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FWIW, I have Pinnacle shoes (flats) and they're great.
Evans doing some odd stuff with workshop and pricing apparently, some very odd choices that don't seem very customer friendly.
ABC.
Anything But cAshley.
I will literally go without before I knowingly give that tosser a single penny.
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mountain bikes are better and cheaper than ever. £500 on a halfords voodoo hardtail is a bike I would take over anything pre ~2005ish for any mountain biking.
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But now we hit perception verses reality
If you owned a simple bike in the 1990s and turned up at trail bread everyone’s bike looked like yours. If you now turn up on a £500 bike or even a £1000 bike you would have a great bike by historic standards. But looking at the bikes almost everyone else is riding you would realise that your kit is way behind what everyone else is riding.
Now you might say @why worry about what everyone else is riding” but people do. I’d say currently mountain biking looks really expensive. Whether it is expensive or not
If you owned a simple bike in the 1990s and turned up at trail bread everyone’s bike looked like yours
Rubbish! When I was racing DH a Marin Mount Vision there were also a lot of people riding Intense M1s which frame only cost was higher than I paid for the whole bike.
It depends when and in the 1990s and where. I certainly wasn’t imagining a downhill race
Riding at Woburn, in the lakes or peak there was a time when every bike pretty much looked the same.
I did some xc races where everyone was on a rigid rim braked bike. You could tell the ti one’s of course. Some cost a fortune. But they were functionally similar.
I was basically agreeing with this point
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As a student I worked at Evans for 5 years and we had a solid base of folk on basic but functional bikes (say 800 – 1k hardtails or basic tiagra ally roadbike) but all were out regularly. I dont see that many of this type of rider these days. IMO The average rider at my local TS has a much better bike now than 15 years ago.
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On my last trail centre trip even junior served to be on a FS e-bike. I saw one group on west I’d call basic bikes
As a student I worked at Evans for 5 years and we had a solid base of folk on basic but functional bikes (say 800 – 1k hardtails or basic tiagra ally roadbike) but all were out regularly. I dont see that many of this type of rider these days. IMO The average rider at my local TS has a much better bike now than 15 years ago.
Possibly better served by Planet-X etc these days?
Or they're shopping via Cycle 2 Work schemes so will either be online or via whichever shop their employer signs up with.
On my last trail center trip even junior served to be on a FS e-bike. I saw one group on west I’d call basic bikes
I dunno, I think the cheaper end of the market seems to actually be doing really well.
Then in the cheap-middling (£1500-£2000) there's loads of decent choice. My bike falls into that bracket and I don't think Z2's and Deore 12s are really a compromise compared to higher tier components anymore. The big difference around that price seems to be that as things have settled down with geometry and wheel sizes, teens are more likely to be riding a 2nd hand Carbon Enduro than a new lower-spec bike. When I was that age 2nd hand meant missing out on disk brakes or having 80mm suspension rather than 125mm. I think maybe that fuels the perception that bikes have gotten more expensive, because more of them look like £3000+ bikes at RRP but probably were bought for 1/3 that.
Higher end, there's always been a few in every group that had XTR. XTR (and SRAM) seems to have gone up even faster than inflation though. FS bikes do seem to have gotten more gaudy/bling though. Maybe neon Santa Cruz's just stick out more than "boutique" frames used to (30 years ago it would have been a rigid Ti bike and blended in).
E-bikes, it's a different sport/demographic. I know barely a handful of people who've bought them as an 'upgrade', and 90% of the other users I see in groups of E-bikes fit a stereotype, their demographic seems to be people who would otherwise have bought an XR400 and gone green-laning. But a lack of green-lanes and an abundance of trail centers has changed that.
The big difference around that price seems to be that as things have settled down with geometry and wheel sizes, teens are more likely to be riding a 2nd hand Carbon Enduro than a new lower-spec bike.
theres a nice alloy spesh in the classifieds right now (not related to me in any way). £700 and even that may be high as its been there for a week with no comments.
Good if not top spec. 5ish years old. 1x drivetrain, dropper, non-obsolete brakes.
"where everyone was on a rigid rim braked bike. You could tell the ti one’s of course. Some cost a fortune. But they were functionally similar."
If you found xc bikes from the rigid and rim brake era to be indistiguishable from each other:
Then you probably wouldn't find a functional difference between this and the latest s-works costing 15 times as much.
Thats not intended as a dig by the way, in a blind test and on bikes correctly set up for us, most of us would struggle to differentiate between them I'd wager.
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If you found xc bikes from the rigid and rim brake era to be indistiguishable from each other:
My not Very important point wasn’t that they were all the same to ride. My point was that if you were new and turned up on a cheap one it looked like everyone else’s.
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Then in the cheap-middling (£1500-£2000) there’s loads of decent choice. My bike falls into that bracket and I don’t think Z2’s and Deore 12s are really a compromise compared to higher tier components anymore.
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I couldn’t agree more. My fs bike is gx and a rhythm fork and I’m pleased to be able to ride such nice stuff. But these bikes are around £2500 now for full fs. You will of course find better deals at the moment but I think those days will be in the rear view mirror soon
Well ok there's a fairly obvious visual distinction between hardtail and full suss
If you want a full suss to fit in at the trail centre, here's a £1.1k 4 bar full suss with black stanchioned rockshox, one-by, a dropper, and a pair of minions.
I'm sure there will be some boardman snobs but for feeling like you've got similar to everyone else that seems to fit the bill.
I think possibly my mistake hear is not fully allowing for inflation over 34 years
In that time a teacher starting salary had roughly trebled in that time. So my £700 kona would give you more than £2k which would but a good fs bike. It might be a bit more but than that? it really is a different world to a rigid rim brake bike.
I think my wife’s Fire Mountain was say £350. It looked like mine but was genuinely horrific and had to be moved on. I’d forgotten this gem. On a week tour round Crete her brakes were so bad I went back up the trail to find her biting her wrists. I asked her why she was doing this an and she said she was trying to distract her mind from the pain in her fingers. To be fair I might have noticed earlier that the brakes needed a reach adjustments