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Where can I find a cheap pretty bike?

Where can I find a cheap touring bike?

  • Since everytime I talk about my converted mountain bike, and everybody gives me these @#!*% responces. Where is the best place to find a nice, cheap, and comfortable touring bike that wont put me into bankruptcy. I find the perfect bike that I would love to have, but its like $700. Everywhere I look, they are just outrageous. Can anybody give me any suggestions.

  • Answer:

    Based on your question, you believe that $700 is "outrageous" for a touring bike. Let's go over this so you don't think I'm an idiot. First, what do you mean by touring? Generally, there are 3 different definitions of velo tours- one is credit card touring, where you ride your bike from hotel to hotel on a planned and dated route and don't carry anything- except of course your credit card. The next is day touring, where you carry just enough to support yourself for a "one day there, one day back" quest, perhaps combined with credit card touring. The final one is loaded touring, where you carry everything you need to be self-sustaining on a long trip. If you are planning a credit card tour, just about any bike that you can confidently ride to your destination will do the trick. It might not be the easiest thing in the world to ride an entry level bike to a destination, but it can be done. Just hop on any bike and go. For a day tour, the same bike can be used as long as it has facility to carry the stuff you want to carry. A loaded tour takes a LOT more. It will require specialized equipment and careful planning on what to take so you don't kill yourself going over expanses of road. It needs to be as light as possible yet tough enough to handle the additional loads as well as being relatively maintenance free- you'll only suffer a twisted wheel on a loaded tour once before you realize that extra few bucks should have been spent on a better bike. So, lets look in to the practical side, and give some perspective. In 1900 (the year), the average bicycle cost $56 and the average annual family income was $438 (look it up). This means that an average bicycle cost. This equalled about 90 DAYS pay. Fast forward to today, and the average bicycle costs $291 (all sources including department stores) and the average family income is $46326. The cost of a bicycle is now bought with just 13 hours work. Another way to think about this is that a $700 bike can be bought with income of under a week. Lets say you only make $10 an hour, or $22000 a year. A $700 bike will take you 70 hours, or less than 2 weeks, to pay for... lets call it 3 weeks with taxes deducted. If 3 weeks pay will put you into bankruptcy, then it is probably not a good idea for you to consider touring, or any type of vacation for that matter. For contrast, if you spent the same number of hours working to buy a bike today as they did in 1900, you'd have a $7200 bike! So, I guess what I am trying to explain is that $700 is VERY cheap for a touring bike, but it really depends on whether you are looking to really enjoy the ride, or looking for an excuse not to. By the way, I take 1 loaded tour a year- roughly 1000 miles over 20 days- and the wheelset alone on my touring bike cost $700 but I'll never have to worry about them failing. Not ever. Oh yeah, don't forget the several hundred dollars you'll spend on outfitting your bike- everything from front and rear racks and panniers to fenders.

Raymond at Yahoo! Answers Visit the source

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The least expensive ones I'm aware of comes from Bikes Direct. You assemble the bike yourself or have a bike shop do it for you. Free UPS shipping & no sales tax except in Texas. Links below. The Motobecane Gran Turismo looks the best of the two.

Old Hippie

$700 for a good bike is not outrageous. In your previous post you described a series of modifications you made to a cheap bike. If they were done as you described, you would have been well on the way to spending $700, so why not just spend the money up front and be done with it? I paid $500 for just the frame of my touring bike, second hand. I expect to be able to ride that bike for a lifetime. Cheap stuff doesn't last if you use it a lot, good stuff does. I paid over $500 for my first good bike and rode it for 28 years before I broke the frame in a crash. Amortized over that time it was a cheap bike. A bike like that would cost thousands today and it would still be cheap if I rode it for another 28 years. A cheap initial price does not equate to good value

Mtrlpqbiker

Honestly, I use my old german mountain bike that I put really low resistance tires on for long touring rides all the time. It's geared like a touring bike anyway haha Usually on craigslist I see older touring bikes for around $150-200 all the time. A lot of them are from the 70s, but as long as they are maintained I don't see a problem with that. If you want to though, it'd be bad *** to throw drops on that mountain bike... haha

Tony

sorry for the responses you didn;t like but real touring bikes are expensive reason is, they are low-volume and specialized not sold at wally world as bikeworks said though, you may not need that depends on what you really want to do a converted mt bike isn;t going to work for any definition of touring though unless it;s riding about 20 miles a day carrying nothing extra but that isn;t what people usually call touring either i doubt you have really thought about your goals if you had, you would already know most of the answer and not be all upset about the answers you got before on the other hand, do what you want ride your walmart bike we don;t care here is the answer you want : anything is fine wle

☼wle☆atlanta☼

Look for a good used one or try bikes direct. A good bike will last the rest of your life. Longer then about anything else you can buy except for a house. $700 is not that much http://www.bikesdirect.com/products/windsor/tourist.htm

John M

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