Worthwhile to Buy the Good Stuff and Make it Last

Last year I bought a 1988 Cannondale for $100 off a guy who planned on taking it apart "to see how it works."

This bike was in rough shape; it had been in an accident that bent the front fork and taco'd the front wheel. The rear hub had been over-tightened and ruined, the plastic cable guides were gone, the headset had a crack in it, one of the shifters had broken off, and there was a crack in the stem. Also, a thick black goop covered every moving joint, as if the previous owner had tried to lube the thing with road tar.

But after a few days of soaking in a chemical solvent bath and sourcing replacement parts I was able to fix the thing, and it has since become one of my favorite bikes of the 40+ I've owned. This is partly because it has a very responsive "criterium" geometry: short wheelbase, steep head angle, close tire tolerances– but also because it's a pleasure to ride something that could have been thrown away, but instead was restored.

Fixing the Cannondale gave me an appreciation for old, quality parts. After 27 years of abuse, where the bike was probably never cleaned and no parts were ever updated, most of the bike still works. The only things I had to replace were the wheels, headset, stem, and... the bottom bracket.

Oh that bottom bracket. The original one was a loose-ball cup-n-cone style system that had gotten rusty and pitted, so I replaced it with the cheapest thing that would fit. I think I got it for under $10. This was a mistake.

Cheap things rarely last, and it's only been eight months but the new BB is already toast.

Serves me right, I guess. When I decided to buy a cheap, non-repairable, inferior bottom bracket I was choosing to contribute to wasteful consumer culture, the idea being that I would buy the BB and by the time it wore-out the bike would be ready to die, or move on to its next owner. The folly of this kind of consumerism is that the dead BB took time and resources to make, but it's now just fodder for the landfill, or it'll take more time and manpower and chemicals and fuel to recycle it into something useful. Had I bought a quality BB, like the original Shimano 600 that came installed in 1988, I could probably get a dozen years out of it, meaning no new replacement part would need to be created for that stretch of time. The resources not spent on a replacement part could be put towards something else, perhaps some innovation.

But, of course, the "buy for quality and longevity" mentality does not suit many a business model where profits depend on constant turnover.

The bike industry is always pressuring the consumer to be "upgrading" to whatever's new, and presumably, throw away the old. But I can say with honesty: my 7-speed, Shimano 600 equipped Cannondale from 1988–which, after being restored, has the same tactile elegance now as it did when it was made–is just as much fun to ride as the Di2 equipped Madones and Pinarellos that used to fill my stable, plus it's less of a burden to lock-up.

So, what I'm saying is there's nothing wrong with buying a new bike (I do it four times a year) but if you aren't like me, you should get something that will last, that you can bond to, and that will out-live current fashions, because resources are limited, and the way into a sustainable future is with an appropriate amount of good material items, not a endless barrage of temporary crap.