I’ve never found Fox to offer better performance than Rock Shox, despite the higher cost. In fact, quite the opposite.

They did revolutionise things when they came out. RS had the Duke, the Psylo or the SID, none of which were a patch on Fox! The trouble is that (IMO) Fox improvements have been negligible at best, whilst cost has increased massively. RS have caught up, and are (marginally) cheaper.

You just have to ditch your constant up-graditus. Lower end components are now staggeringly good! As well as deore, lower end RS stuff is amazing. When I bought my P7 it came with 140mm Tora’s on. The bike snob in me thought ‘I’ll be upgrading them pretty quickly’. I haven’t though. Because I can’t possibly justify spanking a load of cash for what would be losing a bit of weight. The performance is more than I’m ever going to use, and they’ve a lock out.

The thing that has me shaking my head in total disbelief is the list price for Santa Cruz and other high end frames! Eye-wateringly expensive!!!! But I see enough of them out there. And not all of them are Llandegla car park Audi adornments

The current price of tyres has shocked me the most recently. Want the latest lightest-kevlar-walled-EVO-pacestar-carbon-impregnated-tubeless tech tyres? That’ll be £50, sir. EACH. 😯

Still not as bad as fatbike tyres…

Schwalbe Tyres? Bike24.de

Recently fitted Deore cranks-ace. And a Low end 9sp SRAM chain and cassette-ace. Superstar pedals, amazing slx brakes, Superstar switch stans wheels £ 200. schwalbe tyres reduced on bike24. Got spensive fork tho knocked down from 600 to 300. Don’t compromise on your fork and tyres IMO.

bettyswollocks – Member

The current price of tyres has shocked me the most recently. Want the latest lightest-kevlar-walled-EVO-pacestar-carbon-impregnated-tubeless tech tyres? That’ll be £50, sir. EACH.

Though, you can still go and get a pair of Specializeds that are better than most of that acronymed bollocks, for £54.

Yes some prices are stupid, forks especially as already mentioned.
Know a few guys who have bought £2.5K+ bikes on interest free over 2 years. All nice kit and much better riders than me but cant help thinking of stacking it big time and having a broken bike and still paying out for it.
So for me it’s pick out the deals for some new parts and 2nd hand too.

http://www.santacruzbikes.co.uk/SoloCarbon and click on the bike builder…

Have fun, just under £8,000…….

What a joke.

What a joke.

What’s a joke – that an insanely high-end MTB costs less than the cheapest new car you can buy?

That’s like me linking to the Lamborghini website and then saying car prices are ridiculous.

What’s a joke – that an insanely high-end MTB costs less than the cheapest new car you can buy?

And just as relevant… it’s cheaper than the cheapest jumbo jet you can buy too.

Okay, better comparison – sailing dinghies (also leisure sporting equipment) go from £4k to £10k+.

For a plastic bathtub with a sail on it.

Or golf clubs. Golfists spend silly money on carbon metal matrix titanium things to make it easier to spoil a good walk.

bencooper – Member
Or golf clubs. Golfists spend silly money on carbon metal matrix titanium things to make it easier to spoil a good walk.

Actually, I think golf went though its silly period about 8-10 years ago when the R&A went on about the need for hundreds of more golf courses – cue series of predictable bankcrupcies. Equipment has stalled in price with regular and huge discounting. Despite all the so called technology, average handicaps have hardly changed during the period of the so-called tech boom.

Some companies go through annual new products BS with a series of spurious upgrades. Others have maintained the core design throughout. Just bought new set of irons for my younger son’s birthday. £200 cheaper than they were 2 years ago. Same design, same forging, same beautiful ball flight and launch angle. Well known brand – new clubs are hard to distinguish between the equivalent model of 8-10 years ago.

MTB will follow suit soon……

p.s. might go for a good walk “enhanced” a little later!!

I have to say that normally I’m an XT, SLX, kinda guy: Ya know, medium, but reliable spec

See, this is for me where one of the biggest changes is, back in the 90s you used to aspire to LX, XT was high end, only for the proper hardcore, and XTR was, well, the bees knees and only really seen in mags and on the pros bikes.

Now people are poo-pooing SLX and XT as not good enough, or the bare minimum you could possibly consider using on your ‘proper’ bike

Deore is simply amazing now compared to higher end stuff from years ago, but there has been a subtle shift over the years, where once you would probably be laughed at by your mates for buying an XTR rear mech (waste of money, bash on first rock etc…) to fit to your mid range bike, now it almost seems to be expected that you will upgrade, and anythign less than XTR/XX etc is not worth the bother.

on the one hand I hate this, but on the other I love it because it means all my bikes are shod with nearly new XTR and XO stuff bough 2nd hand for less than the cost of new SLX, I’m such a hypocrite… 🙁

Agreed. I generally tell people that up to Deore, you’re paying for increasing performance, above that you’re paying for less weight.

27.5 nobby nics are £18 on bike24 atm and thats cutting edge niche right there!

Well I’ve just bought a Raleigh Altare. £150 from Halfords. Put some SPDs and crud catchers on and it’s good to go as a cheap road commuter. I’ve just paid £340 to have my Anthem serviced and repaired.

To be fair, having gotten into mtb’ing 5-6 years ago I think that the bikes around now for the same money are way better that what was around then.

I bought an Anthem 29’er X1 at the start of the year, struck a ‘good’ deal and paid less than rrp with some pedals & a tubeless kit thrown in, what a bike that is for the ‘money’. More than I’ll ever need, having owned 2 Nicolais before that I can honestly say that paying that for a frame is frankly bonkers for the ‘normal’ man.

However if you’ve got the money, who cares?

A 1.9tdi golf is a fantastic car and will do most if not all of your daily & life requirements. But I’m certain that if ‘Everyman’ could afford an Audi A6 avant with a 3ltr 200+ Bhp Diesel engine they’d have that.

Companies don’t make expensive stuff to annoy the normal man, they make them for the man who can afford them. But you can bet your deore kitted, 2nd frame & finishing kit MTB that they make most of there sales in the low end ‘Everyman’ end of the market, not the marquee end.

Building a new bike just now. The only new bits it will have are wheels, tyres and saddle. Everything else is classifieds amd ebay. It will cost less than my first ever mtb (92 Kona Hahanna). But with the components available now it should be a far greater bike. I hope it will be at least half as fun though!!!!

So, people are buying 2nd hand drivetrain with varying amounts of wear and unknown bashes, possibly mixed up from different sources? I hope it’s cheap enough not to be a false economy.

I’m not having a go, I just know such considerations put me off anything 2nd hand, and frankly, consumables don’t seem that expensive to me for a once or twice a year expense, but suspension servicing is if you don’t DIY.

Good points, mainly though, I really want Shimano to bring LX back. I was always anLX guy. Wasn’t keen on that STX with its shiny. I buy SLX now cos of price/performance/boringreasons. 94 LX, that was the peak right there.

Always smile at the SC bashing

The thing that has me shaking my head in total disbelief is the list price for Santa Cruz and other high end frames! Eye-wateringly expensive!!!! But I see enough of them out there. And not all of them are Llandegla car park Audi adornments

http://www.santacruzbikes.co.uk/SoloCarbon and click on the bike builder…
Have fun, just under £8,000…….
What a joke.

Other options are available, you can have the Alu version or the on without the Carbon wheels etc. I can get the same sort of WTF price out of the Ford Transit van builder.
The VPP alu frames cost similar to Orange frames which everyone want to own and pay a premium because some bloke called Fred made it.
They also happen to sell some very resonable single pivot bikes.

These threads tend to to be a mix of rose tinted memory, jealousy and envy. People earn different amounts of money shocker, bike manufacturers doing R&D and making new stuff shocker. You don’t have to buy it, there is plenty of cheap kit out there that works 10x better than stuff from the 90’s. I look at some entry level bikes and they are all kitted out very well, compare that with a few years back and we are a long way ahead.

I have just made my first step into carbon, it’s great. If half the people in here had their way all I could choose from is steel HT’s and crap components. No way I could have a bike with plush pedallable travel under 30lb that was capable downhill and ridable back up.

I find it strange how people feel the need to justify how much they spend on biking. Whether it’s a lot, or not a lot, it seems odd to argue about it.

Really, why should I care what you spend, and vice versa?

It’s all bikes and therefore all good.

Do people brought up on a diet of 1990s MBUK have a compulsion to ‘upgrade’ their bikes? I know I do. I also have a lot of friends who have got into Mtb more recently and they’re happy with just riding their off-the-peg bikes. Perhaps it’s just a mentality sort of thing. £2k buys you all the bike you could ever really want, but even then I would want to upgrade incrementally until I have that elusive full XTR.

Mountain biking has only gotten more expensive if you constantly aspire to the very best bikes with exotic carbon/ titanium/xx1 etc.

The price of bike bits does seem to have increased a lot in the past 5 years or so, but as many people have said, the mid-range kit is perfectly adequate.

I enjoy tinkering/replacing parts, but part of the satisfaction is in improving and eeking-out a longer life from my older, non-state-of-the-art bikes and riding the wheels off them (likewise for other toys and equipment)

Most people would benefit far, far more from improving their fitness and/or riding skills/confidence than from using more expensive cassettes or shifters. Who cares if you have XT/XTR/Audi S-Line/BMW M-Sport? Let your riding/driving do the talking.

ps. As for expensive suspension, judging by the number of people who don’t bother even trying to set up their suspension properly, most people would probably cope fine on a supermarket full susser, with a pair of RS Judys from the late 90s at the front.

pps. It does always amaze me when I see the sheer number of flash bikes at places like Llandegla (-in the car park. The only people that ever overtake are the occasional whippet on an XC bike on the initial climb. It’s extremely rare that we are caught up on the descents -blokes who aren’t that young, on our collection of used, battered bikes).

Most of those flash bikes will be as they came from the shop, though, and will possibly never wear out.