A new bike has been recently introduced which is designed with the goals of products in the 1960s-- rugged, simple, built to last. Nothing is flimsy on this bike. Even the fenders and sprockets are thick. The design focus was two main goals: robustness and simplicity so owners can fix it themselves. The gears are internal, which seems to reflect ruggedness being prioritized over self-repairability. Derailers are inherently fragile and cassettes wear down relatively quickly and also would impose a thin chain. The internal gears enable the chain to be thick and wide.
The website is in French but I machine-translated the “about” section:
A Bruxellois, magnet to travel by bicycle in town, activist in several environmental associations and working in the design and manufacture of cycles since 2014, established the SUGG srl in 2021 to provide simple, solid, practical, fast, fun, designed and assembled bicycles in Brussels with high quality components often produced in Europe.
The SUGG bikes are aimed at young people from 9 to 99 years of age who wish to move by bike without assistance and prefer to exploit the powerful resources often ignored whose nature has given them. Indeed, with no electric assistance, SUGG bikes are more economical, light, ecological, simple, reliable, durable and fun. At SUGG, the efficiency and ascent qualities of the bike are optimized by the choice of geometry and components. It’s fun!
A few objectives of SUGG: to contribute to the improvement of life in our cities thanks to less air and noise pollution, calm and friendly streets, intelligent and respectful traffic, efficient, beautiful and funny movements; to participate in the fight against unemployment in our regions, on the one hand by repatriating the design and assembly in us and on the other hand by procuring the parts with manufacturers not too far away from us
I don’t have one myself but if I wanted a bomb-proof bike that would last my whole life, this is probably what I would get.
Bikes now are just so tremendously better than anything you could have gotten in the 60s.
It’s the other way around. Modern bikes are less sustainable. Unsustainable cheap Chinese bikes have flooded the market. In the past couple decades proprietary parts have become widespread along with needless excessive introductions of more standards. So bicycles are being thrown away on a large scale with perfectly good frames due to compatibility issues.
Steel frames have become less common, in favor of aluminum and other metals that are more energy intensive, and carbon fiber which significantly degrades over time.
SUGG frames are made from steel. And they make an effort to avoid Chinese components. iirc there’s only one component from China on it.
I needed a new crank, chain and sprocket on a modern Mongoose fat bike. That brand goes back to my childhood so I was surprised to find what a big fiasco that common need was. It was insufficient to simply buy a square taper crank. In the struggle to track down a compatible front sprocket, I had to go to the manufacturer. They told me they couldn’t help me because the part was no longer made. WTF? I called months later and they said they were able to track down a compatible replacement. But of course getting official the parts from the manufacturer is costly. Of course they take full advantage of the compatibility fiasco. I think they wanted $90 for another cheap quality crankset. In the end, I said fuck this, I bought the cheapest square taper sprocket i could find and took a gamble. The result: chainline issues. My threshold of tolerance was pegged, so I simply decided i will not shift into the gears that cause the chain to rub the tire.
BTW, the reason i needed a new crank was because a peddle came loose as i was peddling. The aluminum threads in the crank are soft, so it didn’t take much peddling with a loose peddle to destroy the threads. The crank is part of the sprocket (a poor design). That forced the sprocket to be replaced. Funnily enough, the damage was done when i was test riding it before purchase. I pointed out to the seller at the end of the test ride that the peddle fell off. He offered to fix it or reduce the price. I was far from home so i opted to reduce the price. We both thought it would be cheap and trivial to fix. I think he knocked off ~$50 or so. Well, I could not have predicted the nightmare from such a seemingly minor problem.
If you look at my post, I qualified this with “if you buy a good one”.
Mongoose bikes are literal cheap throwaway trash bikes. This is exactly why people with knowledge about bikes try to steer people towards good quality stuff from bike shops. Cheap department store grade bikes are built to a price for people who rarely ride them. They fall apart under normal use and are not intended to be repairable.
Good quality bikes are very much long lasting, durable, and repairable goods. This is kind of like buying cheap fake leather boots off of alibaba and bemoaning that they aren’t as reliable as the handmade leather boots of your childhood. Of course they’re not! You chose not to buy good boots.
Steel frames have become less common, in favor of aluminum and other metals that are more energy intensive, and carbon fiber which significantly degrades over time.
I’d like to address this directly. Perhaps aluminum is more energy intensive but this seems like an odd thing to focus on considering the long lifespan of bikes, relatively small amount of metal used, and how much better cycling is for the environment than cars in general.
On the properties of the materials, steel is still readily available for those who want it. However, carbon and aluminum are better in most regards than heritage style lugged/brazed steel frames. They’re:
- Lighter. CF is the lightest, obviously, but even AL will be about 25% lighter for a given quality level than steel.
- Better in terms of lateral vs vertical compliance, combining great pedaling efficiency with good compliance over bumps. Steel frames are known for their unique ride, but high end hydroformed aluminum frames use complex shapes and butting schemes to get more control over the structural properties. The result is that you make less compromises in terms of pedaling stiffness and ride quality. CF takes this a step further because the fiber orientations can be manipulated to tune material properties.
- In many cases more durable. Nice steel frame bikes have very thin walled tubing. Thin walled steel tubing is damaged much more easily than similar quality AL or CF. The idea that CF “degrades over time” is a carryover from before manufacturers knew how to make long lasting CF frames. CF as a material can theoretically withstand unlimited stress cycles, and modern CF bike frames have effectively unlimited lifespans short of crash damage.
If you look at my post, I qualified this with “if you buy a good one”.
I missed that. But that’s exactly the purpose of the thread - to identify the good bikes. The problem with modern bikes is that it’s a minefield.
Mongoose bikes are literal cheap throwaway trash bikes. This is exactly why people with knowledge about bikes try to steer people towards good quality stuff from bike shops.
It sounds like you’re saying if it’s in a bike shop, you can expect quality. I don’t think so. I doubt all bicycle shops reject all low quality bikes in their 2nd hand business. Some do though, so you have a better chance than in a dept store or grocery store (indeed even Aldi sells bicycles), but it’s still down to odds. What about sporting good stores? You can probably find a bit of everything in a large range of qualities there.
Cheap department store grade bikes are built to a price for people who rarely ride them. They fall apart under normal use and are not intended to be repairable.
Good quality bikes are very much long lasting, durable, and repairable goods. This is kind of like buying cheap fake leather boots off of alibaba and bemoaning that they aren’t as reliable as the handmade leather boots of your childhood. Of course they’re not! You chose not to buy good boots.
I have a problem with the idea of making the pricetag in input source for your appraisal. It should be the reverse. You should determine what you’re willing to pay based on your appraisal which should be blind to price. Cheap prices can reflect lack of brand reputation and high prices are heavily determined by established brand reputation which is often overplayed. I’ve also seen far too many cases where reputable brands exploit their position and put their label on cheap outsourced garbage. You can get thick genuine leather goods in Tijuana for a fraction of the price you pay for low quality leather just across the border. In the world of tools you’ll pay 5 times more for a tool but it doesn’t outlast 5 replacements.
I knew an artist who ran her own shop and made things in a large range of prices. If an item was sitting in the store too long and she wanted to get rid of it, she would increase the price and then it would sell. It works. Consumers appraise based on the price. By increasing the price, she put that item in the budget range of a different demographic.
The ultimate problem is transparency. They obviously don’t write on the bike’s description “drivetrain: proprietary”. And when a layperson looks at a good bike, they just see the trivial specs, weight, etc. A layperson can’t easily discern from one spec sheet to another which one uses more standardized parts or is more repairable. And if it’s a used bike there’s no spec sheet.
In the case of bikes, it’s luckily mostly true that you get what you pay for and that bikes in bike stores tend to be reasonable quality. They aren’t all great but at the minimum they’ll generally accept readily available replacement parts and not fall apart right away. The nicer bikes will last many decades.
The thing about bikes is that running a bike store is a very low margin business that barely pays the bills. Most bike shops are purely in the business for the passion of it. They love bikes, they love sharing the hobby, and they hate seeing people turned off of cycling because their department store bike stripped out the crankset two weeks after purchase. They also don’t make much money on bike sales; they mostly rely on servicing and parts/accessories to keep the lights on. This means customer relationships tend to be important to them.
If you have a good bike shop like this near you, you can have a frank conversation with the people at the shop about your needs and they will steer you towards something decent.
The problem with modern bikes is that it’s a minefield.
I don’t disagree with you. Low quality bike manufacturers have gotten very good at making their bikes appear high quality to uninitiated while being cheaply constructed.
Unfortunately I think this holds true for a lot of things these days. Back to the analogy of boots, high quality footwear is undergoing a renaissance right now where resoleable long lasting shoes are more available and more affordable than they have been in decades. However, that comes with the undercurrent that some brands have sold out on construction quality to make a quick buck because they know how to keep the “indicators of quality” on the outside while using cheap materials on the interior construction of the boot.
Luckily there is a great, passionate, community for bikes that will happily help people find quality products. I just don’t want to discount the work of the engineers, the bike shop owners and the manufacturers of quality bikes. There are an insane number of really incredible modern bikes that blow anything from the 60s or 70s out of the water in nearly every way.
