cyclezen

also check Out Poseidon bikes
https://www.poseidonbike.com/
very nice bikes for very good prices, good quality components, good build, ride nice
road bike for $700 and gravel for $750 - and you can get addtl $50 off if you get on their mailing list...
I have their Poseidon X gravel bike - v-nice and surpising great value.
Ride On
Yuri

Herzlos

The GRVL120 would be my bike of choice then, if you can find it in stock: https://www.decathlon.com/collection...-bike-bicycle?
(The only reason I have a Giant Revolt 1 is that the GRVL120 and GRVL500 were unavailable at the time).

I've got the Triban RC520 road bike and it's great.

cyclezen

I did buy the Triban 120 GRVL in Europe, for my use there, and was greatly pleased by the bike. Stock, it actually is considerably lighter than my Poseidon X, and about the same level of components.
It does quite fine on-road, given that the tires are 40mm. And worked great on gravel and easy singletrack forest paths.
It comes complete in the box, with the front wheel already installed and requires almost no re-adjustment of controls. Set the saddle height (if the stock saddle fits - it's 130mm width...) and go ride.
Very impressed by the Trban 120 GRVL.
Ride On
Yuri

prj71

Not sure if they are any better now. How long ago is back in the day?

I had a 2016 Cannondale Bad Habit Mountain bike. It was a piece of ****. The rear swing arm cracked on it twice (crackandfail indeed), their PF BB design constantly creaked, No matter how many times the bike shop worked on it and all of the supension bearings started creaking within a year. After I received the 3rd swing arm replacement I sold the bike. My Cannondale "crack n' fail" experiment was over at that point. Never again.

Lombard

Hmmm. Their BB30 has been troublesome for some. I am lucky that I never had a problem with the BB30 creaking on my 2014 Synapse in 16K miles - knock on carbon!

mstateglfr 

Funny rhyming nicknames dont actually mean there was some widespread issue, but they do stick with someone because they are memorable.
Frames from nearly 40 years ago failing /= any sort of issue now. Some of the cantilevered chainstay frames from the early 90s cracked. Frames from 30 years ago failing /= any sort of issue now.

I know actual data isnt available, but I would love to see the actual % of frames that cracked from Trek, Specialized, Cannondale, and Giant thru the years. You saying 'a lot of issues' really doesnt clarify anything and I would bet is an overstatement.

veganbikes

That is true, but folks who worked at shops in the 90s had their issues with Cannonades cracking and issues with Headshocks and stuff like that. I would be curious to know the actual data though as I never really pressed them hard on the issues of how many compared to other stuff.

Old frames cracking not really to blame on the manufacturer but during a relevant lifespan sure. My Specialized Langster cracked after 11 years I couldn't say it was premature and in the end Specialized did replace it.

Lombard

I have 3 Cannondales with Headshoks. Never had a problem with any of the Headshoks. The Headshok is actually more reliable than many of the double stanchion front shocks. However, I have heard of people having issues with the Leftys on Bad Habits.

veganbikes

The big thing now is finding parts, some people have had good luck with theirs but we have had a few come in over the years needing work and no parts. Not really a lefty fan I rode their gravel bike with it and was like nope couldn't get used to it, it was a neat looking bike but I just like having two fork legs.

zen_

Polygon (sold by bikesdirect in the USA) is probably still the king of the price to quality ratio with modern bikes. They have a really good selection of mountain, road, and hybrid bikes, but the gravel bikes need to be revamped for sure.

prj71

The thing is the funny ryhming nickname came about BECAUSE there was a widespread and widely known issue with Cannondale frames being notorious for cracking. The funny name didn't just didn't get made up out of thin air for no reason at all.

Before I bought my Cannondale in 2016 I had done a bunch of research and learned about their cracking frames. I ignored it and ended up with a Cannondale Mountain bike where the rear swing arm cracked twice within 2 years. I should have avoided buying that bike.

Lombard

When any product is mass produced, there will usually be a few users with problems. And then funny nicknames follow. Even in absence of problems, brands are like religion for some. Here are a few:

ShimaNO
CampagNoLow
ScAM
SpeciaLIED

Just to name a few.

Trakhak

Sorry about your swing arm problems. That said:

Again, for the thousandth time: take it from a guy who worked at a Cannondale/Trek/Schwinn/Bianchi dealership in the 1980s and 1990s and raced with guys who rode all those brands and others---the "Crack'n'fail" tag had nothing to do with the reliability of the frames or lack thereof. It was just another example of meaningless bike shop humor, like "Shi*mano." In fact, Cannondale frames were more reliable than the lightweight steel frames that represented their competition.

Manufacturers of high-end steel frames, after all, had a decades-long history of competing with each other to offer the lightest possible road racing frames. As a consequence, those frames were (and are) designed only to last a reasonable amount of time when raced by a skinny European pro. Columbus, for example, originally specified a rider weight limit of 180 lb for its SL tubing!

One of the advantages of Cannondale's use of aluminum is that the frames were able to be designed with a greater margin of safety (i.e., a tube wall thickness-to-diameter ratio significantly below the 1/50 ratio used for the best steel frames) while still coming in at a weight substantially below that of the more fragile steel equivalent.

On that topic, I once asked a Bianchi area sales rep what was going to happen after I gave him a steel frame with a cracked seat stay for warranty replacement: was he going to send it back to Italy for credit? He laughed and said that Bianchi USA sold the Italian-built frames with a lifetime warranty but that Bianchi of Italy offered no warranty of any kind on their high-end frames. "We just throw the warrantied frames away," he said.

The policy of offering lifetime warranties on frames, by the way, was a brilliant Schwinn innovation that led to their becoming the dominant American bike manufacturer and forced any companies that wanted to sell bikes in the U.S. to offer similar warranties.

If Cannondale's bikes had been failing at the rates that internet memes suggest, they wouldn't have become such a dominant presence in the market. Just as Schwinn forced other companies to match Schwinn's lifetime warranty policy, Cannondale forced the previous major players to hastily add aluminum bikes to their lineups, which then led to the steel racing frames disappearing from their catalogs within a few years. (I once asked the Trek area sales rep what effect the switch from steel to aluminum had had on their business. "We're saving a lot of money because we're not replacing as many frames under warranty as we used to," he said.)

Short version: emotion-based reasoning aside, steel equals vinyl, aluminum equals CDs, carbon equals streaming.

prj71

https://www.google.com/search?client...e+frame+cracks

Lombard

When it comes to something like this, a Google search can find an example for just about anything:

https://www.google.com/search?q=trek...h=714&dpr=1.25

Lombard

As the saying goes, a warranty is only as good as the company that provides it.

Trakhak

A bit more nuanced in this case. Bianchi USA replaced the frame in question under warranty without hesitation, even though the cost of the frame came directly out of their profits.

The same Bianchi sales rep said that when a contingent of Bianchi of Italy executives came to visit the headquarters of Bianchi USA one time, they nudged one of the newer Italian execs and urged him to ask about Bianchi USA's frame warranty. He did, and when the Bianchi USA guy finished explaining, the Italians burst into laughter. One of the senior execs then said, "We can sell you frames with a lifetime warranty. But they'll weigh one or two kilos more."

Trakhak

The fact that Cannondales (and the other aluminum bikes) all but eliminated lightweight steel from the marketplace within a few years of the introduction of aluminum frames says considerably more than random photos on the web. If aluminum frames had been cracking at a significant rate, the companies would have been driven back to selling steel.

In any event, you'll find as many or more photos of cracked steel and titanium frames if you do those searches. If you do a search on Bike Forums for cracked titanium, by the way, you'll find a lot of horror stories about how difficult it can be to get a Ti bike manufacturer to replace or repair a cracked frame under warranty.

Lombard

The fact is any frame material can be made to be strong or fragile. Granted that for its given weight, aluminum is stronger than steel. A steel frame can be made as strong or stronger than an aluminum frame but it will weigh more.

Carbon fiber for a given weight will be stronger than either of those, but of course carbon frames are made lighter than either in order to appeal to weight obsessed riders so more can be charged for a carbon bike than an aluminum or steel bike.

Trakhak

Given that current American cyclists tend to be bigger and heavier (and older) than the average cyclist of 30 or 40 years ago, it was clever of the people at Quality Bicycle Products to recognize that the resurgence of interest in steel frames presented a marketing opportunity---thus, their Surly frames. Wisely, they didn't bother attempting to compete in the racing bike category. Instead, they built both cyclocross-style and grand touring/utility heavyweight steel frames. People buying those don't worry much about an extra pound or two here and there.

Myself, I'll take an aluminum frame every time. I spent a few decades buying the best available Columbus and Reynolds steel racing frames, when those were all there was. Now that I'm in my 70s and my testosterone levels have receded, I figure that the best carbon frames are the best, period, but decent aluminum frames offer around 90% of the benefits of carbon for about 60% of the cost, so I'm happy with aluminum.