I think the comparisons with other shops isn’t necessarily fair. There’s no doubt that on a cold, mid January Tuesday afternoon, the footfall there is going to be pretty light compared to Evans on the high street. I’d suggest it’s more of a destination shop and in these sorts of circumstances, I don’t think normal rules apply. Labour costs for this sort of thing will be worked out to make sure the business is profitable and sustainable. The market will then decide if those prices are too high or not. That’s how capitalism works and that’s what this is.

Is the labour cost higher than the Evans on the High Street? Probably, maybe. But it’s not on the High Street, it’s right there in the location that your brake cable snapped.

Fast forward a year when that shop has to move because they can’t afford to pay the bills because they’ve not been charging enough labour. Who fixes the kids brake cable then? No one does.

and was 40 miles from home with a tearful nine year old

Luckily there was a shop on hand to save the day eh? Nah, let’s get on the internet and bash them. Plonker.

The post I think has served its purpose

which was?

Clearly Keith missed the part in his rental agreement with the site that stated not only did he have to pay rent, he also had to install trail signage and fix the toilets. It’s shocking how much these bike shops are trying to get away with.

https://endura.me/

Materials aside, one of the biggest contributing factors to how comfortable a bike feels (assuming hardtail) is down to wheelbase growth and one of the biggest factors in this is toptube and downtube flex. Much more than shaped stays (again assuming traditional diamond frame.

Yes, often to be found sporting a monocle, chortling in a slightly sinister manner and driving a 2CV.

Hoolie[/url]

Has anybody had much luck with the Onza PF30 Eccentric Press Fit Bottom Bracket?

I believe the Onza is the same as a Problem Solvers one but with cheaper bearings. I’d recommend the Niner PF30 BB as this has a mechanism of keeping both cups in phase. Without this I think you’re more likely to suffer from premature bearing wear/failure.

I’m a big fan of EBBs, especially the PF30 type where the clamping force is on the face of the shell, not the ID. Other than that, the Bushnell would be my next preferred.

I’be built hundreds of frames with rocker/slider dropouts without a problem but I prefer the PF30 EBB (mostly for versatility as well as aesthetics reasons). I hate horizontal dropouts if also using disk brakes.

have a feeling one of the bike names was a town or village begining with H. Doing my nut in trying to remember where I saw the link earlier this week….

Hallett?[/url]

I, on the other hand, would be interested when my M El Mar comes due for replacement but I’d need a smaller size than you do…

If only we built stuff here so we could accommodate things like custom sizing, cable routing, BB shells (heh) etc…

Oh, hang on….

You know where we are :wink:

In fact I just did Mr Shand.

Woohoo! We’re all winners!

Did you also pop into M&S on the way home and shout in front of all the customers : “This jumper’s wrong! You need it to be bluer! You need to tell me it’s got pockets! I don’t like the hem! I’m your market for gods sake! You’re doing it all wrong!” ?

The Shand Drove isn’t right.

Yes it is.

You need to get rid of that road PF bottom bracket, and put a standard one in

No we don’t. It’s a 73mm shell (i.e. not road) and we need it to run an eccentric BB for the Rohloff hub.

you need to put mounts on that carbon fork to make it at least look more custom that I’m getting something more than a £60 decalked and lackered chinese one

I’d like to put mounts on it but it will cost me more than I can afford for the tooling and once I’ve done that, I won’t recover the cost. So we do a steel fork with dynamo routing and luggage mounts instead.

the 58 size one needs another inch of stack height

Not for me and all the other people buying them it doesn’t.

and you need to tell me that it can take a triple.

No I don’t.

I am your market

Really? I didn’t see that coming….

we’ve got/ had 4 Fargo’s in the family plus several other Surly and Salsa fat and road bikes. To buy your frame it needs to be better or cheaper than a Fargo, and at the minute it’s neither.

Ok. Buy a Fargo then. I hear they’re great.

BTW, if the tone of your post reflects the type of customer you’re likely to be then I think I might have dodged a bullet.

The Shand Driver is their Fargo copy, steel frame/ carbon fork and they’ve price matched it to £980 for the frameset.

It’s the Drove, (not Driver), it isn’t a copy and we didn’t price match it. Other than that. you’re spot on.

This is where Surly/Salsa are successful: they listen to the market, and this has nothing to do with rent and heating costs

eh? I was responding to someone saying that they could bash out a steel hardtail for £450 and have a business. I was illustrating why they couldn’t.

And you’re right, QBP do listen to the market, they have a massive network of dealers who tell them what sells and what doesn’t. And that’s why’ll run out of Fargos, because hardly anyone wants them, it’s too high risk (niche). They’ll bring some in and sell out what they have. Job done. They don’t have an unlimited pot of cash for this stuff so they’ll be maximising the return on their investment as much as they can.

At what point is someone in the UK going to start welding these together, with the same geometry, lets say £300 for labour plus VAT, lets say ballpark £450 and have a business

Except that’s not a business.

Where’s the money to pay rent, heating, consumables, tool depreciation, contents insurance, goods-in-transit insurance, product liability insurance, public liability, paint, shipping costs, shipping boxes, packaging, NI/PAYE, warranty, advertising, marketing, office costs, accountancy costs… see where I’m going with this?

Little bump? 2 days to go.

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/joining-the-dots-the-highland-trail-550-journal

Like the non-disc Skinny malinky and whilst their stock sizes don’t work for me (my P+J which is all-day-comfortable has a 55cm ETT, the Shand has 54 or 56) they seem to do custom at no extra cost?

Yes, all Skinnys include custom fit/sizing at no additional cost.

Skinnymalinky

Ignore that – not discs

Don’t look at this then!

David’s Skinnymalinky disc by Shand[/url], on Flickr

If I bought one Steven, could you apply some Salsa decals to it?

just peel ours off, the Salsa ones are still underneath.

My mate has a custom Shand and besides the admittedly superb custom paint job it’s almost exactly the same as my Salsa

Of course it is. The geometry is identical, the tubing is exactly the same, the BB shell, dropouts, headtube and cable guides are all carbon copies (pun intended) of the Salsa. No difference at all. Even the lifetime warranty is the same.

I’m just back from a first outing on some Knard 41mm tyres. Seem ok. Although to be brutally honest, I’m not sure I could tell much of a difference from the Nanos. Seem to shed the gloop pretty well.

If it helps at all Ian, I can stick a form up on our site to capture images and words. I can do whatever you want with them once they’re submitted. I suspect they may make their way to us anyway!

That’s funny. Reminds me of this :

16×20″? Pah, that’s tiny compared to mine! ;-)

I’m surprised the Adventure Show has offered Lee a job yet. She’s a natural and would complement Cameron McNeish early well.

She’s the main presenter (properly live!) on an upcoming episode of ‘Out For The Weekend’ on radio Scotland. Couple of weeks time I think.

ah, never mind!

@madeupname where are you?

What you have is a pretty standard setup. Leave the the rings, they just keep the cable from wearing the paint on the headtube. The downtube shifter bosses can either be removed and replaced with an STI boss like this :

or you can leave the boss and fit an adapter like this :

second option is simplest. Doesn’t require any frame mods.

I’d be wary of dating a bike based on cable stops. It’s not an item the factory will pay a huge amount of attention to and could quite easily run for a few years or just as likely change during an MY.

If anyone is really desperate for cranks (RS8), drop me an email. We still have some stock that were destined for bikes but I’m not 100% convinced I want to supply them fitted now that I know we’ll have no warranty backup for them.

Oh, and not at SJS prices!

No idea where you are @bearnecessities but happy to sort that out for you if you’re stuck.

It’s really sad this. I’ve been dealing with them for as long as I can remember and you’ll not find many people more enthusiastic about their job than Mathew. The structure of the company is odd and I’m pretty sure that had more to do with the demise than the product offering itself. We also shouldn’t forget that there’s a few people out of a job with practically no notice. I spoke to Mathew yesterday and he’s completely gutted and shellshocked.

It might be a bit tricky running tubes on Grail’s as they’re designed for tubeless,

They’re fine with tubes. I’d recommend the Grails. Really nice rims. You might also look at the Pacenti SL25.

Why 26″ wheels? Serious question.

Wow, 3 pages of comments about a bike that no-one wants to buy! :wink:.

I saw this thread yesterday and resisted chiming in as I thought it might be better if it just quickly died a death!

Seriously though, there’s a lot of interesting stuff here, some useful and insightful and some just plain wrong and ignorant. The key thing for me (personally) when reading a thread like this is to remember it doesn’t really matter. Sure, there’s some gobby shitebags that like to have their voice heard, so they shout louder, but those people are never going to be our customers, I kind of think of them as the same people in the audience at Top Gear, moaning about how crap the new Porsche 911 is and how they were just about to buy one but how now they’ll just buy a Clio instead.

We think about things very carefully at Shand, we don’t dive into things lightly and when we can’t tell the whole story, sometimes things can look a little odd. I accept that this may be one of those occasions.

Importing a product directly from an overseas manufacturer and ‘adding value’ before selling on to the consumer is not a new business model, and I’ll bet every single person on this thread has purchased something in this way. The bicycle consumer is pretty unique (I believe) as there’s a small number of real geeks who not only want to know about the complete supply chain, but also want to shout and tell everyone else. I’ve not really come across them in other sectors, maybe they do exist, I don’t know. Perhaps I just don’t visit choppingboardtrackworld or pictureframes.net often enough. The thing is, you get to take your choice, you get to decide if buying something direct from the factory with the added risks is something you’re happy doing. For some, they’ll decide that they’ll go that way. Good on them. For others, they’ll do the sums, work out how much the extended warranty, custom paint finish, faster delivery, local pre-sales and after-sales care, fitting of headsets and BB etc, availability of spares etc is worth to them, and they’ll make a decision. But, and here’s the rub, I would bet that almost all of our customers who buy this bike will never have even thought about Alibaba or AliExpress or (shock horror) even know about STW. As is evidenced by just about every thread on this forum that mentions us, STW forum regulars are just not our type of customer (that sounded wrong, I meant that we’re not their type of bike company). Also, we’ll sell full bikes to riders who can’t or don’t want to build a bike themselves. That can be a deal breaker to some.

I am slightly surprised and perhaps a little worried about the comments regarding devaluing the brand. I don’t really understand that. We still design, manufacture, paint and assemble the vast majority of our bikes in house. At the moment, that one carbon bike is the only thing we don’t make. I hadn’t considered how adding this bike would somehow lessen or cancel out all the other stuff we do. Someone commented that they were reconsidering buying a UK built Stoater from us in light of this new bike. That comment bothered me and I brought it up at work earlier. I think it was just a stupid, ill-informed comment to make but it bothered me more than I expected it to.

UK manufactured carbon frames (as Mike already commented) can be made here. It’s something that we are working on right now. But it takes a lot of time and a lot of money. And when we do it, I guarantee, there’ll be a thread on here about how expensive they are compared to Asian imported frames and why don’t we just import something from China, paint it and sell it for a third of the price!

A last point as this is getting very long. I am passionate about manufacturing here in the UK. That’s one of the biggest reasons I do what I do, I want to make stuff and I want to employ people who want to make stuff. The truth is, it’s really hard. Like really, really hard. I want to build a better company for everyone involved at Shand and if that means looking elsewhere for revenue streams to help keep the workshop lights on so we can carry on making stuff, then I’ll explore every avenue possible.

There’s a lot more to this direction we’re heading in than this one bike. It’ll take time to come to fruition and hopefully it might bring some of the doubters round. Perhaps it’ll all make sense at some point.

I’m unlikely to comment again on this thread (I really would like it to die!) but if people who were thinking about a Shand but are now unsure for whatever reason, please contact me directly and I’ll be happy to talk through things on the phone or email.

Im on the hunt also for something like this,whether its a shand custom bracket I dont know.

It’s a Supernova light mount but you do need an eyelet on the underside of the crown for that specific one.

Police are reporting a fight breaking out in Oykel bridge. Apparently a dispute over of the last bag of Haribos…..

I see Lee ‘rested’ for about 4 hours lats night. I’m pleased about that, I had a a horrible feeling she was just going to keep going!

Ian B also got some rest and is doing really well.

I say this every year but really inspiring stuff out there. I’m sure most will have seen it but I really enjoyed Ian’s film of it from 2014 :

HT550 2014

Only those 2 that I know of. NewRetroTom (last years winner on a Shand) has wimped out of doing it this year. Doing some little race in the States instead ;-)