Sourcing Components

I’m conscious of doing this arse about face, in other words I’m buying the components before finishing reading the wheel building guides, which is not at all clever when it comes to the all important spoke length measurement. What could possibly go wrong?!?

As I’ve said, costs are to be kept to a minimum, but not at the expense of quality. For this reason I have a very strong preference for new or “as new” components and the best people to buy these from are those who have thought they might build their own wheels, bought the bits, then freaked out having read the guides, listened to ill-informed merchants of doom on web forums and seen the apparently irresistible offers from the mail order builders. As a result they’ve decided to cut their losses and sell, so it’s off to www.ebay.co.uk we go!

I think Ebay is a glorious product of the internet age, seamlessly mating the grey market with the ravenous consumerist appetite of the public at large. The vast majority of the stuff there is worthless counterfeit rubbish of course, but there are gems: it’s the source of some great bargains, but only if you know what you want, what it’s really worth… and how to haggle.

Many re-sellers of new or “as new” goods have an inflated and unrealistic opinion of what 2nd hand goods are worth, even if the item has never been out of the box. If you buy from a shop, in person on on-line, you have the full protection of consumer law, most notably guarantees & warranties. When you buy 2nd hand you get none of this, so why pay for it? Therefore if an Ebay seller is offering up an item for £25 that is available from a shop for the same amount, they’re not going to sell it. So what? That’s their problem isn’t it? No, it’s your opportunity – make them an offer. Whether they accept or not depends upon a number of things (the manner in which you make the offer, the amount you offer, the price at which you can buy it elsewhere, the timing…) but get it right and you can expect to save at least 25% over the lowest price offered by the on-line merchants.

If you’re going to use Ebay, something to consider also using is a sniping tool. These are bit fly-by-night, because you need to entrust someone you don’t know with your Ebay ID and password. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the people behind some of these tools are also those responsible for the hijacking of Ebay accounts and related illegal activity, so be wary and only use one that’s been recommended by someone you trust. I use Auction Stealer, which offers three free snipes per week and automatically places your bid 10-20 seconds before the auction ends. The point of this is that it leaves little or no time for another bidder to react to your bid, which means that if you win the auction, you could end up winning it for less.

The other main source of cycling bargains is the Classifieds forum on www.singletrackworld.com, although this is totally unregulated so care is required. The same type of seller as described above exists here too, but there are also a few who seem to either have little or no sense for what some items are truly worth, or some misplaced feeling of benevolence towards a disparate bunch of people they mistakenly perceive to be one happy family simply because they all ride a bike (I’m not kidding). Which ever it is, consequently they offer up good kit far cheaper than you’d find it even on Ebay.

Most of my components come from Ebay or STW, but it’s worth trawling through the online shops to see if there are any bargains. This would be time-consuming but for two valuable little gophers in the form of www.bikepimp.co.uk and www.shopping.outdoor-equipment-review.com. Either is good, but out of habit I tend to rely on Bike Pimp (which at the time of writing is down!).

Spokes are a special case and look like they’ll be a tough nut to crack. They’re not widely available to the public in the huge range of sizes required and when they can be found the prices are usually extortionate (up to £1 per spoke, anyone?). All the UK retailers are guilty of overpricing spokes including Chain Reaction, who have doubled the prices of their range of DT Swiss spokes since I last built a wheel. I feel backed into a bit of a corner here. I’m loathe to pay what are clearly rip-off prices, but what choice do I have? Maybe buy from abroad, but surely international P&P and the robbing sods at Barclaycard, who will as usual deliberately use a rate of exchange bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the current state of the currency markets, will negate any advantage found there? Finding a suitable resolution to the spoke problem is the crux to making this project cost effective.