I Need Your Help!

£78.98 is the best i can do, delivered to your door

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/26-Brand-New-Mountain-Silver-Bicycle-Bike-SL26M206...

Weight: 16 Kgs approx

And it's got Saiguan gears, eighteen of them too...

This is quite promising...

And it's 'designed for the UK market' - that's designed to be sold at a market, presumably

One thing it's very much not designed for is the wall trail, so have fun while it lasts if you get one. I take it you'll be wearing a helmet cam? love to see the footage

And check out the suspension design, there'll be zero chain growth, but the pedal bob should be exceptional!

This very much what I'm after. I can't see that dubious linkage dealing with the Graveyard section of The Wall too well....happy days!

And this line This bike is an ideal companion for your life. It offers families with enjoyments and mobility in a high level is both puzzling and intriguing.

I really think this is the one for me...

And yes there are plans for video footage, photos and words too

I must post this link up on the cheesy riders .... they'll love this

Don't mail order - buy from a shop, and then secretly film you guys taking them back in pieces trying to get a refund under the sales of goods act.

G-Bitch - I like that idea, "it said mountain bike on the label, so we rode it down a mountain, and look what happened!"

Halfords would be the best candidate, but I can only find a bike for £99 there. I would love to pay in the £70's ideally.

Surely JJB has a BSO for that money?

JJB are not even close, £129 for the cheapest full suss. It does have blue line tyres listed as one of the 5 stand-out features of it though.

Halfords clearance or some poop on display?

Google shopping does a pretty good job of encompassing the gamut of the mountain bike industry in its first two search results...

Motorworld or similar motor spares chain would be a good bet I reckon - they always have these things on display.

And in a very succinct way it pretty much captures the essence of the challenge. Can bike number 2 get me round Afan as successfully as bike number 1, if so I save £6939.13!

nah ... bike number 2 only has 660mm wide bars and
therefore will be far inferior (puts saucer of milk
in the corner !!)

UPDATE...

The bikes have been purchased!

We now have 7 adult full suspension bikes, 5 are by the well known and respected brand - Virus. These have MTB Technology apparently (it says so on the side!).
We also have a British Eagle and an as yet unidentified one.

Initial rides around the car park indicate that we are going to die! The forks are never going to cope with...well...anything to be honest.

I am being relied upon to overtake someone on the climb of Whites, it will be even more amusing than we first thought, as they really are exceptionally bad bikes.

The date is set - Sunday 22nd November. Feel free to join in if anyone is in the area, it will involve a loop starting with Whites climb, Parsons Folly to join The Wall descent, onto The Wall Climb and finish off with the Wall descent including the Energy section. About 40km of trying to stay in one piece.

I truly doubt that this will pass without incident, the fit of the seat pin within the seat tube is very vague to say the least, so that is going to fail very early on, and can see there being a lot of standing up. The forks are so dodgy looking that they bend whilst just riding along...it's gonna be great!

Have you got BUPA?
Have you got British Cycling insurance?
Have you made a will?

Bon chance et chapeau.

I wanna see photos and video of this outragously funny experiment!!

At least you'll get £250 pound back from "You've been framed" and a fee from the MTB mags if it's well written

Enjoy

PS, I know you have never met me, but please may I have your expensive MTB when you've been "killed to death" by that cheap pile of tat??

Thanks for the support guys, the good news is that the bikes weigh in at a svelte 39lbs, the bad news is..well..everything else about them!

They are built, and with full bike workshop mechanic skills, we can only get a couple of gears, and you need the strength of Garth to turn the twist grip to get those. You cannot do the quill stem up enough to actually make it keep the handlebars in the right direction...I could go on, but I'll save it for the post-Armageddon write up.

Suffice to say, we are getting less and less confident of our chances as we get more familiar with the weapons of our destruction...

Three of us had a blast round the car park on our new bikes yesterday - 10 minutes of just nobbing about resulted in 2 saddles pointing directly to the sky, and one twist grip shifter that twisted around the bars rather than change gear...

My bike has virtually no brakes to speak of, I can get the lever to the bars, and get almost zero speed reduction - that's not a good sign either.

are you allowed to swap the non-functioning bits out or are you stuck with them? and are you allowed to adjust the mech so it's at least in a workable single gear, rather than top?

No swap out of parts allowed prior to lift off, but any fettling that will improve, well, anything is allowed.

We are mostly pretty competent bike fettlers, and one of our number is a Cytech Level 3 mechanic, so we had initially thought that this would mean we could conquer most adversities.

Since then though, we have realised the depth of depravity that has been plumbed by the manufacturer to create these bikes. The funniest thing I saw was when we held the front wheel between our knees, and twisted the handlebars, you could make the forks twist so much that you had about a 45 degree angle between the bars and the front wheel.

The gears are okay, the main problem was that twisting the grip shift actually just rotated it around the bars, I think some super glue or a big self tapper through it has secured it, and normal (such as that is) operation is restored...

I have been donated a nice Troy Lee Carbon full face lid - worth in excess of 3 of the bikes put together - and hopefully some knee and elbow pads, I haven't ridden off road for many years, with the exception of a stint round Afan last year, so my kit is a tad retro compared to the others, and I never believed in the whole protective armour thing in those days, I'm a believer now though!

What type of brakes do they have?

The brakes are amazing. From the front they appear to be a fairly normal V-type brake arm, but when you look at the back of the arm you realise they are actually just made of pressed sheet steel. They flex inward so much that increasing the force on the lever doesn't increase the force of the pad on the rim. The pad is made of plastic rather than rubber too.

My chosen bike has much worse brake performance than the other tested so far, not sure why, just lucky I suppose!

ouch!

How can that be legal?

hey DaSy, if your really lucky it may rain all day sunday them brakes will be even worse than no brakes...hmmm

I think it is forecast to rain in Afan area, I don't care about stopping at the moment though, I am focussed on overtaking someone on the way up.

The main problem is that the drive train really cannot cope with power through it. The square taper cranks will very easily convert to round taper, especially as the inside of them appears to have a plastic coating to interfere with the fit.
I also found that I was only getting meaningful drive from about 3/4 of the full pedal revolution, and it turned out I was screwing the freewheel on tighter - this went on for about 10 pedal revs!

I want to nurse it up the climb though just to get a chance to test this Troy Lee lid on the way down if nothing else.

low gear and high cadence then. if you get to choose a gear

I think we may need to No-More-Nails my Time Atacs on too, the pedal fit is vague to say the least.

High cadence, low power it is, but I'm sure to get carried away if I see a potential overtake on the cards!

"Virus" is too funny; it's not a bike - it's a disease!

I hope you take a photographer on a bike which is capable of following the BSOs around the route to record their failures!

DaSy? Are you there? Did you survive? Do your limbs work?

Just back from Afan, and I'm still functioning.

Five riders made muster, one dropping out due to some lame excuse.

The weather was insane, with torrential rain and a freezing hail storm!

Two bikes died, but three made it round pretty well! All those three had total brake failure, and I mean total, mine also had to have the chain moved by hand to get different gears.

I overtook quite a few on the climb! We all overtook quite a few on the descent, which was mental when you consider the Whites descent is really best approached with brakes. I really can't stress quite how much our brakes didn't work, absolutely nothing at all...

One of our number is a national standard downhiller, and his run through the tabletops on the Energy section was truly amazing. He was getting ridiculous air, crossing up in the air than spotting the landing on every one. All this on a bike with no useable suspension and weighing 40lbs.

We only made The Whites Level due to the weather and bike breakages, one set of forks bending so far back the bike was rendered unrideable, and meant a 3km walk for one...of course we didn't wait for him.

hey DaSy do you think Rapha might class this as an epic!

cant wait to see a few pictures. brilliant stuff, well done that man.

hahahahahahahaha! sounds amazing. have you got video of X-ups on a BSO? i *must* see it

interesting that three bikes made it round, more than i would expect if i'm honest...

So in a way then, your mate with the £120 bike had a point…

We have stills of the 6 pack run, the weather meant that the video equipment had to be left in the van.

It was an epic, we drove 300 miles to ride 11 miles, break 5 bikes and waste about £500! It's a proud moment.

I overtook my mate at one point, and as I went past he jumped off his bike and flung it after me, it wheeled past me and crashed in front of me, I managed to cycled straight over the top of it, in front of a group of very bemused riders, which we then overtook on the next descent.

there's people driving back from Afan as we speak saying "did you see those idiots on cheap bikes, one of them was throwing his at the other who then rode over it" fantastic.

Tony, my mate did point out that we have two total failures, the other three with no usable brakes or gears, and one with collapsed forks - which incidentally were marked Activ Suspention, not being able to spell on the stickers isn't a good sign.

All this happened in the bikes first 11 miles, so I'm not sure quite what we proved, but it did teach me to pick a good line that requires no brakes...

i spose in some respect the bikes that you (ab)used were no better than the old 'klunkers' that Gary Fisher et all used back in the early 80's in california as the first mountain bikes

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the guy riding the six pack also had purple and silver tinsel bar tassels,we lost one of those during one crash, but did add a little je ne sais quoi.

I suppose what I meant was did you enjoy it as much as you would on your normal bike, different experience by the sounds of it… and if you were to repeat it regurlarly I suppose the cost of buying a bike a week would start to mount. Eventually.

its the little details that matter in any 'epic' ride

I've ridden all Afan trails on my Pace RC200 rigid singlespeed, but for some reason that was so much easier than these. It does weigh sub 20lbs and have great brakes I suppose.

I just wanted some brakes...

To be honest Tony, we have never had so much anticipation, excitement and all out enjoyment on any ride, ever. We are even thinking of mending any we can, plus we have two spares, and embarking on another adventure.

Maybe Cwmcarn downhill run...

well you were basically riding a rigid singlespeed, weren't you? just a really heavy and crap one pretending to have gears and suspension.

Where are these photos you speak of!

It'll be a few days before I get my hands on them. I was too busy riding and screaming to take any myself.

We had a rider on a real bike following, and we saw them on the camera afterwards, but will have a wait before I get them, as they have to go via my mate then on to me.

Yeah take them to Cwmcarn it would be worth it to see the looks on the guys faces as you load them onto the trailer for the uplift. Or you could ride them up the XC trail to play on the Freeride park at the top and ride the bus back down as that would kill them off.

Photos? I keep coming back to this thread to check.

Hahaha....

I'm hoping to pick them up this week, I only have a few before and after pics at the mo', nothing very exciting.

I am on the case though...honest.

I got rained on this morning, and it reminded me of the weather we had when I want to Afan, which reminded me of this thread, so I thought I'd check it to see if there were any pics...

Look out for a feature on road.cc this weekend!...

could i change the subject a little by asking you all to visit www.parrabuddy.blogspot.com and follow www.twitter.com/skippydetour as i am "looking for help" to find "disabled riders and volunteers to join in riding routes of 2010 tour de france in july.

most of you will know the people who i should be asking to participate if you are unable to find the time yourself
feel free to offer assistance!