:mad: I’m really sick of junky scumbags. This city is full of them. I went to the library downtown for literally 30 seconds to drop off a couple of books. I came out, my 4000 dollar bike, gone. I know: what the hell was I thinking. Now I am out for blood. I really want to take a sword or something and go down and hack people apart. That’s how mad I am, and that makes me sick. I’m not like this. Cruel world.
Yeah, that would cheese me off, too.
But how do you spend four grand for a bike? For that price it should have exploded when the thieves DNA didn’t match yours.
Shit, I was pissed-off enough after having a £25 bike nicked…
To get a little more clarification, what kind of bike is it? What type of lock did they use and how did they defeat it?
I’ve got a Trek Carbon Fiber Mtn. Bike with Chris King wheels and I use a Kryptonite EVO2000 lock and Kryptonite locking skewers. So far I’ve been lucky, I caught one guy trying to steal my Moots seatpost and seat but the Kryptonite skewers foiled him!
A guy where I work left his bike u-locked to a No-Parking sign outside. He even took the front tire and seat so those wouldn’t get stolen.
Overnight, someone came and removed the No Parking sign from the top of the ten foot pole and slid the bike off!!! And this was on the corner of a busy intersection. Unbelievable.
ZJ
This Bike ROCKS!
My bike was stolen back in grad school. It was an inexpensive (heck, admit it – it was a cheap) and old bike, so you had to wonder why they even bothered to go to all the trouble to cut through the airline cable securing it in place. Made my life miserable until I got a replacement. Just proves that some people will steal anything.
Hmmm, four grand eh?
My guess is a Lightspeed.
[sub]super expensive titanium, FYI[/sub]
Or a Moots or a Seven Cycles or a tricked out Independent Fabrication or Waterford…There’s lots of $4K bikes. Id prefer a Moots.
If you get into mountain bikes, particularly anything for downhill, you can eat up $4k very quickly. My boyfriend started whimpering when I told him about this post…
My best friend got a part-time job in a bike shop just to feed his mountain bike habit. He ended up with a $5K bike for $2K, but I still couldn’t believe the costs. Me, I just buy a lot of books. Although a lighter bike would be nice this time of year…
Why do these bikes cost eight to ten times as much as a perfectly decent, high quality 400 - 500 bicycle.
Well, I’m not as familiar with high-quality road bikes, (think they’re made of… spaceships or something.) but a real downhill mountain bike has things like hydraulic disc brakes, forks with 6, 7, 8, or sometimes MORE inches of travel, and rear suspensions that can also provide absurdly high amounts of travel. All of these have to be engineered to take a pretty good beating AND to spring back properly while riding down a mountain or after hitting drops of 8’… 10’… 12’… 20’+ if you’re FREAKING INSANE. This is… a delicate business, to say the least. Downhill bikes have all sorts of complex hardware that isn’t even ON other bikes. Good downhill bikes should be able to stand up to this sort of thing without injury to the rider or damage to the bike, presuming the drop is done correctly. The rider should even be able to father children afterward. 
Here is a picture from the manufacturer’s website of the type of bike my boyfriend has. (Though he doesn’t have this year’s model, of course. 
) If you look up in front, the gold part of the fork compresses all the way down into the silver part, up to that black ring. Same sort of thing with the big spring in the middle. 7" of travel, front and rear.
I won’t argue with the fact that some people spend way, way, WAY more than they need to on a bike they’ll never use properly just to look cool or be able to OWN an expensive bike. But that doesn’t mean that these things are all overpriced.
Astro, Astro, Astro, my wayward little friend, you must come to understand the Cult of the Price Sticker.
As a road racer, I can certainly appreciate that a four thousand dollar bike is certainly a worthwhile investment for any number of individuals, but the majority of these bikes go to loaded pudgy slow master riders anyway. They may not need that nice of bike, but nobody really needs a Lexus or Acura anyway when a Toyota or Honda can get you the same quality for half the price. Oh well, as long as they get out there and enjoy it, whatever. A $4000 bike is a hell of a lot cheaper way to go through a mid-life crisis than a $50,000 sports coupe.
I’m rambling here because I’m on both sides. My own bike was upwards of $1400 and worth every penney, but when I see sites like this offering $10,000 bikes that aren’t even as light as my cheap-ass, million and two other like it Fuji Team Superlight, I have to sigh.
:dubious: :rolleyes: :dubious: :wally 
I understand the mountain bikes… I mean, they’ve got springs and hydraulics and weird oils that my boyfriend keeps talking about replacing and they do weird stuff… makes sense that they’d be expensive, they’re a lot more complicated than normal bikes. But the road bikes are a mystery to me. I repeat: made of spaceships!
LOL 
Did you check out your insurance to see if you’d be covered? When my bike was stolen in college, I got reimbursed through my parent’s homeowner’s insurance. Despite the fact that I wasn’t even living with them.
If you don’t have a homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policy, and aren’t covered under someone else’s (like your parents)… well, this incident is an example of why insurance is a Good Thing.
Generally what drives up the prices of roadbikes are the exotic materials they’re composed of. As of several years ago when I worked at a cycle shop, titanium, and carbon fiber were used in the top of the line frames. Once you buy the frame, it’s a matter of equipping it with the most best (Exotic = light in weight) parts money can buy. Sure those wheels you have are nice, but you can save some weight switching them out for some pimp $1,000 carbon fiber rims.
Think of mountain bikes as a desktop computer, they’re big, ugly and powerful. Road bikes are more laptops, smaller, lighter and more feature packed being better.
Btw, yes 90% of the people that bought $3,000+ bikes were dudes going through some serious midlife crisis.
Aha! “exotic materials”! I knew it! Spaceships. 
(though I actually did know a little about the carbon-fiber stuff before. You can actually get carbon-fiber parts on mountain bikes, which in my opinion is an amazingly bad idea. (anybody familiar with the properties of carbon fiber stuff will know why…))
Okay, Elfbabe, what exactly do you have against carbon fiber?
It looks cool, and really, is there anything else that matters?