Bike Builds

Posted by PeterD Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:17:00 GMT

One of the areas that Passion Trail Bikes uses to differentiate itself is in the quality of our bike service.

Using building up a new bike as an example – if you purchased a bike elsewhere and wanted it built, Passion would charge you up to $250 to do that. That sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it?

Actually, any service we do is based on a rate of $60 per hour (which, for comparison, is only about half of the hourly rate for an auto repair shop). So $250 means that we are spending over 6 hours building your bike (and actually there is often even more time spent than we bill you for).

So, why does it take over 6 hours to build a bike? Bikes arrive in boxes in a mostly assembled state from the manufacturer. Discount bike shops often save money by just doing the minimal work needed to complete the bike (which can take less than 1 hour). Passion goes the other direction – we disassemble these bikes and then re-assemble them, ensuring everything is greased, properly tightened, properly adjusted, wheels trued, etc. We want to ensure a bike that performs as well as it can, and yet give you as little trouble as possible.

To do this, we usually involve the customer twice after a bike is ordered. First, once the bike mostly built, we do a fitting. At this time, we make changes ranging from setting the stem height to swapping out parts (stems, saddles, etc.) until the bike is just right for you.

After this is done, we complete the assembly and get it ready for you to ride. Then a fitting to make sure everything is set, tuning the bike even more specifically for you (set suspension, etc.), and giving any instruction needed on how to use the bike.

Part of this philosophy of getting the best bike for the customer can be seen in what is stocked in the shop – there are often more bike frames in the shop than completed bikes. Many people want custom builds such that it is often better to build up from a bare frame rather than swap parts from a complete bike.

$250 is actually the standard price if you brought in a new full suspension bike for us to build – hardtails and road bikes (yes, we work on road bikes) are less. But if you buy the bike from us, we put the same time and effort in to building it, but we don’t charge anything extra to do the build.