 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
I've been looking around for a bike, and in recent days I've come across a couple of wildly different used frames which piqued my interest. However, when I then searched online for suitable components, it seems that some of them are effectively 'obsolete'. An example is a carbon, non-tapered, QR 29er rigid fork - there isn't much choice. Perhaps there never was, but I'm beginning to see that building up an older frame with new components might take a bit of work.
On a similar note, are online retailers such as Wiggle struggling at the minute? They just don't seem to have much stock, and some places seem to be selling a lot of dross. I haven't bought much bike gear recently, and although the specialist stuff always took a bit of hunting down, I seemed to remember there being much more availability of mainstream and semi-mainstream stuff.
Maybe you need to go older? Plenty of straight steerer rigid carbon 26er forks around.
I bought a "Toseek" rigid carbon 29er fork from ebay last year, straight steerer and for QR axle, it spent the winter fitted to my On One Inbred 29er.
Worth looking for an On One rigid carbon fork too...
All that stuff exists still. I bought an exotic fork from carbon cycles last year that met the brief. I would have thought (not checked) that they still do it.
Erm, buy parts sh too?
Got a exotic one in my shed , never used bought for a project that never happened . Mail us if you fancy it and we can talk turkey.
it's not difficult at all to find parts if you're patient nearly everything turns up used sooner or later. i just rebuilt an early 90's cannondale with loads of hard to find bits needed. if you have a bike you like and want to keep just leave a search on ebay and collect stuff when cheap for future needs