Comment by ErroneousBosh
9 hours ago
> Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
So basically just your average cheap crappy Halfords Bike-Shaped Object type "bike"?
No. I politely covered BSOs
"very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use"
You want cheap and reliable, not cheap with a load of doodads to make it seem expensive.
Well you strip all the crap off, don't you? Just run the barest frame possible.
You still have the problem that the bits that you cannot just knock up out of old Morris Minor steering columns or AK47 barrels are the bits that break.
I know one person who has legitimately worn out a bike frame, in 40-something years of cycling, and it wasn't me. It was a guy who rode his bike about 50 miles *every single day* and rode from Edinburgh to Glasgow and back a couple of times a week. Eventually it started cracking around the welds.
The problem is BSOs tend to have weird/non-standard parts which complicate repair/replacement and the tools necessary for working on them.