MoAlpha

Bikeracer123

TimothyH

I'll look for some. Don't take it out much since I moved to the south 15 years ago. Too many drunk boaters on the lakes. Its really bad.

The combing around the cockpit was a royal pain. Space and time aside, take it slow and you can do it. She was built from plans but they also sell kits. Most of the how-to knowledge came from the Chesapeake Light Craft forums. Nowadays there is youtube.

MoAlpha

WhyFi

Fify.

Campag4life

Smaller bike builders don't compete in R&D dolllars which is the bottom line and why IMO their products aren't as good as the big brands but a couple of other points you touched upon.

1. Diminishing return. Indeed correct. Most secrets about how to make a great carbon bike are out there and there isn't a whole lot of difference in the performance of high end bikes in my experience. They may feel a bit different but they don't perform much different. Weight is a factor. Big brands makes some uber light bikes that won't break. Big brands I believe also test their products more rigorously and of course they can afford to because of their cash flow and if they don't a massive recall could bankrupt them. Big brands have more to lose.

2. Reverse engineering. Invention is rare. Ask the Chinese. China has a lot of very smart and talented engineers. Invention is genius which is much different than smart. If they steal our intellectual property, they are smart enough to figure out how to manufacture it. They may not be smart enough to create it. This portends to all of industry.

What do all big companies do? Competitive analysis. What is that? They buy the competition's product and cut it in half and figure out why they do what they do. If its considered a good idea and they won't get killed in patent infringement, they will make it like the competition. This is largely why diminishing return exists. Few secrets. But secrets exist. To me, an Allied will never perform like a Tarmac, TCR or R3/5. It is because of all the R&D and countless design iterations improving these models. Allied doesn't have the DNA. They look nice and no doubt perform 'good enough'. But if paying almost the same amount for an 'exclusive' bike like an Allied, I will toss exclusivity to the curb and opt for the DNA of a top brand. This is why big brands excel. Consumer know what to expect and they expect a very high level of performance based upon reputation. Its why most of us drive name brand cars, wear name brand helmets and even own a name brand cycling computer. Also keep in mind the only thing really not name brand on an Allied bike is the frame. The rest of the bike is name brand from the groupset to the tires to the wheels to the handlebar to the stem to the saddle.

Sy Reene

So.. IOW there's no likelihood for anything new or better to come of any new or better company. It just aint going to happen. All the big companies in existence today are, and will remain, the best, and we are stuck with til them the end of days.

Campag4life

No that's called a false extrapolation. You forgot what was written in the thread. Genius in nature exists. It is extremely rare.
Guys like Jobs, Musk and Gates...and you can throw less famous guys like founders Vroomen from Cervelo or Sinyard from Specialized...guys like this come about once in a lifetime...or if more frequently, rarely. Rare guys. Visionaries. The extreme right of the Bell curve. Gates for example scored a perfect 800 on his math SAT's. He has the IQ of Galileo. Musk may even be smarter than Gates.

Remember, big companies all start small. They grow due to their talent.

Funny thing about society is, the common man doesn't really understand talent. Talent is like a false construct for many. They can't see it or touch it. Many even doubt it. But it is what separates people and companies are made up of people and companies with extraordinary people will generally make the best products.

An extrapolation can be made to athletes. Yes we had Michael Jordan and LeBron James in our lifetime. And a slew of other talented but not as talented basketball players...like Magic Johnson and even Larry Bird. Then there is the home town. The best athlete in a given home town everybody knows. Or the best cyclist. I know the best cyclist in our town and have ridden with him several times. He would get dropped in the TdF but he can drop everybody in my town. Companies are that way. Crθme rises to the top.

WhyFi

Nope. Making a product and successfully managing a company are two vastly different things.

Campag4life

You are refuting yourself. Nowhere did I state that making a good product and successful management are not both vital ingredients. Of course they are.
The right mix of company principles is effective at both. Yup. That is how small companies become big companies. Yup.
Jobs reputation as impossible to work for including present day Musk is common knowledge. They expect perfection and many fall by the wayside trying to keep up. Both companies were/are successful. Jobs was hired twice.

WhyFi

No, I'm not. I'm refuting your circular logic stance that better products are available from bigger companies because bigger companies are bigger because they have better products. If that's an unfair or inaccurate way to paraphrase your position, then you've done a poor job of concisely stating your position. In any event, history tells us that any further discussion is a lost cause that'll merely be used a vehicle for more hurr durr durr on your part, so I'll bow out here.

Maelochs

By that logic, Keoniggsegg's cars aren't as good as Hyundai's. Not every business owner want to get big. And getting big shows skill and talent, not at making a product, but at building a business. Everyone has heard of Fender and Gibson ... and they make some amazing guitars. But look how many pro musicians play guitars made by much smaller shops. If bigger always meant better, all the pros would play Fender or Gibson.

You don't have to agree. I don't care. But I know different people have different dreams. Grant Petersen doesn't want to rival trek---is Rivendell, therefore, crap? That ex-NASA engineer making CF bikes down under .... he probably Is a genius ... but his bike suck because, after years in the corporate world, he prefers to have a small shop and work at a leisurely pace?

Some folks with tons of talent choose to stay hands-on, to design and build what they love designing and building. Some folks with tons of talent farm out the labor to others and instead build a corporation. But the guy who makes the breakthroughs? He might be the guy in his own home workshop in his garage. He can buy the same software, do the same math, learn the same physics and chemistry.

That genius might decide to work at home and turn out small batches of stuff--or he might choose to go to work for a company like Cervelo, where I can guarantee you, the founders Do Not spend all day designing the next bikes. They hire others, who also have a lot of talent, to do that.

Walmart is a much bigger company than Cervelo ... so Walmart is filled with geniuses, ... but you sure aren't buying their bikes.

Whatever. if someone chooses to conflate corporate success with product excellence, that is fine. Nowadays people believe all kinds of crazy stuff.

Maelochs

I love that wooden kayak. I can understand that it is hard to find a safe place to paddle it----it would be like driving a 100-year-old Rolls-Royce in LA rush-hour traffic.

Campag4life

Sure do.
Sadly, a lot of people that post on bike forums hardly know anything about bikes. Take the following thread if you need a good laugh.
Poor OP. He asked a simple question and not a single solid response.
Comical but reality:

https://weightweenies.starbike.com/f...p?f=3&t=155049

Dan333SP

I scored the same as Gates on the SAT, why am I not running a mulit-billion dollar corporation?

"Crθme" does not always rise to the top. Your athlete analogy works to disprove your own point. It's commonly said in racing circles that the greatest driver ever born was not Ayrton Senna or Michael Schumacher, rather it was an anonymous kid in an Indian slum who will never actually touch a motor vehicle in his entire lifetime because the circumstances did not align for him/her, or that individual decides they'd rather take up pigeon farming than go into racing.

Point is- The world's greatest cycling designers/engineers tend to take the best paying jobs which tend to be with the biggest and best funded companies, but that is not an absolute thing. There are plenty of possibly better engineers at smaller companies who have no interest in working for corporate behemoths for whatever reason (creative freedom, family relocation, whatever). They may have innovations built into their boutique frame designs that are "better" than what you're getting from a Specialized, or at least equal to, and the market ignores it because their marketing budget is tiny and they aren't interested in building brand recognition by offering lower priced mass-produced entry level bikes to subsidize a worldwide ad campaign. Plus, we're talking about infinitesimally small marginal gains.

All I'm saying is... the only way to know whether an Allied is a better bike for you than an R3 (or whatever) is to ride one and see how it makes you feel. It wouldn't keep Sagan from winning a sprint stage, it's not going to keep a MUP warrior from setting a PR on his favorite strava segment.
*

Campag4life

I hear you and a pretty well stated counterpoint. Btw, major props for 800 on your math SAT's. You have very rare mathematical talent...a fraction of 1%'er.

Yes it could be conjectured that the truly gifted are never heard of. But then hard to prove isn't it they possess this rare gift if untested in a suitable area that judges all the intangibles that make up the best in the world. But no doubt many very talented people that aren't among the public domain.
Typically however I still push back and say talent is recognized and rewarded.

I will mention Ben Carson the African American neurosurgeon who now works for the White House. He grew up against all odds. No father. A mom who kept him away from running with gangs. He speaks about how close he came to falling into the abyss where his peers mostly fell victim to. But he rose. Likely genius level IQ. His talent was recognized and promoted. There are other similar stories. These people are extraordinary to elevate themselves where almost all fall into obscurity and poverty. Most don't have the intellectual horsepower to overcome such devastating odds...but Ben Carson did. His talent rose. He was the crθme.

Maelochs

Ben Carson doesn't run an international corporation, Therefore he must be a failure. His creme didn't rise.

HTupolev

They largely don't have to.

The matter of diminishing returns isn't a "maybe." Diamond-frame road framesets are an extremely mature technology, and there's simply not much room to expand into. You have to throw a ton of advancement at a road frame to make any tangible performance headway.
Weight? Even all-steel touring framesets built for heavy-loaded riding tend to fall withing four pounds of an Emonda SLR frameset, which for most riders will cause around a 2% difference in speed when climbing steep hills.
Aero? A bit more oblique, but this is an interesting article, which includes a comparison between a Venge ViAS and a custom steel aero bike built by Stinner. With a rider onboard, the ViAS only had a .005m^2 advantage in CdA... that's about two watts riding solo at 20mph, or four watts at 25mph. For an average rider, it's around a tenth of a mph at 25mph. That's not nothing, but I think it's smaller than a lot of people would expect between a big-manufacturer carbon aero frame and a one-off steel bike made from off-the-shelf tubing.
Geometry hasn't evolved much in several decades. Most road bikes in the 1980s used about the same head angles and trail as those today, and the chainstays aren't dramatically different in length. Fit hasn't evolved much either, even though the changing appearance and use of the contact points can make it look like it has.
Engineering of stiffness and flex is interesting, but also misunderstood, and definitely not accurately-marketed. Power transfer losses due to frame flex are so small that they're difficult to measure, even on extremely flexible frames. Reviewers are actually really bad at guessing how stiff a bike is. Research into how frame stiffness affects pedaling has produced results that most people find surprising, and it doesn't seem to be super well-understood. This isn't to say that the big manufacturers don't make good bikes; they pay attention to what works and what doesn't, and act on it to produce excellent framesets. But it's as much art as science, and it's not something that makes massive strides year over year; it it was, the gains decade over decades would be astronomical. And as someone who regularly rides properly-fit and well-maintained framesets made over a span of forty years, that definitely isn't my experience. My '79 Fuji and my '16 Emonda pedal very differently, but they both pedal well, including at a high intensity.

At any rate, small builders compete by offering things that people want. Sometimes it's functional, sometimes aesthetic. It's usually not exactly one-to-one with offerings from big builders, because they have better economies of scale and are difficult to compete 100% directly with.
Sometimes it's that some small builder is the only one offering a particular style of bike with a certain type of geometry and a certain arrangement of braze-ons and a certain BB standard. Sometimes someone wants full custom. Sometimes the location of manufacturer has appeal. Many people who bought Terry bikes in the 80s - with 700c rear wheels and smaller front wheels - were looking for small-size road frames that could be fit aggressively, handle like average-sized road bikes, and have standard road gearing. Sometimes a rider just likes skinny tubes and lugs; sometimes a rider goes for a Calfee because they want carbon tubes and crazy lugs.

And, heck. If someone wants to be as fast as possible on the road under their own power, they're definitely going with a small brand, because the huge brands don't do recumbents.

Sy Reene

Or a smaller builder just hires the engineering talent away from the big guys.

ColonelSanders

Thanks for taking the time to write all that up.


I'm someone who would undoubtedly be quite happy on a bike built by a boutique builder, no question whatsoever, as I get to chose exactly the colour I want and how wide a set of tyres it can take.


I was playing Devil's Advocate and trying to put myself in the mindset of someone who may not be a professional racer, but values very highly, having a very fast bike, even if the difference would only be worth 1 minute over 40 miles.

znomit

Doesn't matter how hot the bike is, as soon as a fat, ugly, out of shape, mismatched kit wearing 41er jumps on it everyone's gonna point and laugh.

Hmmm

Get some gumwalls on that thing

MoAlpha

It's funnier when the kit matches and the Seppo owner actually refers to it as "kit."