Steve makes a good point, but in my experience, failures on quality bikes are exceedingly rare. I rode my Alex Singer about 60,000 km in about 6 years. The only failures I recall were:
- bottom bracket bearing failure. (My fault, I had known for 2 years that the 33-year-old bearings were on their way out, but had been too busy to replace them.) Easy to replace, as the bearings are standard, and all you need is a press or a vise to get them in. - dropout failure. Again, after more than 120,000 hard miles under the previous owner and myself since 1974, not that surprising. Took it to a local builder, and we put in a new dropout. - cracked internal expander seatpost. It creaked, but was totally rideable. - freewheel failure. IRD freewheel, first generation. I got home fine. Put an old Dura-Ace freewheel on, and never had problems again. - spoke failure. Easy to fix on the road. The former two would not have been a problem with a newer bike (i.e., less than 30 years and 100,000 miles), and the freewheel failure could have been avoided by using better components. The spoke failure happened at the beginning of a 1200 km brevet, but it took less than 3 minutes to fix. I find that with fewer bikes, it's easier to keep them in top shape. For many years, I raced and trained 12,000 miles a year and had a single bike, without ever missing a ride or race due to the bike not being rideable. Jan Heine Editor Bicycle Quarterly www.bikequarterly.com Follow our blog at http://janheine.wordpress.com/ On Jan 22, 7:19 pm, Steve Palincsar <[email protected]> wrote: > Great, right up to the moment something fails, you need a part, and the > bike goes on deadline. > > I think that even if you're Jan and you have a bike parts company, there > are still going to be times when you have to order a part, or when you > have to take the bike down to the shop and they tell you it'll be a week > to ten days. > > At that point, it's great to have at least two bikes! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
