IMG_4213 by Jimperialism, on Flickr

It's a Motobecane CXX with Apex and Deore/Alex DA16 wheels. Eyelets, tire clearance, horizontal dropouts, downtube bosses, sick chrome finish. Brooks was purchased separately along with the rack and pedals, but I'm still in for less than a grand. Gotta get a better rack, and eventually some leather bar tape, but it's basically exactly what I want.

What the hell am I supposed to do with all my time now that I have little reason to scour Craigslist anymore? Oh, right, ride it.

Very cool!

Where did you pick that up?

It's actually from bikesdirect.com

I felt kinda bad not going local, but they're all made in the same place anyways and the bike + brooks came out to $960 (I had the rack and pedals already), which is frankly a much better deal than a stock Cross-check, which was my other choice. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't have the willpower to build up a CC with used parts, but I'm pretty freakin' happy with this ride. It took some assembly, but it's fantastic (except when I crash it, which has happened 3 times already. Not the bike's fault, though. It turns out it's NOT too late in the season for studded tires to be worth it.).

I don't want to be the bitter shop employee here but this really bugs me. Not that you bought this bike, I can understand the reasoning. What really gets under my skin is that Surly put hundreds in not thousands of hours into testing and developing the cross check and created an awesome bike. Bikes direct comes along, copies and pastes the geo sheet from surly's site and then takes it to a factory and says, "make us a thousand like this." Sure the spec is different but here are the geo sheets, they are identical.

http://www.bikesdirect.com/products/mot ... xx_geo.gif
http://surlybikes.com/bikes/cross_check

If good designs can just be stolen and reproduced like this, no one will put any time/effort/money into creating them.
/rant

u mad bro?

Surly had a decade to make money off it (without innovating at all except for mid-blade eyelets since the frame's inception), now they're hot shit. They're not going out of business because 10% (if that) of their potential buyers went mail-order.

I bought the Brooks at a local shop and will continue to buy tires, fenders, tools, etc from local shops, by the way. I understand the value of the LBS but for someone who does their own labor (bottom brackets, headsets, wheel truing, etc) and wants the best bang for the buck, the 'net is a sound (and not totally immoral) option.

.

We'll see how much the savings are worth when the frame breaks.

He could replace it with a new Cross Check frame and still come out ahead....

I'll admit it's not great for your LBS but I can see why someone would buy online.

(Don't flame- I own a Cross Check. Q\Surly and a LBS got their cut.)

Hey man, I understand, everybody wants to save a buck. All in all I get the consumer point of view, especially if they do their own wrenching. To get a little deeper, it doesn't even bug me that bikes direct goes to say the maxway factory to pick a frame out of a catalogue. Those are open source frames that maxway developed for whoever wants to buy/brand them. What pisses me off are bikes like this and the kilo WT, where it's not an open source frame. For both those bikes bikesdirect just copied and pasted information from the surly website and had a factory reproduce them. As I was saying before a lot of time and money went into developing and designing these bikes. When a company like bikesdirect can completely cut design out of their budget by ripping off other companies, and then undercutting the companies they ripped off, design becomes less and less of a priority.

Can't see any info on how much tire this frame can run. Also, I don't see any mounts on the fork blades like my cross check has.

in the end, If one smiles when they ride, all is good.

Actually this is incorrect.

Bikes Direct gets their bikes from what is probably one company manufacturing many brands in Taiwan like all other bikes. If they get a fluke bikesdirect sells them for a steal. They are more of a distributor than anything. The companies that are copying bikes are Dawes, Motobecane, Windsor, etc.

Not everyone can afford to spend $1200 on a bike, bikes direct is a good alternative. Unless you rather have cycling not be accessible to everyone. As you say you work at a bike shop, where do you think people are going to get their parts from? Getting parts from the shop is always easier than buying online, not much cost difference either.

I'll buy bikes, frames, etc. from a shop, but I'll buy certain parts online. For example, if I need a new chain and cassette, I'm going to go online and buy it because it's going to be way cheaper than paying full retail at a shop. If I want to look at something, or test it, or ask advice from a mechanic, sure I'll buy from the shop, but when I know exactly what I want and I'm going to install it myself I think it's acceptable to order from the web.

Steel frames are pretty mature technology, man. I've spent enough time behind an electrode to be able to spot decent welds and I have absolutely no qualms about the build quality.