Are the BSOs of today really any worse than the bikes we use to use as kids? Sure they aren’t going to be fit for purpose for proper offroad riding, but then again I’m pretty sure the Raleigh blazer and 2 ton grifter i owned weren’t either.

I’m sure they’d be perfectly fine for riding round the street, messing around in the woods however.

Cheap bikes are definitely crappier these days! Back in the 80s when BMXs were fashionable a cheap kids’ bike was at least functional, unlike now when they have to have gears and full “suspension”.

What we class as a bso now bares little resemblance to the bikes that we had in the 80s. They were at least functional given the technology that was around at the time. Pretty rubbish by today’s standards for sure but given the advances that have been made, to still be making bikes that make 80s bikes look functional gives an idea of how crap some of the stuff around at the minute is.

I always wince when I see someone commuting on one of those – It must be so hard lugging 50lbs of metal around. Thankfully, the “suspension” stops working after a few hours of riding so at least it doesn’t bob and wallow.

There’s obviously a market for them though, I guess a £129.99 “full suspension” bike looks like a better deal than a £129.99 rigid bike. I know which one I’d rather have.

I don’t think they’re responsible for people not enjoying leisurely bike rides or the collapse of society and the obesity epidemic. Blame the playstation / multi-channel TV.

But to be fair most non cyclists will watch loads of TV spend hours on their phones ect, ect.

Interesting take on what people who don’t ride bikes spend their lives doing. Many people manage to fill their lives with lots of other things that don’t involve riding a bicycle. Many non cyclists apparently have busy, interesting, fulfilled lives. Amazing, I know.

Slightly ironic that you’ve written the above on an internet forum. And it’s etc btw.

I see it all the time at the LBS.

“How much to get little Fred’s bike going again?”

“Well to put it right and safe will be £80”

“Yeah, but, it’s only a kids bike, how much to get it going?”

It’s ONLY your child’s bike, you know, would you like him to be safe? 🙄

Don’t get me started on the amount of people who ask me, because I’m a cyclist, advice on which bike to buy. What sort of riding are you planning? How much have you got to spend? They then baulk at £300 for a tidy hybrid and go and buy a Asda special for £79.99 because they “just want to see if they like cycling”. Well, that will be a self fulfilling prophecy, I’ll bet it does 2 laps of the park before rusting in the shed, because you didn’t like riding that price of crap.

But what do I know?

Are the BSOs of today really any worse than the bikes we use to use as kids?

I think shit bearings and plastic parts are a given at sub £100 but if the manufacturers concentrated on just a rigid bike with working rim brakes they may achieve that, instead of spaffing the none existent budget on full sus and discs which weigh a tonne and don’t actually ****ing work.

In my early teens I got a <£150 emmelle california with my paper round money, was heavy, crap tyres and bearings but it coped with flying around the streets, some offroad and didn’t fall apart in the 12months or so I had it before it got nicked. Dunno tho, can anyone shed light on what was the cheapest of cheap was back in 80s/90s?

Dunno about cheapest of cheap but I got a Carlton road bike for £100 in 1982/3 that lasted over a year of commuting 14 miles each way plus other rides.

Mid 1990s I got an MTB (hardtail) for similar price for riding to college – so good that when we moved house I left it in the garden shed 😆

In the early 90s, my Dad bought me a “Gypsy” mountain bike from a French Hypermarket. It had a sweet purple – yellow fade paint job and I’m sure it was modestly-priced. But it had 18 gears that working and was all put together pretty well, plus it didn’t have any unnecessary accoutrements like suspension. It survived me blatting around the woods until I could get a ‘proper’ MTB.

Remember kids, £50 gets you a rigid 1993 Kona Hahana* with working gears and brakes.

Superb for just riding around. And old skool off-road.

*possibly a little large got the pre-teen kids, but for a teenager, that and £50 of tools and spares will go a lot further than any £99 BSO. Anc teach them basic bike maintenance.

The cheapest ‘BSO’s from the 1980s/90s I can remember were the Falcons and Emmelles but I think they were actually decent cheap bikes! Even early Carreras were not too bad. I think the advent of suspension forks started the slide. EVERY bike nowadays has to have at least a suspension fork. I wouldn’t touch any bike with a suspension fork until I got to the £500+ price point. Before that, rigid fork and fat tyre does a much better job! Women’s bikes are a problem. Recently, I had to really search hard for a small, female specific bike under £1000 with decent forks. My S.O. has just ordered a 2013 Orange Diva HT at £850 but it comes with Recon Silvers and a host of other decent parts. The 2015 Trek Skye has cheapo RS coils which let it down, I felt.

My first fs was off ebay appolo or viking I think solid iron when i put it on the scales it was 45lb but it looked good lol

Are the BSOs of today really any worse than the bikes we use to use as kids?

I worked in a Lbs from 1978-81 and you didn’t see many totally rubbish bikes. for the most part spares were pretty generic so you could sort most bikes out. Cost wise the above Raleigh Grifter might have been a 35lb tank but it wasn’t cheap, about £80 or £400+ in todays money 😯

Hi all,

I fairness I purchased a Halfrauds Carrera Kraken for my son thinking it should last the distance/a distance. Within one year the only thing of major significance is the frame & forks ;-( whilst one would think that it was just an upgrade path, I would add that most parts just wore out or broke. In my sons defence he did manage about 2500Km in the last 13 months….I guess Krakens are built to a price and for lighter use 😉

JeZ

LOL at that, but it’s not exactly a good analogy. That would be like a cycling newbie with a brand new top of the range Specialized (it would be a Specialized wouldn’t it?) telling one of us lot that their CX/touring bike wasn’t up to the planned towpath ride. Personally if I was leading a group walk up mountains (in my Inov-8s most likely – wore boots on a mountain for the first time in years to walk up Snowdon and my feet didn’t like it), I’d probably tell people not to wear jeans and Nike fashion trainers.

Cost wise the above Raleigh Grifter might have been a 35lb tank but it wasn’t cheap, about £80 or £400+ in todays money

That’s exactly the point I was going to make. Even ‘cheap’ bikes in the ’80’s were expensive in relation to the prices that BSO’s are now so I would expect them to be better quality. Of course the cheap an nasty supermarket BSO’s are going to be exactly that these days – can you imagine even thinking about buying a bike from a supermarket in 1982?

jezzep >> I fairness I purchased a Halfrauds Carrera Kraken for my son thinking it should last the distance/a distance. Within one year the only thing of major significance is the frame & forks ;-( whilst one would think that it was just an upgrade path, I would add that most parts just wore out or broke. In my sons defence he did manage about 2500Km in the last 13 months….I guess Krakens are built to a price and for lighter use

So what you’re saying is the components – which you’ll find on similar or more expensive priced bikes from other brands – are goosed, and the frame and fork are still going strong? What does that have to do with it being a Carrera or a bike from Halfords? If anything, the one thing which Halfords are responsible for is the bit which is still fine!

No idea what the deal is nowadays, but their old frames were great (made by Merida). My (2009?) frame is still going strong. All the other bits have been replaced or upgraded, but the frame is braw 🙂

There’s a load of BSOs in the local Asda, all sitting there on the shop floor with forks the wrong way round. 🙄

My brother-in-law bought some heap of shit road bike for about £179 fondly imagining that he was going to get into triathlon and then finding out too late that the bike was barely capable of being ridden more than about 5 miles without killing its owner. It also weighs more than my hardtail!

BSO’s have got worse because back in the 80’s they didn’t have suspension or disc brakes.

Now they do, but the idea of value for money hasn’t changed. So people expect a bike with all the latest stuff for the same bargain price they were in the 80’s

It will only get worse as bikes get better – kids will want a dropper post next – imagine how bad that will be when Asda are flogging it.

So should we come up with a generic, “look for this in a BSO” list for people to use? I.e (correct me if I’m wrong)
Rigid F&F
Minimal gears
V-Brakes

Do I make sense?

Yes. But. The parents are grown adults, in theory perfectly capable of researching the best bike for their kid and understanding the difference between cheap rubbish and something decent.

Their parents grew up riding Grifters and Choppers just like we did. Kids bikes are toys for kids – wanting a bike to play with and wanting to be a cyclist are different things. Unless their parents are cyclists and the kids are going to ride with them then a toy bike is fine for what a kids will use it for.

Reminds me of service calls I used to get whilst at Sky, Pikey complains that the picture isn’t that good and nothing like what they saw on the demo Sky set up in Curry so there must be something wrong with the sky box.
Transpires its because the Baird TV bought from ‘Shitehouse’on tick’ isn’t that good especially when your comparing it to a £900 Sony that the store are using.
Worst thing is the Baird which is a £250 TV will end up costing them similar to the Sony after they have finished paying for it with the massive interest rates.

Have you seen what kids do to bikes,leave them in the middle of the road,chuck them down grass banks in a ghost bike race (like we used to do),leave them out in the rain,ride them around with flat tyres.

Much as I’d love to get my girls decent bikes, (7+8 YO) so far we’ve had four bikes run over, (only one by me)
🙂
Cheap bso’s have their place, and that place is out in the rain, under the wheel of next doors pickup, with the dog chewing the foam off the seat 😆

An Asda £79 special is a bit rich though, I’ve had more success getting them from a local charity shop depot for £20 max.

There’s enough to stress about without having to round up my kids bikes every night and the horror of them taking precious shed space.

I presume we’re talking a while ago? Not much wrong with the picture on my £200 TV!

The kids /low end stuff is shite of the first order. The fact big names like Shimano put there name to derailleurs with plastic parts at pivot points that always always! deform within 6mths to year of light riding, after all these years in the business is a straight up rip off.

Going back in time even the cheapest roadie deraillers on low spec first generation MTB’s, didn’t have plastic parts at pivot points, they are taking the royal piss regardless of price. Unfortunately cars have gone the same way, plastic (not used for weight saving) where metal should and was used in the past, a great example being plastic clutch pedal couplers that used to be metal, the car industry has created a wear part that virtually never failed before W@nkers.

I worked in Halfords from 1997-2002 as a part-time sales and repair bod. At the time, it was my dream job and I absolutely loved it when the cycle section started to fill with GT, Kona and Voodoo bikes. (We didn’t sell many of them!).

With a full set of good tools and some quiet moments, I managed to tackle most mechanical jobs and learnt lifelong skills including dealing with the public, sales and, of course, a reasonable level of bike fettling. The full timers used to save the “hard” jobs (BB / headset replacement, wheel truing etc) for me at the weekend.

The very bottom rung of the bike market was the Gemini Outrider, which usually sold for £80-90, in a very bright orange colour. We sold tons of these bikes, which were a bit of a Halfords in-joke, despite the fact that a fairly reasonable Apollo cost only another £15-20.

It was almost impossible to set-up said Gemini to work properly: the gears were ok – but the wheels, caliper brakes, contact points and tyres were beyond dreadful. I remember that there were some hard folk who rode them every day to work for years on end.

In those days, there were no high quality children’s bikes. I remember the Apollo Space Cadet, which tellingly had “no-one can hear you scream in space” written on the seat stay. If and when customers brought them back with a defect, we simply exchanged the whole bike and binned the old one.

At times (e.g. run-up to Christmas), we were encouraged to sell the bikes without building them; i.e. for home assembly. I can tell you from experience of building thousands of low-quality bikes that this isn’t something you can do easily: there were typically no instructions and the only tool that came in the box was a piece of thin metal with bolt-shaped holes stamped in it. I used to take real pride in fixing home-assembled bikes so that they were safe and worked properly!

The simpler Apollo bikes of the Apollo range and certainly the Real and Carrera bikes were actually pretty decent and didn’t cost a huge amount more than the real BSO fare (like that Gemini). I still see loads of them in use today. In these days before Islabikes / Frog etc, there were no real quality offerings for kids’ bikes.

Customers at the budget end of the market were actually more insightful than I think we give credit for in this thread. Most were simply acting on a whim or a vision of cycling on a rare sunny day along a flat towpath; for which a £300 was arguably not going to offer VFM. Even back in these days, a good tenth of customers were taking the in-house finance offers, which were generally at 15%+ APR.

In the short time I was there, you could see that the market was widening so that the cheaper end was getting cheaper and the top end was getting more expensive. You could (and definitely still can) buy a pair of tyres or a decent saddle for the price of said Gemini, which, from looking at old Halfords stock from the mid-90s, was less typical of the market in the past.

That final trend seems to sum-up where society has gone since those times really – the top is getting further away and things are really nasty at the bottom.

Ben, my experiences and conclusions are almost exactly the same.

It’s the same tend we are seeing with all forms of retail, availability of cheaper and cheaper items (seems like a bargain), and the trade off is service. FFS, in some shops after wandering the barren wasteland of endless isles with no expert in sight, you even have to scan and pack the bloody thing.

As with so much of the march of ‘consumer choice’ this comes at the expense of all other considerations.

in some shops after wandering the barren wasteland of endless isles with no expert in sight, you even have to scan and pack the bloody thing.

Well if they can’t be bothered to turn up and take your money, is it really stealing? 😉