Boardman or Ribble?

bonzo_banana

Svetty wrote:

Bonzo Banana wrote:

I'm pretty sure in the past some of the Boardman frames were open mould designs but perhaps that was the early ones and did see the report about them opening a research and testing centre.

Maybe they are going the Canyon route of designing futuristic looking bikes to add value but personally from what I've seen open mould designs are the most evolved safest designs and add to that a fantastic paint job I wouldn't see those as inferior. Open mould designs are far more exposed to failure as they are used by 100s possibly 1000s of brands around the world yet seem to be some of the least likely to fail.

Ribble do use open mould frames but I'm pretty certain Boardman have always designed their own. I have an open mould Ribble RT-80 which is a perfectly decent bike......

It's a sliding scale though with brands like Canyon fully designing their own frames and then handing those designs over to the real manufacturer who has make that design into a real product. A while back it was Canyon's aluminium frames were made by Giant and their carbon by quest composites but that could have changed. You get the other scale where a brand just buys in the factories own frame designs but you also get geometry tweaks, reinforcement plates, butted or non-butted tubing etc that could be applied to an existing factory frame design. I have a older Boardman's hardtail frame, it's a fairly high end model and it looks similar to a Giant model of the era and I believe at the time many Boardman aluminium frames were made by Giant. I must admit I struggle to see much difference with carbon frames as so many look so generic. Fuji-ta makes a huge number of carbon frames for many brands. A huge number of the Dorel brands carbon frames are made there as are the brands of Accell. Their portfolio of carbon frame designs are extensive, this is just a small amount. They manufacture about 20 million bikes per year and also are a huge oem frame provider to assemblers elsewhere in China and the far east plus Europe and the US. They are the world's largest manufacturer of quality aluminium frames or were a few years ago but now many aluminium frames are coming out of Cambodia and Bangladesh.

Personally I think the design input of many US and European brands is massively over-stated with most buying stock designs or minor variations of the frame designs of the manufacturer. It's very expensive to design new frames, not just all the testing of the new frames but the certification such companies doing this can make themselves far less competitive it's better to just tweak existing factory designs to save on re-testing and new certification. I've seen it stated that often its reserved for high end models to create flagship products for marketing purposes but lower frames in the range do not have such innovation they are bought in at far lower cost and make far higher margins which pays for the expense of flagship product development.

http://www.fuji-ta.com/portfolio-category/carbon-frame

http://www.fuji-ta.com/bicycle-display

Darius_Jedburgh

I've got the Ribble AL 105. Not a lot wrong with it. Had it 18 months and had trouble free riding. No reason not to recommend it, but don't know the Boardman.

leythervegas

I was looking at both those bikes last week but decided to go for the Cannondale Topstone. Spec is pretty good and the overall feel is of slightly better quality than the boardman (in my opinion) and I didn't want to wait 2 to 3 weeks for the Ribble - I also disliked their colours. The 10% off at Sunset cycles helped too.