The Bondi Buddha and the art of bicycle fabrication
My mate Rod gets a fair fraction of his income from picking up stuff in the chuck-outs and then putting the so-filtered goods into second hand auctions.
On matters decorative, stuff that goes into houses, he is a whizz at selecting the junk that will sell and rejecting the rubbish that won’t.
More recently I have partially convinced him that there is money to be had from all those bicycles that get chucked out.
So he has picked up a couple of bikes and it’s pretty clear that he can’t tell a good bike from a bad bike. Hence this blog entry.
Firstly, why do people throw out bicycles? Well there are a number of reasons.
The primary one is that there are roughly one million bikes sold in Australia every year but less than 20% or so get ridden more than half a dozen times.
For most people a bike purchase is a new year’s resolution ‘fail’. People think that buying a bike will force or encourage them to do exercise. Not so it seems.
After a set period, say one to two years depending on the person, the unused bike is deemed ‘fully depreciated’ and deposited on the street during a council chuck out, or at any time of the year in Bondi.
The decision to chuck out an unused bike is made easier if the bike is rusting (which is invariably the case if it was bought at Kmart or Target or similar).
Typically bikes with gears will go out of ‘tune’ due to cable stretch and your local bike shop will charge people enormous amounts to do a 1 minute fix-up job. The high servicing cost also encourages people to chuck out bikes that they aren’t using.
Kids bikes also get chucked out as the kids outgrow them. Being made to the lowest feasible specification these kids bikes invariably have no possible resale value.
On the odd occasion that someone regularly rides their bike, a short time into their cycling career (usually as a Lycra clad weekend warrior) they will realise that their first purchase was a piece of shit. They will then start on the merry-go-round of continual bike upgrades and this can entail chucking out older bikes if they are at the cheaper end of the scale.
Now, Rod, I am going to explain specifically why some bikes are worth money and some are not. And the important point here is that you need to stop considering a bike as a ‘bike’; you need to start looking at a bike as a co-located selection of bike components.
Firstly, let’s consider bike frames.
The most expensive frames are carbon fiber and these don’t get chucked out unless they are cracked and therefore worthless.
Aluminium is an abomination used at the lower end of the market. Slightly lighter than steel in principle (but never in practice) it is favoured by the cheap Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers of frames. Leave it where you found it unless it happens to have some nice components attached to it.
Steel frames are the only ones ever worth picking up. These can be rusty but you need to look past that – it’s nothing that a bit of sanding and painting can’t fix. The older frames can be very valuable in fact.
Oh, there is titanium too. Unicorns – you will never see one.
When a lay-person looks at a bike all they see is the frame. Oddly, if you ever build a bike using parts purchased on Ebay you will find that the most of your money will go on all the other bits, the wheels, the tyres, the gears, the shifters, the cranks, the headset etc.
That is, the true value of a bike is the bits that are attached to the frame and not the frame itself.
This is where you need to know the good shit from the crap. It’s a matter of brand and model recognition. Even the top brands like Shimano make a lot of low end rubbish components.
Even without this insider knowledge of which components are worth money, take a look at the grips on the handlebars, or the gear shifters, or the pedals, or the wheels. Do they look like high quality or some piece of shit knocked up in Shenzhen?
And here’s another odd thing. You can buy a fixie from Reid Cycles for just $200. But if you wanted to build the same bike from parts bought online it would cost you at least $500. Just the wheels without tyres would cost you $200. Now supposedly the internet (Ebay and Alibaba) has cut out all the margins in manufactured goods. So what this tells me is that the supplier to Reid Cycles is either getting massive volume discounts or that these bikes are made from shit components that are very cheap and that aren’t even offered for sale online. Probably the latter.
When a corporate weekend warrior buys a $10,000 road bike they are buying a bike that costs maybe $1,000 to put together by the assembler or $2,000 if you or I wanted to buy the parts and assemble it. That’s right, ‘assemble’. What happens is that someone buys the frame from one place, the wheels from another, and all the other bits, and assembles it. A branded bike is just a paint job that costs $9,000 to the fools that buy it. There is hardly a branded bike company in the world that designs or makes a single component on any of the bikes they sell.
So with all this mind here are the golden rules of picking up bikes from chuck outs:
1. The only frames that have any value are steel frames. The older the better unless they are in really crappy conditions.
2. When you look at a bike that doesn’t have a steel frame then look at the components and not the frame. Either learn to recognise brands and models of components that have high value or use your common sense and filter out the cheap components that are unsellable.
3. Remember just about nothing good happens in and around aluminium bike frames. So if a bike is aluminium (you can tell by the welds and the large tubing sizes) it’s a fair chance the components are rubbish.
4. Ignore ‘mountain bikes’ – these are mostly what is sold at Kmart and Target and they are highly represented in the Bondi ‘lost bike’ exhibitions. These are the bikes that visiting backpackers have left chained to posts to rot for eternity. Backpackers are canny enough to realise that these barely functional velocipedes have no market value; so should you.
5. You’ll make more money by putting the components on eBay than you will by putting a chuck-out bike into a second hand auction.
I really wish that the Chinese wouldn’t waste all those raw materials when they make crap bike components. With the same amount of effort they could make high quality components – the only difference would be the use of higher specced materials and better quality component designs.
The differential cost of building say a gear lever that is designed to last forever, look good and function brilliantly, compared to something that you might find on a Kmart special, is in fact only a small percentage of the cost.
But we can’t blame the Chinese because they will keep building these bikes if we keep buying them and chucking them out.
PS I am just building my first bike completely out of parts scabbed from chuck-out bikes and abandoned bikes. So far I have got parts from five bikes for this ‘new’ fixie and I lack only for a rear wheel and a brake caliper of merit.
offshore westerly 