Originally Posted by BHBiker

If it breaks...who do you contact?

Originally Posted by BHBiker

If it breaks...who do you contact?

Originally Posted by dsx724

Here's a bike I built with a frame from eBay. I just finished it this morning actually. 52 cm T700 frame. $1750 for the entire bike and tools.

https://gal.12scenicpoint.com/v/cycli...ghlightId=3878

Psimet is awesome! (love the Rival group)

There are one or two cosmetic blemishes but nothing serious. I can see why factories rejected them and they go for so cheap. The frames are sold around at just about material costs but thats better than losing several hundred dollars which is hard to recover given the tight margins asian manufactures have to work with.

Originally Posted by Quel

Kind of interesting to me, because you are seeing the same thing with one of my other hobbies: saxophone. Sax production was historically based in Europe (Selmer) or the USA (Conn, etc), and then the japanese built a good industry out of it (Yamaha, Yanagisawa). Now a days, Chinese and Taiwanese horns are starting to be built up. For years they were trash, student level at best, but recently they've started to produce some very good horns that could be played by a professional. Tons of no-name branded horns shipped to the states and finalized by Americans before being rebranded, so lots of smaller shops.

Is there a difference between a $5-6000 horn made in Paris and the $1-1500 one built in Taiwan or China? Yes, there is. But is it 3-4 times better? No way. Same with lots of other high end equipment, you really start to pay out the butt to get marginal improvments once you reach a certain point. And the Asian horns are getting better every month.

Same thing could be happening with road bikes. Seems like a good business opportunity for some young bike pro to take advantage of. Get frames from China/Tiawn, inspect them to check for quality issues, rebrand them and sell. That's basically all the big brand manufacturers are doing now anyways, but with more overhead costs that add to the final cost.

Originally Posted by dauphin

Is it just me or does the fork on this no name carbon frame look like the one on the Pinarello?

https://cgi.ebay.com/Full-Carbon-Road...#ht_2013wt_958

https://www.mallarte.com/Images/pinarello_paris.jpg

Originally Posted by Quel

Kind of interesting to me, because you are seeing the same thing with one of my other hobbies: saxophone. Sax production was historically based in Europe (Selmer) or the USA (Conn, etc), and then the japanese built a good industry out of it (Yamaha, Yanagisawa). Now a days, Chinese and Taiwanese horns are starting to be built up. For years they were trash, student level at best, but recently they've started to produce some very good horns that could be played by a professional. Tons of no-name branded horns shipped to the states and finalized by Americans before being rebranded, so lots of smaller shops.

Is there a difference between a $5-6000 horn made in Paris and the $1-1500 one built in Taiwan or China? Yes, there is. But is it 3-4 times better? No way. Same with lots of other high end equipment, you really start to pay out the butt to get marginal improvments once you reach a certain point. And the Asian horns are getting better every month.

Same thing could be happening with road bikes. Seems like a good business opportunity for some young bike pro to take advantage of. Get frames from China/Tiawn, inspect them to check for quality issues, rebrand them and sell. That's basically all the big brand manufacturers are doing now anyways, but with more overhead costs that add to the final cost.

Originally Posted by karesz3

From listening to people in the bike business, it appears that there is a huge difference in quality between a factory in China vs. Taiwan. It's apples to oranges since the Taiwanese quality is way superior to anything coming out of China.

Cheers

Originally Posted by phallenthoul

20 pro teams in TDF 2009.
11 use made-in-China frames.
6 made-in-Taiwan.
3 made-in-France.
1 made-in-USA.