Not Just a Ride

On Wednesday, Matt Seaton explained in his weekly column on cycling for the Guardian why hand-crafted bikes are better:

[...] if you take your custom to an artisan operation, you are buying a bike where more of the price you pay has gone into making the bike than into subsidising the marketing campaign. You are also more likely to be offered a custom-made option. Instead of buying an off-the-peg bike in a standard size, you can buy one not yet made until your particulars have been fed through a computer program that will enable the frame-builder to size the bike precisely for you (and it doesn't have to cost a fortune; prices start at a few hundred). It's like having a tailored suit made, or a hand-stitched dress.

There is, of course, a snob value and perhaps an element of bogus mystique to the bespoke bike. But there is something special about riding a bicycle that has been designed around you. All-day comfort and the banishment of backache are the practical side. More transcendently, there is a sense of dynamic harmony, a blurring of boundaries between where you end and the bike begins.

[...]

what you get may not, in a technical, performance-oriented sense, be as good as the off-the-shelf machine, but it will have a personality the mass-produced item can never match. That bike is not just a ride; it's a relationship.

Two wheels, Matt Seaton - The Guardian, 11 October 2007