Here at Dobbs Cycle Works it is my goal to bring you cycling videos that can actually help you make decisions on how and what to ride. As well as delivering content aimed at helping with at home repairs and maintenance of your bike. With a little fun from time to time.
Trek bought out a great store near me. The store used to have once or twice yearly bike swaps. You could bring your bike shop bike in (nothing from Walmart) over the preceding week, they'd recommend a selling price but you could pick your own. If the bike sold, you could either get 75% cash or 100% credit in the shop. It was great but now it's gone.
Great video. Thank you for the upload. I can't help but feel the major brands decided to ride the money train and particularly spent the last 3 years marketing to the fashion cyclists. Demand being high due to COVID, coupled with the numbskulls who believed that riding a bicycle consisted of getting dressed up like the opening prologue of a grand tour on a $15,000+USD bike for their 10km group rides to the coffee shop for caramel lattes and pesto, drove prices through the roof. Now that trend has fallen off a cliff, the major brands are crying to the regular cycling market to bail them out. I've not a shred of sympathy for them. Unfortunately for shops (and applicable to most industries one may say) the commoners (for a lack of a better term) are left with the repercussions.
I still find it funny that buying a bike is "getting into a sport". Like getting a bike in Europe is a cheap way to get around or do some leisure rides and only a small minority does it as a sport with those horrendously expensive bikes. Like I've probably never even seen a bike that costs more than 1000€.
The bicycle industry is going the same way as the car and motorbike industry. More tech,means more expense and more specialists to fix the tech. This pushes up overall costs. Bike corporations are always chasing profits at the customers expense.
great structural analysis about decay of bike industry in the modern people. thanks, im learning english and i can't understand all but im shocked because there are a lot of cycling content in another countrys
I'm almost afraid to walk into a bicycle shop anymore. By choice (because I love them) I still ride lugged steel frames (Columbus or Reynolds 531) with a horizontal top tube, downtube shifters (three of my bikes are indexed, the rest are friction), 5 or 6 speed rear ends, and sewup tires. Those fancy $8000.00 bikes? Probably get me on my 30-40 Sunday ride three minutes faster. Big deal. Oh, I have owned a few brifter equipped bikes. Sold them off, preferred the Seventies/Eighties stuff.
Listening to this presentation, I'm almost afraid to walk into a bicycle shop anymore. By choice (because I love them) I still ride lugged steel frames (Columbus or Reynolds 531) with a horizontal top tube, downtube shifters (three of my bikes are indexed, the rest are friction), 5 or 6 speed rear ends, and sewup tires. Those fancy $8000.00 bikes? Probably get me on my 30-40 mile Sunday ride three minutes faster. Big deal. Oh, I have owned a few brifter equipped bikes. Sold them off, preferred the Seventies/Eighties stuff.
I had some of the same on a ridley noah fast with dtswiss 240 hubs. That bike was a rocket. The rims were comfortable, fast and light. They were great while i was on rim brake.
Colonel’s was up for sale recently and I wished so badly I could have gotten some friends together to buy it. I would have loved to move it to the near southside and give people a really great place to come for bikes.
Many bicycles have become overly complicated. Does everyone need, internal routing, electric shifting, disc brakes, or carbon fiber frames? Many of these things don’t necessarily provide any value, make the bicycle more expensive, make the bicycle more difficult to work on, and reduce one’s bank account.
40 years in the bike industry and counting. GREAT video piece here. You nailed many things that are wrong with the bicycle industry. Part of the problem is these companies like Wiggle, Lordgun(sp?), etc., is they don’t give a shit about the LBS. In fact they would LOVE IT if we all disappeared. That attitude partnered with SRAM, SHIMANO, Campy,…the list could go on and on that, let’s face it, enable these “mailorder” empires to do their bidding. They’ll ALL deny it but they are full of 🤬. Now all that…combined with the bike industry which in the last 15-20 years has become corporate and as greedy as it comes. Do you know how much an SWORKS FRAME costs to make? Literally, pennies on the dollar and it’s… just flat out wrong. Let’s be clear…ALL companies are doing this. Herein lies the problem.
When I was a kid, my friend got a Raleigh BMX with the mag wheels for Christmas. I got a no name "big box" brand BMX. I hated him and never talked to him again. Bike envy is real.
I like long endurance rides. The rule is: the longer the ride the "cheaper" the bike. You don't meet those snobs on overland roads. Bikes technical value peaks out rather really quickly. Sometimes I meet some competitive riders doing their training. Boy do the bikes they ride on such occasions differ from what they sell during races! Carbon - maybe a frame from Ali. Disc brakes - no. Electronic or hydraulic gearing - never. Deep section wheels - never seen. Gravel - you just ride on your road bike over it.
They think their only customers are tech nerds in silicon valley, no normal person even with money is going to buy something like that unless they are a professional and even then a professional will probably be sponsored, they won’t buy it either. Very slim market for something like that, I can get a motorcycle for less.
30 years in. Raced everything, worked in shops and owned shops. Small biz bike shops won’t change with the times. They’re stubborn. They hate everything online. They hate everything electric. Roadie category got boring cause it’s all about themselves. Elite high end BS. Consumers are discount driven therefore bike shops need to adapt or move on. Service after the sale doesn’t mean crap to the majority. On and on and on…. If ya haven’t moved on and adapted yet you are done in the business. Pretty simple dude.
The Banksy painting that sensationally self-destructed three years ago after selling for $1.4 million at auction was resold by Sotheby's Thursday for 18.6 million pounds, or $25.4 million, a record for the artist. I'd rather have an overpriced bike.
In 2021, I bought a Ritchey Road Logic to by my forever road bike. I was 36, and wanted to buy a bike that I could ride well into my 60s. It has a full Shimano 105 5800 groupset, with rim brakes, that I brought over from my previous bike. While I have no doubt the frame will last, I genuinely worry the groupset and wheels needed to keep it running will no longer be made in twenty years. With electronic groupsets taking over, they can bake in planned obsolescence with software. Eventually, I'm sure there will be built in handlebar bike computers. Mark my words, when that happens, they'll implant a subscription pay to ride scheme in your electronic groupsets and ebikes. Greed in late stage capitalism knows no shame. I don't want to have to miss a ride because I forgot to charge my bike. It's getting harder and harder to find groupsets that come with rim brakes. Yeah disc is better in wet conditions, but I live in the desert. The latest rim brakes found in the Tiagra/105 levels are perfectly capable of throwing me over the bars. Hell, I threw myself over the bars on a 1989 Dave Scott Master Centurion with Shimano 600 brakes. So now I am looking at buying a Tiagra 4700 gruppo and stashing it away to replace my current 5800 groupset when that is worn out.
Also a huge problem is that there it basically no quality control in bikes.... When bottom brackets and similar places can vary with one or two mm on the samme bike its junk... And thats where the modern bicycle industry are just junk for waaay to much money and no one are keeping the brands in check nearly... Twisted frames or over spray or bad weld on aluminium frames or badly made carbon etc etc and then they want much money too...
I’m still trying to figure out how a simple road bike can cost as much as a brand new CRF250 dirt bike. Coming from the off-roading world, no part of me can make the price of bicycles make sense to me.
I was a Cat 2 racer in the early/mid 80's, and up until 10 years ago, I felt like I was slumming it if I didn't Dura Ace and XTR bikes. I now have 5 bikes and all of them are Craigslist purchases. As far as components, they are all mutts with mixtures of 105, SLX, XT, and Ultegra, and three of them are steel. Riding single track on my Ritchey P-650b makes me really happy. The big upgrade for me is having disc brakes on everything.
The thing that blows my mind recently is the 3d printed saddles from the big brand selling for $400 a piece. Like seriously, isn't 3d printing supposed to REDUCE production costs? lol.
The shop where I bought my bike kept breaking it every single time I brought it in. The worst part was he would always always blame me. Eventually took it to another shop and have not had a single problem in the past 2-3 years.
we won't need $10k bikes for 15-minute cities. But it's the same for every sport. Try outfitting your son for little league. When the hell did he need a $200 bat or $300 glove? With no guarantee he will even stick with baseball, before moving on to some other whim of the neighborhood kids.
Hey Dobbs, very useful vid! How much rear wheel frame clearance does your 2013 Tarmac have to accommodate these wheels and the 25s you mounted on them? Say, if you measured the distance between the chainstays at the point behind the BB where the wheel rolls through. I have a roughly similar era Spec road bike I’m considering these wheels for - wonder how translatable your experience might be to my frame.
600 to 1000 bucks is all you really need, get a good mechanic if you want your bike to feel good. these "online" direct to customer shops, DO NOT ship you a properly built up bike like you do at a LBS. Doesnt matter what bike you have IT NEEDS to be tunned up after the break in period or else it will feel like a 200$ bike.
fuck racing culture. you will get more performance from a bike that is solid. sure a ultra light bike might be faster when it is perfectly maintained and clean. but a bike build a bit more sturdy will ride better in all day training conditions. source: 15years as a full time bike messenger
bought a 2008 Kuota with Ultegra group set and rim breaks, total weight is 8,5kg - absolutely love this bike and will never sell it. Love that I can fix all of it myself.
The Death of affordable Groupsets like the 11 speed R7000 105 was the beginning of the end. Manufacturers are so focused on making high tech wireless shyte thats costing them so much money to R&D so they have to overprice sell to make some money just to keep employees. Now here we are everything is overpriced. You can't buy cheap low end mechanical equipped bikes anymore that still offers performance. In Japan they make cheap steel bikes equipped with mechanical gruppos, those won't win tour de france its focused on urban riding and its selling really well there. Americans and Europeans has been brainwashed by all these World Tour races they can't accept bike without electronic gruppos anymore. I recently threw away my Red AXS and Dura Ace Di2 bikes and settled on a Tarmac 105 R7000 mechanical and never looked back. Life has been good without the dramas of dead battery, rusted wires and battery fallouts. I got the last SL6 Sport from the factory and happy with it.
It's a pleasure to hear somebody put out a focused, in-depth, and well paced, non-rambling analysis / discussion ON ANYTHING. This is a mega-ego, elitist hobby / sport and it always will be.
Local shops are going under because of youtube lets be honest. Bike shops are a humiliation ritual. Expensive, slow, elitist. Thanks to youtube, I can just do it myself in less time than it takes to drive it to the bike shop.
I ride a bike everywhere. I never pay more than $100.00 for a bike, always a used one, and I do my own maintenance and repairs. Even a "low end" bike at $2500.00 seems like nothing but thief-bait to me.
Where do we start.... Trying to re-invent the wheel (literally) forcing consumers to buy new bikes because all of a sudden, 26" wheels and frames with 135mm dropouts and straight steerers are barely supported! There's no conspiracy, it was almost as if prices of bikes went through the roof overnight and the choice of parts to upgrade and keep the old bikes going disappeared. Need a new set of forks? Oh, you'll need a new frame! Buy a new frame, you'll need new wheels... Want to swap forks? Oooops, it's not boost and tapered.... Oh shucks, it's the wrong offset too! A group of aging industry w@nkers have destroyed it, in a little less than two decades.
All of this.... every minute of it..... extremely well said... Having been in the cycling world, in a very serious way, since the 1970's. I see this as being so true.
What a great video and you are sooo right!! I'm so glad you pointed out the snobbery of the cycling culture. I ride with a bunch of ragtag old school dudes that can hold their own and we just love giving the smack down to the snobby fashion riders. Furthermore, when I was a kid, my Flemish, electrician father would take me out on rides and it didn't matter if I had a banana seat it was all about pumpin those peddles. Again, thanks for the video, I'm a fan for life.
I had a sweet Everton tour de France racer from 1996, when it was all worn, I looked into new parts. But they were so expensive I ended up buying a "new" cheap off-brand bike.. Im still pissed it wasnt "worthwhile" to keep the old one on the road..
