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Interested to see what people think is a reasonable amount of time for manufacturers to keep spare parts available for?
Say frames/wheels/forks for example - do you still expect to be able to get a widget for a 2002 fork? 2007? 2011?
whats reaonable? five years after manufacture, ten years?
Maybe longer for frames, less for other parts?
I think it should bear some proprtion to the cost of the original part. If you spent £1000 on a washing machine you'd sure as hell hope to have spare parts for it for many years. Obviously washing machines are far more common than fox forks, but if i dropped a grand on a fox fork, I would hope that as long as the company was still trading I would be able to get smaller spare parts for it for a good ten years after. I suppose cast parts are different but if a manufacturer machines all their own smaller parts i don't see why they shouldn't be able to keep them available/orderable indefinitely, like Hope do.
Hope discontinued c2 stuff about 2 years ago.
Admittedly it's something of a sweeping generalisation, but there seems to be an inverse ratio of company size and spares availability. [comparatively] Small outfits such as Hope and Pace seem to continue offering spares for previous products a lot longer than the larger ones such as Shimano or SRAM (for example).
....when it comes to brakes, shimano have trouble offering spare parts for current stuff never mind old products! 😆 Unless you consider a whole lever/reservoir and entire caliper assembly to be spare 'parts'.
As an aside, I wonder how many pedals, wheels and hubs are lying abandoned beacause spares are not available via that brand, but would be available if you knew which other brands the same taiwanese manufacturer made the hub/pedal in question for. It would be nice to have a bit of transparency so if you couldn't find spares for hub X, you could look for spares for hub Y instead.