Sancho – Member
Tony, just a couple of lads I know from two different shops, who have dealt with you in the past and you have apparently left an impression on them both for them to say they wouldnt want to deal with you again.

Ed, please do me a favour, because apart from buying the odd bit from your shop (where i always got a great service) i cant seem to remember using any other shop in Leeds.

i use CRC for 90% of the stuff i ever buy, and Spa for my wheels (since 1987).

so please enk
lighten me who these shops are.

Examples please…

I bought an MRP xcg bash plate for my intense slope style. Right iscg mount. It fitted, after I’d spent an hour filing and refinishing it as due the position of a lower bearing it wouldn’t fit flush.

You can quite easily buy parts from the cheapest source based on the catalogue published spec that should work and then find yourself in a mare of situation with bits not working together, not fitting, or working sub-optimally.

Examples please…

> XT Octalink cranks mated with current Octalink BB where the crank arm bottoms out out the cup even when using recommended axle length, older version of BB clears, new one doesn’t as shoulder is thicker.

> Same again with ISIS BBs and some cranks, especially Middleburn and any BB without a stop collar on the axle.

> Tapered fork steerers that don’t work in very short headtubes as the taper is too long.

> Headsets and forks where the lower cup inner diameter clearance is tight and mated to a fork where the crown race taper area extends a bit so they bind.

> Cassettes that clip spokes when using hubs with certain flange sizes and spokes with thick/wide elbow

> larger (36 -38t) Chainrings not clearing chainstays on some frames withough using wider BB axle

> Disc brake mounts/adaptors where you can’t position the caliper outboard enough for some rotor/hub/frame combos

> Variations in tolerances with seat tubes and seatposts meaning some are a loose fit (Thomson I’m looking at you) and some are too tight (Van Nicholas I’m looking at you)

> Shifter and brake lever combos that don’t mesh well together

> Chain devices and full suss frames – always a lottery until you’ve actually mated them together to check for clearances

> Chainrings and cranks spider tabs that don’t quite work without a little ‘modification’

> Mixing chainrings (as well as other drivetrain components actually) from different manufacturers and then finding shifting ramps and pins don’t necessarily work together well.

I could go on but they are just a few plucked from experience.

Not everything adheres to standards, follows published specs or actually fits together nicely with everything else.

– Building a bike form a pile of bits that all fit together nicely is not that hard.

– Building a bike from a pile of bits that don’t can be a nightmare.

And here we are talking about customer sourced/chosen parts which means the risk of the latter is a great deal higher.

And has been said above – all the time in the workshop getting stuff to fit that theoretically “should” is lost money.

We seem to have a very sad expectation these days that people should do stuff for free and that making a profit is a bad thing – just because you enjoy tinkering with bikes, doesn’t mean that someone who does it for a living should do it “for the love”. Love, as they say, doesn’t pay the bills.

Interesting list I knew about the vast majority of them but the Tapered steerer one is new to me, probably as I no tapered forks.

If I were a bikeshop and a customer asked me to build a bike from a pile of bits he wanted to supply, I would at a significant cost AND want to check the build spec before quoting.

The tapered steerer thing is damn annoying, I’ve run into it twice on two different frames and with two different forks.

I’m not sure if it’s the fork manufacturer not following spec (if there is one!) on how far up the Taper from 1.5 to 1.125 should go, or if it’s the frame manufacturers being silly in speccing very short headtubes and not accounting for that taper.

For all we know some fo the cost difference int he OP’s original quotes could have been from the shop speccing slightly different models/part numbers that are not available at the cut down prices due to being odd/unsual options.

Nor did he tell us what kind of discussion was had with them about the actual specs or what was asked for.

Too little information to reliably comment…

I don’t object to paying the LBS to sort stuff that I’m too lazy, fed up, unskilled to do myself. The only time I think they take the piss is when, like my LBS in the UK, they quote me an hour of labour and a two week wait time to change a shock bushing. I bought the tool.