (king, Boone ti, Hed carbon rims etc..) would come it 12.5K for a singlespeed and that's without going mental on custom Ti frames or forks.
Stick a battery and geary noncesense on a bike and yeah I could easily see bikes well into 20K + region.
I had to price up my current collection of niche tat for new insurance and surprised the hell out myself. Its amazing how costs add up with multiple interesting things over time. (not including the costs my custom built fort knox bike store and workshop, that pretty much invincible unless you bulldoze it)
It's almost like GMBN read the forum..........
22.7k. Amateurs.
And Maximas don’t work with Hope Vented rotors.
They beat you on a few items though and without a custom paint job.
By that I mean the idea that you should be able to get 80% of the performance if you spend 20% of the price. So does that mean that a £2000 bike is 80% as good as a £10,000 bike? Is a £400 bike 80% as good as a £2000 bike (and 64% as good as a £10,000 bike)?
Pretty much but it doesn't work at the extremes and there is a tipping point, i.e. a £200 bike will not be 80% as good as a £1000 bike because a £1000 bike is really good enough for most people whereas a £200 bike is a complete piece of crap
22.7k. Amateurs.
And Maximas don’t work with Hope Vented rotors.
And they missed out the chain ring, and as far as I know, there’s no compatible chain ring that works on O-chain with SRAM transmission.
Also the Synchros wheels are XC not enduro.
as far as I know, there’s no compatible chain ring that works on O-chain with SRAM transmission.
https://ride5dev.com/collections/chainrings/products/104bcd-titanium-chainring-5dev
Pretty much but it doesn’t work at the extremes and there is a tipping point, i.e. a £200 bike will not be 80% as good as a £1000 bike because a £1000 bike is really good enough for most people whereas a £200 bike is a complete piece of crap
Absolutely. At the very bottom end, parts are made to have features that look good in the shop and last a reasonable amount of time with gentle usage. Pay a bit more and you get substantial increases in durability due to better quality materials. More still and you get better serviceability, then more features, and finally exotic materials for weight savings.
There’s definitely a sweet spot, although it may vary from person to person. I still wonder whether I overpaid for my full sus because I don’t use half of the adjustability on the fork.
Pretty much but it doesn’t work at the extremes and there is a tipping point, i.e. a £200 bike will not be 80% as good as a £1000 bike because a £1000 bike is really good enough for most people whereas a £200 bike is a complete piece of crap
I guess it also depends on what your criteria for what a £200 bike actually is. For example, I assume we're not counting second hand. Too many variables, like knowing the right person or being in the right place at the right time.
However, does a £500 bike that's been on the shelf for a year and a half and is now on sale for 60% off count (used to be pretty common pre-pandemic)? If you base it purely on RRP then I guess there's a price point for a Minimum Viable Mountain Bike but what exactly would that be?
If I had to take a guess I'd say around £6-700 is the minimum you could RRP a bike that was actually up to handling trail centre type riding. Something like this:
https://www.chainreactioncycles.com/p/vitus-nucleus-27-vr-mountain-bike-black
So, assuming you wanted an extra 20% performance the you'd be looking at spending £3,000-3,500 which would get you something like this:
https://www.chainreactioncycles.com/p/vitus-escarpe-27-crs-mountain-bike
It would be interesting to see a magazine do some tests to see how well this 80/20 rule stands up. I'm not sure but the Escarpe feels like it would give more than a 20% improvement but then I'm not sure if it would actually make me 20% faster. But it comes back to the question of what you're measuring when you say 20% 'better'
If I had to take a guess I’d say around £6-700 is the minimum you could RRP a bike that was actually up to handling trail centre type riding.
There have been loads of "cheap bike subjected to...[wholly inappropriate riding]" articles over the years. Might have been the late Steve Worland took a £200 "MTB" down Cap d'Ail downhill course and it and the rider broadly survived.
GCN have put one of those horrific Amazon Eurobike road bikes through all sorts including the Arenberg Trench section from Paris-Roubaix and they regularly do "cheap bike vs superbike" videos.
I think the cut-off used to be about £400 for a "decent" MTB, maybe with inflation etc it's closer to £600 or so now. The problem with really cheap bikes is that they become uneconomical to fix almost immediately. You can buy any number of <£200 bikes from Halfords / catalogues etc but as soon as it needs any replacement parts, it's £30 for tyres, £30 for the cassette, £10 for the chain, £10 for the brake blocks.... Plus labour because the people buying those things don't have the first clue about them. My LBS has one of those in most days - "can you just...?"
Yes, but it'll cost you £60.
But I only paid £100 for the whole bike!
But it comes back to the question of what you’re measuring when you say 20% ‘better’
Better as in actually stops and goes reliably, doesn't fall apart at the first bit of off-road, is comfortable and fun to ride...
alanl
I’m debating whether to get rid (its worth £250 tops), and get a loan to buy that Trek. Any thoughts on it?
Do it. That's a fantastic buy!
If I was in the market for a new full sus (without an engine), I'd be all over that.
In a useable xc hard tail theme.. pricing Inc vat but not duty
Frame: Sturdy cycles Tara frame (no custom paint) £7200
Fork: Bright racing xco £1836
Headset: ceramic speed bearings x2 (£112 each) + covers and crown race £236
Stem: Schmolke TLo stem 100mm £540
Bar: Schmolke TLo £326
Grips: rev grips £100
Seat post: reverb axs £760
Rear mech & shifter: Hopp carbon SRAM XX SL Eagle Transmission derailleuer with full carbon upgrade £1350
Cassette: SRAM xx £500
Chain: SRAM xx £90
Cranks & chain ring: Sturdy cycles £1752
BB: ceramic speed £365
Saddle: selle Italia SLR carbon £450
Brakes: trickstuff piccola hd £1000
Wheels: syncros carbon £4500
Pedals: Garmin MTB £600
Tyres: Pirelli scorpion £140
Tubeless valves / sealant etc: £100
That's £21,845 , for a hardtail!
could probably add to that as well with various misc parts. Topcap, carbon through axles etc.
I remember doing this as a teenager in very late 80s/early 90s with catalogues and bike mags!
Obvs no ebikes but the most I could really get to was around £2k based on a Pace RC100,RC30s, Bullseye cranks, magura hydro's, syncros hardware etc. I'm sure there was exotica in the states I'd never heard about as it hadn't made its way to rural cambridgeshire but I could have ordered and bought this set up from my LBS,Ben Haywards in Cambridge
Apparently this equates to almost 6k now. Considering this was just a fully rigid hardtail I guess the dial hasn't moved as far as we think.
Edit....ahhhh and then we have monkeyboyj posting!
That’s £21,845 , for a hardtail!
Imagine taking that out for its first ever ride and wrapping it around a tree. 😳
Or being overtaken by kids on Carreras, wheelie-ing up the hill.
I could prob add another 2k.to my build with a bit more than a quick Google - dward design chain ring would add £150 for example & I'm sure that there are more expensive xc tyres out there. Bottle cages can cost £100 each...
@tomhoward you'll need to knock off a couple grand from your virtual kenevo as eEwing's, BB & ring etc won't be needed as it already comes with carbon cranks for the motor.
The kenevo also has a £700? X2 Shock on it already and comes with a headset and bunch of other bits. If the task is purely expense on a usable compatible bike, your prob better starting with non ebike frame that comes with a no shock option - Atherton / actofive / Nicolai or similar? I know that they aren't off the shelf & in stock etc.
With the cranks etc, I assume no one would want them SH, so no value to them, that’s why I took £500 off the shock price, as I assume you could get something back offloading the povo spec *checks* Fox Factory Shock once replaced.