[Closed] What would you pay for a 100% British made frame?

What's wrong with 531?

what's right with it?
it's out of date small o/d stovepipe

double post. i hit the button once honest gov.

Hmmm.... in 1997 I paid £550 for a made to measure 853 frame with forks and stem. It was built to my requirements specifically to be able to fit Salmon guards with standard drop calipers. I still use it, about 4,500 miles last year, and it still rides nicely.

Less than one made abroad if I'm honest; as there'd be no shipping & import fees to cover and would probably have some kind of local small business grant/incentive in place 'promoting/funding' British industry

If I was feeling particularly flush I'd maybe pay up to an extra £100 for something like a UK-made Soul but that'd be about it. No chance for the ~£1000 that it would probably actually cost.

That's not to say that I don't buy into the cachet of an artisan, UK-made frame but for me that sort of thing would be a once-in-a-lifetime treat to be cleaned every day with my toothbrush, rather than battered round the woods in the muck. That's still a market that some people might be able to make a living from but I don't think the market for a UK-made Soul/456/Sirius would be very big.

Isn't 953 a pain in the tits to work with and 931 gives 99% of the benefits but none of the hassle making it easier, and hence cheaper?

(May have dreamt that though)

cheap steel or scaffolding!!

I remember a couple of UK frame Designers (Taiwanese build) making 853 and "normal" steel versions of the same frame...in back to back testing there was bugger all difference in ride quality that could be determined in "blind" tests and only a marginal weight saving for significant cost difference. Funnily all the lovely frames they sell now that folk love aren't 853.

I would love a custom uk made frame, but not many uk frame builders can make anything as sexy a groovey cycleworks, or retrotec

[url= http://www.14bikeco.com/frames-forks/frames ]14 bike co[/url] will make a 'custom' track/fixed frame and forks in the UK with plenty of options from £450 up.

I need an aero tubed, filet brazed 853 14r lo pro.

waswasss - the curtis bikes on chainreaction are 4130 cromo tubed tawain models mate. not made in uk. i had one of both. check the sticker as it gives it away, its 4130 which curtis dont hand make from and also it says designed in the uk.

931 gives 99% of the benefits but none of the hassle making it easier, and hence cheaper?

Woody I get where you're coming from here. Actually being made in the UK isn't really the marketing feature you should be focusing on (and it doesn't seem like being made in the UK is any reason to command a premium judging by the responses here).

You're marketing position is more compelling than that; it's the ability to offer a moderate level of choice and customisation.

Colour is a great example; if you manufacture in the far east, you can't ship unpainted frames because they would rust in the container (at least that's what I've been told) so you have to stick to defining the colour choice at the point of manufacture and the mass market doesn't want lots of colour choices to manage.

I'll have mine in metallic BRG with white box panels please.

Same with drop outs. I want a 12mm by 135mm rear please because I want to use one set of wheels across two bikes (they're really nice wheels so why wouldn't I?)

I would also like a 44mm head tube and drilled for a dropper post. I would also like some input on the tube sets but I can live with the geometry and sizing being just like say a Cotic BFe or a Dialled Alpine.

Currently if I want all this I have to go with a full on custom built frame that is going to cost me £1150 or more.

Actually the Cotic Bfe ticks most of my boxes and costs £330.

If you can give me a Bfe or Alpine with those choices i've listed above, I would happily pay £500.

I don't want it fillet brazed though, I would want it TIG welded because I prefer the aesthetics (more modern) and in my mind at least, the results are stronger if you're using 853. Maybe that's a misconception that needs changing in my mind though.

But it sounds so nice when you ping an 853 tube with your fingernail. Admittedly not the sort of thing most people do when riding, but even the sound of cables rattling and pinging off the top tube is nice to hear 🙂

But it sounds so nice when you ping an 853 tube with your fingernail. Admittedly not the sort of thing most people do when riding, but even the sound of cables rattling and pinging off the top tube is nice to hear

Sounds almost exactly the same on a 520 frame though

I'm having a bike built by 18 Bikes, more than happy to pay good money for it,

The service alone is worth the extra. Its down to little things like how do YOU want this... How would YOU like XXXX to be...

I really enjoyed sitting with the guys, discussing what I wanted, what parts where to go on. Its so much more than just an off the peg frameset.

I get updates like this:

[img] [/img]

as the build goes on, dead exciting.

Shep, you need to keep an eye on that. It looks like they are holding it together with tape. Rubbish.

Shep, you need to keep an eye on that. It looks like they are holding it together with tape. Rubbish

Yeah they where quick to sort that, it was a Taiwanese kid they had on work experience. 🙄

853/t45: £800
Tange: £600

If a frame took about 1 week to be built by 1 person, and parts were about 200 pounds for quality tubes etc, then would it be reasonable for the frame to cost about 800? That's about 600 pounds for around a week's work???

ok, lets take the VAT off, now you're down to £500. Assuming you want to have a some holidays, we'll assume you can do 48 bikes. That's gives you 4 weeks off. So you've now got an income of 24K.

I'm guessing powdercoat and decals, so how about £50 including carriage/transport back and forward.
You're now down to £21600.

I assume you'll be selling direct (no margin for a retailer or distributor) so you'll have be shipping bikes out. Factor in £5 for boxes and packing material. and now we're down to £21360

Not sure how they're put together but I'm think you might be looking at something like £15 per frame for consumables based on that volume so, now we're down to £20640.

What's that you say? You want some heat on in the workshop in the winter? Ok then but it'll cost you £200 per year. Oh, and how are people going to know about you? Marketing and advertising you say? Ok, £1K a year sound ok?

Right now we're down to less than £20k and you still need to pay your rent, rates, water, tooling, insurance, testing, warranty, shipping/carriage, accountancy, NI, tax, website .....

And you'll be working on your own 60hrs week.

As someone who knows about this stuff once said, "it's simple but it's not easy."

How much would you be willing to pay for a 100% British made frame or built bike. Not so much a complete custom frame but an off the peg that you can at least can spec drop out type, colour scheme.

The same or less than other similarly specced frames on the market. The same as anything else.

...If a frame took about 1 week to be built by 1 person...

a week?!?

**** me.

i've had a few frames made, i've seen it done in less than a day*.

(*by a welding Samurai master, he charges accordingly, he's worth it)

Personally I think it's a bit of shame that going from the above responses that as a nation we aren't a bit more loyal to home grown. Maybe I'm being harsh - would all those who have said they would not pay extra overtly favour the UK made if price and spec were exactly the same?

Fair market price.

If you want to [s]overcharge[/s] charge more than the importers then you have to do something very special/unique and well thought out - ie completely custom and perfectly built.

But it sounds so nice when you ping an 853 tube with your fingernail. Admittedly not the sort of thing most people do when riding, but even the sound of cables rattling and pinging off the top tube is nice to hear

Sounds almost exactly the same on a 520 frame though

Oh no the sound is completely different I tell you.

Good response Shandcycles.

I would certainly pay a premium, provided that the pre and after care service is good. For example Cy and Paul at Cotic always help and answer queries and not necessarily to gain sales and reach out to customers for their input on new designs. Shandcycles are on here looking to gain insight from customers and be helpful amongst others. I don't see Trek or the like with their vast resources on this forum. For me, this is the difference and if this keeps jobs in the UK, building bikes specifically for UK conditions then that's a brilliant thing. I appreciate we can't all spend vast sums and we should live within our means, so if UK brands could get 0% finance that would also be a major boost.

In the mid 90s I bought a Roberts (genesis). It cost me 500 earth pounds at the time. So in modern money that is probably 1 or 2 million current pounds ...
I bought it on spec, I wasn't prepared to go to a D.O.G.S.B.O.L.O.X - mainly because I though the name was rather trite and trying too hard.

I orderd a 20 inch - in modern day sizing it would have been around 23 inches. It was meant to have a sloping top tube - but it didn't ( oh, that is the 19 inch, didn't you know that?) It wasn't what I expected, but I was too embarassed to complain. I stuck with it for 2 years until the interfaces with the top tube became too much

The paint work was rubbish, it chipped like nail varnish - and the BB was never central - you had to reverse a std shimano BB, just so the rank of the chainring side would clear the frame.

I found the whole Roberts experience a user unfriendly one.

Cotic however, are great. Even though the bikes are made in the East

I couldn't care less where a frame is made if I'm honest.
most of mine are carbon so probably made in the east, other than the Litespeed which is US of A.

Oh, I have a Curtis jump bike but only because my name is Curtis so id have purchased one even if it was from north Korea and made of while bone by a 7 year old in a sweat shop.

If it's a quality frame with good paint people will buy regardless of price and provenance..... All IMHO

trek and specialized dont need to come on here for info, they PAY lots of riders to ride for them and provide them with the info thats actually needed. Id say info on frame design from a team rider who races and rides as a job is slightly more reliable than a forum poster is it not?

I like british made frames, theres something nice knowing that its not mass produced but unfortunately its hard to make them at a price most people would like to pay.
Lets not forget you can usually get a frame that is exceptionally well built in taiwan for £300! most frame builders in the uk (especially start up companies) will pay nearly that for a good tubeset and then they still have to build the thing!

There are large parts of the demise of Raliegh in this thread - ultimately consumers could buy a whole bike cheaper than it cost Raleigh to buy the components, plus they missed the whole group set thing. I do not see logic in paying more for a British frame other than a slight warm fuzzy feeling.

Lets not forget you can usually get a frame that is exceptionally well built in taiwan for £300!

And this is the thing - if you just want a good frame at a good price, a custom frame isn't for you. What you get with a custom frame is a lot more personal control and interaction over the whole process. This costs money, of course, so if cost is your prime concern then it won't work for you, but for many people cost isn't the prime concern.

Unfortunately without some seriously good guidance (ie correcting) most people would probably end up speccing something completely rubbish as a custom frame, the way angles etc are flung round here as the way to make a perfect bike.

but for many people cost isn't the prime concern.

Surely if this is the case there would be alot more bespoke british bike companies?

i wish there was more british builders but the economics just dont work anymore.

As mentioned above, I have voiced my opinion before that there is no reason why someone couldn't build frames in the UK for exactly the same price as Taiwan with everything being equal as far as the customer is concerned (quality, design, finish etc etc). But the issue isn't scale, at least not to start with.

The main reason you can't get a batch of frames built here and be competitive on price is that there is no one offering it. There simply isn't the infrastructure here for it anymore. In Taiwan, if you want a dropout that isn't available then they will make it for you, likewise headtubes, braze ons, bb shells etc etc. We have had huge issues trying to get a tapered headtube swaged over here that would be a simple phone call over there. In order to make frames here you would have to set up doing EVERYTHING yourself. This brings the issue of enough scale to make it worthwhile and also the capital to get it all started.

I believe that as the wages of other countries rise and we still have issues with delivery times we will see people starting to produce more here. The comments about quality are a non issue, if you get the right people in to to the job (as the Taiwanese have done) and train them appropriately then the quality can be as good or better.

I don't think the general public will pay more for just 'made in the uk' but provided the product is as good or better, available faster, reacts faster to the market and is priced competitively then there is no reason that mass produced UK frames wouldn't be a success.

We don't have the workshop capacity or capital to increase these to make it work, trust me, I'd love to but it's not going to happen anytime soon (for us)

Matt

this:

but the economics just dont work anymore.

is changing

mikewsmith - Member
Unfortunately without some seriously good guidance (ie correcting) most people would probably end up speccing something completely rubbish as a custom frame, the way angles etc are flung round here as the way to make a perfect bike.

I suspect I';d go in with a printout of the Soul Geometry chart, and get as far as the price, and think "why am I bothering?"

There already are some people bringing large scale frame manufacturing back to the UK from the far east.

[b][u]teamhurtmore:[/u][/b] I do not see logic in paying more for a British frame other than a slight warm fuzzy feeling.

But some of us live for warm fuzzy feelings 🙂

I totally agree with what 18BikesMatt is saying about getting things made in this country, it is a complete bitch to get something simple made here when in the far east it is just a quick call. Also the Chinese are far more setup and willing to produce a product for you and not just a component or process as is the case here. The cost of manufacturing and wages in the far east is growing at a very fast rate, wage increases seems to be jumping every 6 months and not just by a few %. Coupled with the fact that shipping costs are going up and up and the drive or incentive to bring manufacturing back to the UK certainly increases.

Manufacturing in the UK also allows you to react to the market far quicker and keep stock constantly flowing. It always amazes me if you go to buy a bike in late summer autumn, shops just have no stock and you have to wait to really late in the year before new models start flowing through. This has got to be partly due to the batch production and the very long shipping times.

This story is also interesting as it shows large numbers of bikes can be made in Europe. I wonder if the reason the UK numbers are so small is due to the point that 18BikeMatt made that we have just lost capacity and supporting industries in the UK.

That's completely it - we've lost the manufacturing infrastructure, the backyard workshops. A simple example - I just got myself a stem jig. No-one in the UK makes stem jigs - or any frame tooling at all - so it had to come from the States, but in the US there are a whole bunch of small one- or two-person companies making stuff, so I had the choice of 3 or 4 stem jigs. Same with even simple stuff like tube blocks (a split aluminium block with a hole to hold a frame tube) - dead easy to make, available from loads of small companies in the States, no-one here.

So framebuilding in the UK has to piggyback on the growth of framebuilding in the US.

Forgot the link

http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/bikes-made-in-britain-double-in-2011/013763

I'd love to see something like this work but fear the economies of scale will be working against it. Perhaps if making the custom frames is part of a larger business which keeps the people and tooling utilised and hence paid for?

Do you remember Solitude Cycles? Alex used to be on here a lot and he designed the frames with the customer and had them made by Lee Cooper. Perhaps something like this where a welder/fabricator is able to get on with building stuff while a "designer" speaks to the customer... one problem with this is that there are now two mouths/families to feed; unless your both doing it as a sideline?.

I'd love to get a custom frame built as I have certain ideas I want to try. But I can also try some of these by buying cheap frames which means when the ideas don't quite work I am able to move on without crying into my coffee... but one day 8)

Finding a niche such as 2souls in Germany has managed to do may be a way to be successful... but only for as long as the niche is yours unless your able and willing to follow (and probably even push) the niche. Mountain bikers can't even decide on wheel or tyre size at the moment so the future could be anything 🙄

I wish all you frame builders and dream livers the best, I hope your still there when I figure out what I want and decide it's time.

PS. I'm in Scotland so keeping it local would be Ben or Shand. I was sad when Charlie at Alves called it a day as he did a great job on repairs for me 😥

I wonder if the reason the UK numbers are so small is due to the point that 18BikeMatt made that we have just lost capacity and supporting industries in the UK.

I don't believe we have lost the capacity or supporting industries. It's all here. If you think you can just pick up a phone in Taiwan and get someone to make 10 set sof dropouts for you then you're very misguided. It's ALL about scale and commitment. We're not based in an particularly industrial heartland up here but I have 3 of 4 places I can go to who would make dropouts for us. Cast, CNC, whatever. But the only way these guys will look at taking the business is if the volumes make it worth while. That requires commitment from you as a manufacturer. Pissing around in a shed making 20 frames a year and then complaining about the lack of infrastructure willing to support your cottage industry isn't going to get you anywhere.

I'm not saying that there's no place for small scale bespoke framebuilders building 20 frames in their shed but it bears no resemblance to launching a UK made mountain bike brand. I've said this to Matt before but if you want things done in this industry and you're not willing to commit to volume, you NEED to do it yourself. Take a look at what Tom at Demon does with fabrication, he's low volume but does an incredible job without bitching about not getting other people to buy into his vision.

If you think you can build a UK made bike/frame then do it. But you need to commit. If you think you can test the water by making half a dozen frames, then you'll run into the problems Matt has described.

Just to reiterate, it's ALL about scale.

No-one in the UK makes stem jigs - or any frame tooling at all - so it had to come from the States

Sorry but that's bollock Ben! I've had tooling made in this country. It exists, but you need to look for it. What is missing are the nice fancy e-commerce sites that exists elsewhere.

Sorry but that's bollock Ben! I've had tooling made in this country. It exists, but you need to look for it. What is missing are the nice fancy e-commerce sites that exists elsewhere.

Oh sure, you can get stuff made - I've done that, there are rapid prototypers and waterjet cutters and CNC companies about who will make whatever you like. But it's not available off the shelf as far as I know - you have to design the tooling yourself and chase about places to get it made.

Shand. Sorry I think you miss understand where I am coming from. I totally agree with you that it is all about volume and it is never going to work with 20 frames made in shed. You have to be churning out frames at a fair rate and using processes that allow you to speed up production and part selection that can be used across a range so you can increase volumes when buying say drop outs and overall help to reduce prices.

What I meant by the loss of capacity is that competition is not there and there are not companies falling over backwards to supply you. If you say came up with a new dropout design then you would have to fully fund all the development and manufacture. In the far east companies would be willing to do the development work as part of getting the job, they might even do reduced tooling costs. Similar to what you get in this country with plastic injection moulding. As there is decent competition companies are willing to add value or take on risk to get you as a customer.