Cracked frame - new commuter needed

graeme_s-2

I commute on a Planet X London Road with Rival 22. The drive train needed servicing, and I’ve been super impressed the SRAM Force 1x on my new On One Space Chicken, so decided to switch the London Road over to Rival 1x.



£250 of parts and tools later I’m ready to get going, so this evening I stripped the worn stuff off my London Road, and while giving the bike a clean, discovered this on the drive side chain stay 😢😢😢



Bike’s not quite done 10,000 miles so a bit gutted. The other thing is I probably wouldn’t have bought the space chicken for general larking about on if I’d known this was going to happen, and now I’ve got £250 of parts and no bike to put them on!

bondurant

On the positive side...new frame shopping time!

graeme_s-2

oxoman said:

Is it worth getting repaired from a cost prospective.

It’s a cheap aluminium frame, so I suspect not.

timothyw

Interestingly PX don't have the London Road frame listed for sale at the moment, although they still have lots of the bikes.

Have you contacted PX to see if they will give you a discounted replacement/warranty (guess it is too old?)

Other obvious one that springs to mind is Dolan RDX which has been on for £150 in the sales but is back up to £225 at the moment.

Do you have a budget in mind?

graeme_s-2

I'm in a bit of a quandary about what to do. The cheapest would be to get another PX London Road, and transfer my old parts and new kit across to it. It's completely out of warranty, but a couple of people have suggested to me I might be able to get some sort of discount anyway. However as timothyw points out the London Roads are out of stock at the moment.

I'd quite like to move to a bike with thru axles and to use a 650B tubeless wheelset on my commuter. This would allow me to swap wheels back and forth between my commuter and my On One Space Chicken. The wheels on my London Road are 700C quick release and not tubeless. The brake mounts on most of the frames that would meet my criteria look to be flat mount whereas the brakes on my London Road are post mount. I think it should be possible to mount these with adaptor brackets?

Then it's trying to work out whether it's going to be more cost effective to buy a frame and use what I have, or buy a cheap bike (maybe with Apex 1) and swap in/out my Rival stuff and sell off the Apex stuff. Although is that worth the hassle, and will it be cost effective? Also I'm installing 10,000 mile old parts (the brake callipers, shifters and possibly wheels) onto a new bike, will they last or I'm I fitting parts that are going to fail? Or just sell/return the stuff I've bought and buy a bike with the features I want.

Then I'm not sure whether to go for another aluminium bike, or to go for Carbon or Titanium this time. I bought this bike 4.5 years ago to replace an aluminium fixie that cracked around the bottom bracket shell.

I can see Evans have a 2019 Pinnacle X for £945 at the moment. Rival 1, hydro, 650B tubeless wheels. But it's apparently 10.18kg in the small frame size (I'd probably need a large) which sounds potentially even lardier than the London Road.

If I was moving the hydraulic brakes to a new frame I'd probably get a mechanic to do that as it's not something I've done before.

timothyw

It's quite easy to reuse existing post mount calipers on a flat mount bike frame (and cheap too) although the results are rather unsightly: https://www.bikehugger.com/posts/road-disc-brake-tech-flat-mount-vs-post-mount/

Certainly if you aren't confident doing the spannering then it might make sense to sell what you have and buy a new commuter, although the counter argument to that is that building up a new frameset will be a great way to improve your skills and confidence - might be worth hanging onto the parts and keeping an eye out for a frame in any case.