Beat the LBS

mclarent

I was just looking at what it would cost to build a bike from scratch, using components sourced from the net / ebay etc. Adding it all up, seems hard to beat what you pay for a pre-assembled bike - can anyone tell me any different?

redddraggon

It depends what you want. Most of my builds end up cheaper than a shop equivalent.

E.g. my Ribble winter - £600 Centaur/Veloce/Ventos/decent finishing kit - If I'd bought it built up from Ribble like that it would have costing £800 maybe £900, with all the little upgrades - decent saddle, better wheels, better tyres etc

It definitely works out cheaper to build your own if you want Campag at least and find a good priced frame, Shimano maybe not as the Manufacturers can get OEM shimano really really cheap.

Vivid

There's no way you can source the frame and components for cheaper than a manufacturer whom has the buying power of thousands.

Fair point above, guess it depends obviously on what you want. 90% of the time i'm sure it will work out more expensive.

cougie

In the days when custom steel frames were the ultimate in bike technology - I would always build the bike myself and pick and choose the components. Nowadays its far simpler to have just one groupset and the frames are usually mass produced.

It will work out a lot cheaper to get an off the shelf bike - the shop usually lets you swap a few bits over though anyway.

Monty Dog

Margins on complete bikes are less than for components - it'll always work out cheaper to buy a complete bike unless you buy all the bits with a hefty discount by shopping around. It depends on whether you can buy the bike you want fully assembled without the need to swap components. I generally build my own through a process of rolling upgrades - I could never afford to drop £2-3k on a complete bike all at once, but can usually stretch to a frame, groupset or wheels every year.