Has anyone else seen the recent advert from Halfrauds for a cheap nasty £70 shitter?

Can’t help but think this would be like riding a radiator and feel sorry for anyone who buys one.

To compare I recently bought some new pedals, I had been putting this off for ages as money is a bit tight. Decent flats were anywhere up to £120 for hope’s pedals and £100 for DMR vaults. In the end I went for a sensible £60 option with Shimano Saint.

I just can’t get my head round the fact a decent pair of pedals costs the same as a bike from Halfrauds. Makes you wonder how they do it? Surely it must be a death trap.

That’s not the cheapest ever. My mother bought two from Tesco. £60 each. Full suss as well…

That was a couple of years ago mind.

I worked in Glasgow for a couple of years and bought one for my rain or shine short commute along the banks of the Clyde. Technically i went into the shop and asked for the cheapest bike they sold. It weighed a ton, had aluminium proportioned tubes made of steel and I reckon weighed almost as much as my full suss.

Still, after nipping up the bolts it ran ok, sold it 2 years later for £40 and spent nothing on it during the time I owned it.

I admit it was poor compared with my “proper” MTB and road bikes but it served its purpose so I wouldn’t go so far as death trap.

I bet the kid who gets one for Xmas will be made up and will be able to wheelie better than you…

Butcher, I imagine you can get cheaper I was refering to Halfrauds claim of their cheapest ever.

Mintman, very good point you make there. Costing so little you can always sell it for a similar price you paid for it I suppose.

Was it horrible to ride?

Butcher, I imagine you can get cheaper I was refering to Halfrauds claim of their cheapest ever.

Mintman, very good point you make there. Costing so little you can always sell it for a similar price you paid for it I suppose.

Was it horrible to ride?

Iv’e got an Orange 5 that cost over 3K & It’s horrible to ride!

Just kidding. 😈

It wasn’t at all comfortable, but certainly sluggish and heavy so I can’t say I enjoyed it much! It really felt like it had nothing in common with my Pace 405 but it made that feel like a joy to ride when I did go biking!

“Decent flats were anywhere up to £120 for hope’s pedals and £100 for DMR vaults. In the end I went for a sensible £60 option with Shimano Saint.”

Pipe down – what you mean there is – the pedals i want are xyz…

I had a 90 euro folding bike for a 12 mile round trip in den helder for 6 months …..one of the better folding bikes ive ridden tbh ( and i have ridden alot of them)

I just can’t get my head round the fact a decent pair of pedals costs the same as a bike from Halfrauds.

I’m sure the people who buy a bike from Halfords would think the same thing if you told them how much you spent on pedals.

FWIW I use Nukeproof Electron pedals which are rather cheaper than even BSOs sold by Halfords. Then again I suspect most people would think I spent a ridiculous amount on the unicycle they’re attached to.

Iv’e got an Orange 5 that cost over 3K & It’s horrible to ride!

Just kidding
I know you could never get one that cheap 😛

I had a succession of cheep BSO’s while at university, TBH they went up and down hills and round corners as well as anything costing £1k+.

Probably wouldn’t have wanted to take it down too many black runs but for commuting and riding to the pub there’s nothing between them and something costing 100x more.

Just bought the missus’ mum a rockrider 5.0 from decathlon for £99, if it doesn’t outlast all my bikes (except probably my £100 commuter) I’d be very surprised.

A student i know had a trax fs from halfords to do the trails at Afan, i tried to tell him not to bother but his mum bought it as a present so when he turned up with it i said nice bike, did W2 twice so’s about 100k + and kild it, had his money back too.

My most ridden bike is a £200 Decathlon special, it’s absolutely fine.
That Halfords £70 jobbie will put a smile on many a face this Christmas and will get people out on bikes, what’s not to like?

Can’t help but think this would be like riding a radiator and feel sorry for anyone who buys one.

I bet the poor sods that get one have to put up with instant coffee too, I weep for these people, I really do.

Might want to think about the fact not everyone can afford £1000+ bikes, and for many folk a £100 bike will do just as good a job for them.

No doubt the kids who get them for Christmas will live them and might just get turned on to cycling.

My first xc bike – surprisingly robust … Youd never know i was a dh rider in a past live with that seat angle…..this was in about 2001…..bike was 25 pounds second hand .

One things for sure the 70 quid halfords bike is at least fully rigid and not quite in the same league as supermarker full sus specials .

I was given a BSO once which I kept at work. I would ride my nice bike to work, lock it away, then ride the BSO to the gym and lock it outside.
I think it cost me about £20 to replace all the cables, brake blocks and chain, probably about 40% of the bike’s new price.
It wasn’t a death trap and it wasn’t particularly nice to ride, but it was quicker than walking.

Might want to think about the fact not everyone can afford £1000+ bikes

Which reminds me…
Mrs MTG and myself called in at the local bike recycling charity shop yesterday.
We were riding about £6000 worth of bikes between us and got talking to a woman who was buying a bike for her 14 year old daughter. She mentioned that she had wanted to get a bike for a while, but had only just been able to afford it. This from a shop that sells bikes mostly in the £25 – £60 range.

I see guys riding along on supermarket and halfords cheapies all the time, about town…it does the job they want it for, and thb to them a mountain bike is a mountain bike and would probably never dream of spending over a 100 quid on a bike.My brother could never dream of even spending 2 or 3 hundred quid on a bike and was commuting to work on a very old cheap Diamond Back I gave him years ago up until a fortnight ago he phones me and says ‘Ive got a new bike,a Claude Butler for £40’he was just over the moon he had a ‘new bike’,the DB was still going strong,the only thing I ever did to that bike was change a tube for him…again does the job they want it for A2b.

I alway point people who come to me for cheap normal bikes towards Common Wheel, the local bike charity – for that money you get something much, much better second-hand.

Fair point that this £70 fully rigid halfords beast is probably a lot better than super market full sussers.
I still can’t imagine it would last 5 minutes off road.

I see far too many people riding those super market ful sussers as commuter bikes simply because they haven’t got a clue. I always think to myself they must not realise how hard they are making it for themselves.

For example I see a guy everyday riding to work. He is on the nastiest full susser you can imagine, rear wheel so flat it’s almost on the rim and not doing any more than 7mph on the flat. It must weigh in excess of 50lb.
I don’t unseat as why he doesn’t buy a cheap fully rigid and put skinny tyres on it. He would half his travel time and make the ride so much easier.

It’s very easy to look down on cheap bikes when you know about and ride better quality bikes. But for the majority of people its all they can afford and does for what they need. For some its a starting point that gets them involved in the sport and that can never be a bad thing.

Jez http://www.followingthechainline.blogspot.com

Having seen the heaps of crap that a lot of folk in Amsterdam or Copenhagen happily ride around on as their main mode of transport absolutely fine I don’t see the problem. The big difference though is that in the UK we still have a fixation with calling and vaguely shaping the bikes intended to ride around towns like these “mountain bikes”. Cheap road/city specific bikes should be where it’s at.

Fair point that this £70 fully rigid halfords beast is probably a lot better than super market full sussers.
I still can’t imagine it would last 5 minutes off road.

A while ago one of the mags (don’t remember which) didactic test on some cheapie bikes by taking them out for a proper ride. if I recall correctly they had a few problems here and there but all the bikes survived intact and undamaged. All bikes sold in the UK must pass the same testing and conform to the same British Standards. There’s no reason a properly PDId bike would fall apart
As everyone has said, cheap bikes have a place. Pooling into town, to work, leaving outside etc. if it gets people out of a car, saves them some money and gets their heart rate up a bit, then that’s gotta be a good thing right?
Who knows, maybe their next bike is a £300 Trek town bike…. And so on. 🙂

I spotted the ad and thought at least it’s fully rigid, and actually thought hats of to them for not pushing looky likey full sussers.
Bet it rides as well as a Pashley about town or down the canal tow path.

Did anybody else who saw the advert think to themselves, despite the £xxxx of bikes on the current fleet; “I quite fancy that” ?

Think about it, it’s another niche to fill- its a new bike, but for the cost of a tank of fuel. You could ride it down the pub, not lock it up, not do any maintenance and yet it’s still a new bike!

I just can’t get my head round the fact a decent pair of pedals costs the same as a bike from Halfrauds. Makes you wonder how they do it? Surely it must be a death trap the pedal manufacturer must have seen me coming.

the mrs turned up in late august with a brand new in box alloy framed adult sized full susser from tesco ..26 quid… alloy rims.. 21 spd.. v brakes.. pink and white
more than appropriate for the canal side sunday runs and mid week reservoir ride she does..

has she been ripped off or is it us paying 2 grand for a ‘basic spec’ that are ‘ripped’ off..

A friend spent around £400 on a HT from Halfords.

Took it over Norland Moor once which, DBW or Ton will tell you, aint that gnar. He weighs about 8 stone. By the time we’d reached the bottom he’d snapped something in the forks and the front brake stopped working.

2 trips to Gisburn later, cracked frame.

I don’t know what the manufacturers intended that bike to be used for, bumpy roads maybe.

A £400 bike shouldn’t just do that, I blame the rider.

In contrast to that, my dad has had the same £200 Scott mountain bike for the last 18 years. When I’ve mentioned that I’m riding a remote pass that doesn’t have a path on it, he’ll invariably say he’s done it before on that bike.

I have a cheap (not as cheap as that Halfords bike) no brand bike for the winter commute. Mix of trails and roads. Does me fine.

It’s probably no ‘worse’ than the bike I started off-roading on at 11 years old. I remember it being a lot of fun, it got loads of off-road use at a level that I’d still call ‘proper MTB’. In hindsight I know it wasn’t a great bike, but it was a good price and it got me hooked. So, one of the best £100-odd ever spent.

It doesn’t look that bad for £70. It’d probably be fine as a commuter/hack bike thing.

I recently had a shot on the bike that I had when I was 14, an old raleigh, and couldn’t imagine considering taking it anywhere near some of the runs I’d take my current bikes on. It felt bloody awful.

But then again, I loved that bike when I was younger, it was perfect for what I needed it for at the time, a bit of light off road, mucking around with mates etc and without having ever been on 3 k full susser to compare it to, I absolutely loved it.

I imagine/hope the kid who gets his first 100 quid MTB this christmas will think the same 🙂

The only thing i notice is people on cheap bikes around town never seem to change gear! Not sure if that is because they haven’t worked out what the gears (usually at least 21 of them) are for, or just because they don’t work / aren’t adjusted right (more likely). So i regularly pass people going up a slight grade, but they are in top gear, doing about 4mph, and straining like mad just to move…….

Decent flats were anywhere up to £120 for hope’s pedals and £100 for DMR vaults. In the end I went for a sensible £60 option with Shimano Saint.

You spent how much on some pedals? I think my last pair were £12.

As loads of people have already said, for most people a bike is a bike is a bike, if it gets them from place A to place B without exploding into a pile of nuts and bolts they are happy.

If they are the kind of person who then thinks, hey this is fun! and starts riding more then maybe they will think about getting a better bike later, maybe not, but we all started on cheap bikes didn’t we?

I remember when I got my first ‘proper’ mountain bike and my parents spent £150 on it, it was the best bike in the world ever and I couldn’t ever imagine having to upgrade it, same again 2 years later when I was scrimping and saving for my £300 Trek… unless you’re one of those ‘new’ 😉 riders who has been duped into thinking you can’t possibly tackle anything trickier than a towpath unless you have spent close to a grand or more on a tricked up super bike, we all started off with cheap bikes, and I think it’s amazing how much bike you can get for under £100 when they are built sensibly, ie: rigid and functional.

They serve a purpose, cheap transport and ‘gateway’ bikes for want of a better phrase.

It’s a shame that really sensible, cheap bikes aren’t easily available over here. Something with mudguards, a basket, dynamo lights and a sensible upright position.

Not sure if that is because they haven’t worked out what the gears (usually at least 21 of them) are for, or just because they don’t work / aren’t adjusted right (more likely)

I’d say you have that the wrong way round, the amount of times I’ve had to explain to people how their gears work, and when to use them, I reckon it’s because most people either just don’t know or don’t care, their gears may not shift as slickly as the latest XTR, but even a 10 year old, kinky cabled, thumby and SIS derailleur will move the chain to a different* cog.

*maybe not the correct one but at least in the right direction!

It’s a shame that really sensible, cheap bikes aren’t easily available over here. Something with mudguards, a basket, dynamo lights and a sensible upright position.

+1 but then a decent set of mudguards, and lights fitted correctly can cost almost half the purchase price of a ‘cool’ looking MTB style bike…

Until they start coming as standard, and there is a shift from MTB style fashion bikes to actual functional city and town bikes people will keep commuting on heavy, knobbly tyred tanks.

I think it’s an image thing, bikes are still not seen as a cheap transport tool, even by the people who buy them as cheap transport tools! they still want it to look like a mountain bike.

This thread reminded me of this blog post about converting a BSO left in the back alley for the Scrap Metal Fairies to take away into a ridiculously practical winter bike: http://karlmccracken.sweat365.com/2012/12/15/my-winter-fugly-bike/

I just can’t get my head round the fact a decent pair of pedals costs the same as a bike from Halfrauds. Makes you wonder how they do it? Surely it must be a death trap the pedal manufacturer must have seen me coming.

Not really. I have had my DMR V12 pedals for approximately 13 years now. Think I paid less than £50 for them.
They are still going strong but I have a few bikes so needed some more decent pedals.
Instead of going crazy on DMR vaults at £100 I went for shimano saints and got good discount from my local bike shop.
Paid £50 in the end which I am very happy with.

They are fully rebuildable and will no double last me 20 years plus so very good value.
On the other hand I could have spent £12 on some pedals or £70 on the halfords bike and it would simply not last.

The rule is buy quality buy once.
Riding a shitter makes you appreciate quality bike goods.