rain miles count double

You can’t escape it. Christmas is rapidly approaching and maybe you’re thinking of buying a new bike for someone, or maybe even buying one for yourself to keep those New Year’s Resolutions. A “mountain style” bike you assemble yourself can be had from many supermarket and high street retailers for less than £100. Bargain or a false economy? BBC’s Watchdog investigated recently.

Revisiting a similar item from the 1990‘s, flat pack bikes from Tesco, Halfords, Toys R Us, Argos, and Asda were tested by having ordinary members of the public assemble them using only the tools and instructions provided in the box. The retailers would have you believe that building these bikes is so easy anyone can do it and the result will be a safe, high quality machine that will give you years of cycling pleasure. But if things are that rosy, why do cycling experts warn against buying these bikes, referring to them using the derogatory “bicycle shaped objects”?

Watch the video on the BBC Watchdog site and read the comments. You should also check out the reaction from the Bicycle Shaped Object bloggers.

Taking everything into consideration it seems that two main problems exist.

Firstly, it takes some skill and experience to be able to assemble a bike properly. All the test subjects in the Watchdog programme made basic mistakes that rendered their bikes either unsafe or downright unrideable. Problems with brake and gear calibration were most common (to be fair, this is tricky even when you do know what you’re doing) but more fundamental mistakes such as not tightening axle nuts properly were being made. It seems that the average member of the public doesn’t know how to use a spanner, but as this is the target market for these bikes the skillset (or lack of) needs to be taken into consideration.

Secondly, the bikes themselves are made to extremely tight budgets and therefore feature the lowest-of-the-low end parts that often don’t quite fit or work together properly, or don’t last very long and fail suddenly when they do work out of the box. Commenters report snapping chains, failing cranks and suspension arms that break folding the bike in two, as well as the resulting hospitalisations. Do you want that happening to you?

Another consideration is that, even if built expertly and remaining unbroken, these bikes are not fun to ride and are likely to give you an unfairly bad experience of cycling. They’re heavy, they don’t steer well, the gears don’t work smoothly and they stop poorly. They’re also likely to require constant attention to keep them rideable. Doesn’t sound like fun to me.

If you’re thinking of buying a sub-£100 bike for Christmas, take a few minutes to watch the video and read the comments. Then take a few more minutes to think about what you saw.

If you’ve never built a bike before, are you absolutely confident you’re capable of doing it properly? Confident enough to ride it into traffic? Or let your child ride it? If you have the confidence, can you trust a bike made so cheaply? A bike made for less than 30% of the price most cycle experts would call “entry level”? A bike that is likely to require constant attention to keep it even barely rideable? And don’t forget the fun factor, or lack of it.

A bike can be an amazingly useful tool and amazingly good fun. If you can, push the budget boat out a bit and your investment will be well rewarded.

Otherwise, be careful.