>I think usually that building something out of parts even if your
>labor is not worth anything is more expensive than buying something
>that has economies of scale at all steps of the manufacturing
>process. Unless you just want this as an amusing project you could
>economically do better buying a well reviewed modest model from a big
>manufacturer.
That depends on what you want. I built myself a dual-suspension bike
out of a frame and (quality) parts for somewhere around CDN$600 [1] --
and that's including shipping costs because some of them came in from
the States. There's no way I could have bought an equivalent complete
bike for under $2000 or so.
The cheap end of the market is cheaper than buying it out of bits, but
once you get up to a reasonable level of quality, economies of scale
don't come in as much. Buying a full Dura-Ace 10speed groupset is
_expensive_, yup -- but so is buying a bike with that groupset already
on there.
That said, if you count assembly time into that, it becomes trickier,
and I wanted to build myself a bike. As for the original poster's
request, Sheldon Brown's site is great, Rivendell bikes are lovely but
pricey -- I'd suggest just going to the shop you like and asking them
for recommendations, to be honest.
Basically, parts-wise, it's Shimano -vs- Campagnolo, and for touring I
think that's probably Shimano. Wheels, 32x3cross, maybe 36 if you're
heavy/have lots of load to carry, brakes I'd suggest getting long reach
calipers so you can get decent-sized tires and mudguards in there.
Shifters and the like may well depend on what mountings there are on
the frame; cantilever brakes are great, but only if the frame'll take
them, for instance.
Thinking about it, your best bet may be to look for a cyclocross bike;
if I was to have just the one (rather than 5 -- see my TOPE23 entry)
that'd be what I went for, because they'll go fast on the roads but
still handle a fair amount of off-road terrain, and they're designed to
keep working in ghastly mud, which may not be what you intend to ride
in, but the resulting overall robustness should be generally useful.
-- dan
[1] to be fair, it's a singlespeed, so I saved on shifters -- but
otherwise it's an XTR crankset, Avid SD7 levers/brakes, Time ATAC
pedals, LX wheels/Mavic rims, Marzocchi Bomber on the front; saddle I
had in a box of saddles, and I had a couple of spare wheels around I
built up for winter a while back, but there's always somewhere online
with a good deal on wheelsets.
You can get a lot of bike for not much money if you shop around and,
critically, know which parts to buy used. The bombers on the front of my
previous mountain bike have had exactly zero maintanence through five
summers and four winters of riding and are still as good as the day I
got them -- so I'm happy to buy used ones of those; ditto with the
crankset, those guys don't really wear out. Brakes, on the other hand,
tend to get gunged up with age and I've spent enough time wrestling with
old brakes that this time I just bit the bullet and bought new ones.
I keep being terribly tempted by more used bikes -- the lovely old
Marinoni I got for $180 (with tubular tyres, yet) has been great to me
and a Colnago's just showed up there for $200, though that one's a bit
small.
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