Originally Posted by
TKJava
Recently I was fairly laid up with knee surgery so I had the opportunity to watch too many YouTube videos and found this guy Hambini who makes custom BB's. He has many videos that show how poorly bikes are made and to such sloppy tolerances. I have a Canyon that I purchased mid-summer of 2019 that I absolutely love. Hambini does a video of how poorly Canyon frames are made and he's also trashing Orbea, Cervelo, Specialized and Cannondale. Does anyone find this information to be of value? Would a bike that met such strict tolerances be so expensive that we could not buy it? How does one know (really know) if their frames have voids in them or have oval bottom bracket holes etc. Are there frames that have been made to higher standards and how would you know? You can't go to a Trek website and under "specs" find something like bottom bracket hole round to within 0.000001mm and are parallel to within 0.0001 mm etc. etc. The same would go for all parts on your bike? Are we wasting our money or in order to afford a bike that costs $4K we need to put up with 1 out of 10 bikes being a total lemon? If you walk into a LBS today and look at Cannondales or Cervelo's I guarantee the salesperson is going to tell you that the frame is the best, why because every other bike manufacturer puts the same components on it e.g. Shimano Ultegra/Durace or SRAM Red etc. the only differentiation is the frame
How close is “close enough”. Does a bottom bracket
need to be within ±1 nanometer? Consider that there are a billion nanometers in a meter. I question anyone’s ability to measure something within ±1 nanometer. I question someone’s ability to measure something within the 0.01 micrometer. The first is 3x1^-9 inchs for the metrically challenged.
That’s not even NASA level tolerances. To put it in a way that people might understand, a human hair is 75,000 nanometers in diameter. The relationship between that hair and a nanometer is similar to the relationship between a mile and an inch. There are 63,360 inches in a mile. Now, imagine that you have a yard stick and try to measure ±1” in that mile.