Upgrade fear in the current climate..

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Rick
Posts: 2034
Joined: Sat Aug 29, 2009 4:30 pm

by Rick

I was afraid to upgrade to "click shifting", and "brifters" and to "threadless headsets" and to "10 speeds" and to "BB30", because a knew those were all just silly fads that would soon be obsolete.

Looks like I got stuck with BB30 :oops:

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kman
Posts: 1117
Joined: Wed Jul 13, 2005 10:51 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

by kman

Good discussion. I had similar concerns as the OP. I'm thinking if I go 2nd hand, like I normally do (drip feed upgrades over the years) then hopefully, if this disc brake revolution does occur, there will be plenty of high end, non-disc frames available 2nd hand.
You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
-- Frank Zappa

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FreaK
Posts: 852
Joined: Sat Aug 27, 2005 5:57 am
Location: mOntreal

by FreaK

This reminds me a little bit of the discussion we had when BB30 came out as an open standard. I was right in that it did definitely stick around. What i didn't expect was the explosion of other sizes.
One thing that happened with MTB was that the market shrank a bit and if you wanted to build a fork it had to work with as many brakes as possible and if you built a brake it had to work with as many frames/forks as possible so there was a sort of standardizing force there.
I too hope there's a calming soon. I mean i can pick a bunch of smart stuff out of what's available but it's hard to say if there'll be a replacement down the road if something goes funny.
The Chris King internal headset has had a decisive impact on the custom frame market, and mtb forks seem to have settled down to a 1.5-1.125 taper, which is really good to see since that actually makes a lot of structural sense with a long single crown fork.
I don't know what the deal is with all the extraneous axle sizes though, that bugs.
it's actually possible to come to the conclusion even before realising it makes no sense at all
-
tymon_tm

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neeb
Posts: 1101
Joined: Tue Jan 27, 2009 8:19 pm

by neeb

It's a long time since anything has come along that will make almost all parts of the bike prior to the change obsolete/incompatible simultaneously. Disk brakes have the potential to do this as a disk equipped bike needs disk specific wheels, disk specific frame and forks, and at least a partial disk specific groupset.

Of course you can argue that a rim brake bike will still be perfectly good even if disks become the norm, but if all high-end road bikes in a few years time are sold with disks (as seems likely if they end up being universally adopted in the pro peloton), then there will quickly come a time when you won't be able to get new high-end non-disk frames, wheels and shifters because no-one will be selling them. I'm not convinced by F45's argument that high-end rim brake stuff will always be around as a ww option, because as more & more of the really big R&R money gets thrown at disk bikes the weights will come down until the difference compared to a niche market rim brake bike is minimal or non-existent. So you will be stuck with what will soon become a retro bike as other technological developments come along.

But now is not the time to invest in a disk road bike because there are very few available, standards remain uncertain, and the technology will probably get much better relatively quickly.

So like indywagon above I'm at least happy to have a really nice rim brake bike (Foil Team Issue with SR mechanical) that should last me until everything gets sorted out. But I do wonder if the manufacturers have thought it all out in terms of sales...

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