How Much Can I Ask.....

[Felt 35]

.......for a second hand 5 1/2 year old Trek carbon road bike with Ultegra components

Thanks.

[HAL9000]

Check that famous auction site for market value. Check Thai shops for the price of a new one and interpolate the difference.

[Felt 35]

Check that famous auction site for market value. Check Thai shops for the price of a new one and interpolate the difference.

I have lately got it checked by a dealer and 20-25K was mentioned. It costed new 120K .

Thanks.

Felt.

[NanLaew]

Check that famous auction site for market value. Check Thai shops for the price of a new one and interpolate the difference.

I have lately got it checked by a dealer and 20-25K was mentioned. It costed new 120K .

Thanks.

Felt.

Yes, but that was over 5 years ago. How long has it been out of production?

Have you priced it online for a realistic second-hand price or sought the cost of the equivalent at a local dealer as already suggested?

[Felt 35]

Check that famous auction site for market value. Check Thai shops for the price of a new one and interpolate the difference.

I have lately got it checked by a dealer and 20-25K was mentioned. It costed new 120K .

Thanks.

Felt.

Yes, but that was over 5 years ago. How long has it been out of production?

Have you priced it online for a realistic second-hand price or sought the cost of the equivalent at a local dealer as already suggested?

The dealer I bought the bike from said that he could try to sell it for around 20 - 25K.

BTW, the Trek Madone 5.2 is still in production but is now produced in Taiwan and not with OCLV carbon but TCL carbon which Trek once advertised as inferior to OCLV. That’s one of the reason to that the Madone 5.2 now sells for 110K in Thailand. I have however heard that the top end Madone models still are produced in Wisconsin, USA.

Anyway I have only plusses to say about the Madone it’s been an amazing 5 years friendship and the bike are still ready for any ride and distance. (No I don’t work for Trek)

[OriginalPoster]

Check that famous auction site for market value. Check Thai shops for the price of a new one and interpolate the difference.

I have lately got it checked by a dealer and 20-25K was mentioned. It costed new 120K .

Thanks.

Felt.

Yes, but that was over 5 years ago. How long has it been out of production?

Have you priced it online for a realistic second-hand price or sought the cost of the equivalent at a local dealer as already suggested?

The dealer I bought the bike from said that he could try to sell it for around 20 - 25K.

BTW, the Trek Madone 5.2 is still in production but is now produced in Taiwan and not with OCLV carbon but TCL carbon which Trek once advertised as inferior to OCLV. That’s one of the reason to that the Madone 5.2 now sells for 110K in Thailand. I have however heard that the top end Madone models still are produced in Wisconsin, USA.

Anyway I have only plusses to say about the Madone it’s been an amazing 5 years friendship and the bike are still ready for any ride and distance. (No I don’t work for Trek)

20 - 25K sounds more like what a dealer would pay for a bike like that rather than what they would sell it for. If the bike is in good shape, 25K sounds very cheap to me.

[ianf]

Personally I dislike Treks. However a 5 year old madone should indeed sell for 25k or even 30k (try 32 and discount to 29). However I wouldn't pay 2 satang for one! But that is just a personal opinion.

[OriginalPoster]

Personally I dislike Treks. However a 5 year old madone should indeed sell for 25k or even 30k (try 32 and discount to 29). However I wouldn't pay 2 satang for one! But that is just a personal opinion.

What's the downside of Treks?

[ianf]

Personally I dislike Treks. However a 5 year old madone should indeed sell for 25k or even 30k (try 32 and discount to 29). However I wouldn't pay 2 satang for one! But that is just a personal opinion.

What's the downside of Treks?

Blind prejudice on my part.

However, I have been around this sport since I was 10 years old. I have seen many beautiful bikes over the years and have owned and do own a few. I like bikes with a heritage or built with passion and love. These days many frames are mass produced in Taiwan and China with an increase in brands available to us westerners. Surfing yesterday I found one Taiwan manufacturer with a host of frames - but curiously the geometry and the graphics posted for the geometry seemed multi-sourced which suggested to me that they would undergo a project for an overseas company and then rebrand the same frame as their own. When I bought my first carbon frame (a Condor made in Italy and designed by cyclists in the UK) I asked why the price was 1000 uk pounds less than a Trek. "We don't have to pay Armstrong!" came the reply.

To me most Treks I've seen over here in Thailand are not very well set up, also I know peeps that have bought Treks only for something to break or go wrong. As far as pure road bikes go I think Trek have dumped a lot of stuff onto the market which actually needed a bit more thought before being sold.

Another anecdote: There is an American company that sell a lot of carbon online. A friend bought exactly the same frame via Hong Kong for half the price. It was a track bike. Beautiful, 400 us$. Shame that he couldn't put a chainring larger than 48T on the bike though. Anything larger scraped the frameset. That says it all.

Biased, yeah I think so. But after all, why buy a Trek when there is Specialised, Bianchi, Pinarello, Condor, Gios, Colnago, Cervelo, Planet X and many other beautiful bikes on the market?

[el jefe]

Personally I dislike Treks. However a 5 year old madone should indeed sell for 25k or even 30k (try 32 and discount to 29). However I wouldn't pay 2 satang for one! But that is just a personal opinion.

What's the downside of Treks?

Blind prejudice on my part.

However, I have been around this sport since I was 10 years old. I have seen many beautiful bikes over the years and have owned and do own a few. I like bikes with a heritage or built with passion and love. These days many frames are mass produced in Taiwan and China with an increase in brands available to us westerners. Surfing yesterday I found one Taiwan manufacturer with a host of frames - but curiously the geometry and the graphics posted for the geometry seemed multi-sourced which suggested to me that they would undergo a project for an overseas company and then rebrand the same frame as their own. When I bought my first carbon frame (a Condor made in Italy and designed by cyclists in the UK) I asked why the price was 1000 uk pounds less than a Trek. "We don't have to pay Armstrong!" came the reply.

To me most Treks I've seen over here in Thailand are not very well set up, also I know peeps that have bought Treks only for something to break or go wrong. As far as pure road bikes go I think Trek have dumped a lot of stuff onto the market which actually needed a bit more thought before being sold.

Another anecdote: There is an American company that sell a lot of carbon online. A friend bought exactly the same frame via Hong Kong for half the price. It was a track bike. Beautiful, 400 us$. Shame that he couldn't put a chainring larger than 48T on the bike though. Anything larger scraped the frameset. That says it all.

Biased, yeah I think so. But after all, why buy a Trek when there is Specialised, Bianchi, Pinarello, Condor, Gios, Colnago, Cervelo, Planet X and many other beautiful bikes on the market?

You do realize that those "beautiful" Specialized (it's an American company so they spell it with a "z") bikes are all made in Taiwan by Merida. You can buy a nearly identical bike with Merida decals for much less. Several of the other bikes mentioned here are also made in Taiwan. There are only a handful of factories in the world that can mass produce enough carbon frames for every bike company that wants to sell them and all of those factories are in Taiwan (although many are opening factories in mainland China to handle the demand). Why pay for the decals when you can get the same bike for less?!

[OriginalPoster]

Personally I dislike Treks. However a 5 year old madone should indeed sell for 25k or even 30k (try 32 and discount to 29). However I wouldn't pay 2 satang for one! But that is just a personal opinion.

What's the downside of Treks?

Blind prejudice on my part.

However, I have been around this sport since I was 10 years old. I have seen many beautiful bikes over the years and have owned and do own a few. I like bikes with a heritage or built with passion and love. These days many frames are mass produced in Taiwan and China with an increase in brands available to us westerners. Surfing yesterday I found one Taiwan manufacturer with a host of frames - but curiously the geometry and the graphics posted for the geometry seemed multi-sourced which suggested to me that they would undergo a project for an overseas company and then rebrand the same frame as their own. When I bought my first carbon frame (a Condor made in Italy and designed by cyclists in the UK) I asked why the price was 1000 uk pounds less than a Trek. "We don't have to pay Armstrong!" came the reply.

To me most Treks I've seen over here in Thailand are not very well set up, also I know peeps that have bought Treks only for something to break or go wrong. As far as pure road bikes go I think Trek have dumped a lot of stuff onto the market which actually needed a bit more thought before being sold.

Another anecdote: There is an American company that sell a lot of carbon online. A friend bought exactly the same frame via Hong Kong for half the price. It was a track bike. Beautiful, 400 us$. Shame that he couldn't put a chainring larger than 48T on the bike though. Anything larger scraped the frameset. That says it all.

Biased, yeah I think so. But after all, why buy a Trek when there is Specialised, Bianchi, Pinarello, Condor, Gios, Colnago, Cervelo, Planet X and many other beautiful bikes on the market?

Maybe paying Lance Armstrong affects Trek's finances overall but in Thailand Treks seems to have similar prices to bikes of other brands that have similar components and frame materials. If I was going to single out a name brand whose prices in Thailand are consipuously disproportiante to it's specs it would Cannondale, not Trek.

[ad61]

Personally I dislike Treks. However a 5 year old madone should indeed sell for 25k or even 30k (try 32 and discount to 29). However I wouldn't pay 2 satang for one! But that is just a personal opinion.

What's the downside of Treks?

Blind prejudice on my part.

However, I have been around this sport since I was 10 years old. I have seen many beautiful bikes over the years and have owned and do own a few. I like bikes with a heritage or built with passion and love. These days many frames are mass produced in Taiwan and China with an increase in brands available to us westerners. Surfing yesterday I found one Taiwan manufacturer with a host of frames - but curiously the geometry and the graphics posted for the geometry seemed multi-sourced which suggested to me that they would undergo a project for an overseas company and then rebrand the same frame as their own. When I bought my first carbon frame (a Condor made in Italy and designed by cyclists in the UK) I asked why the price was 1000 uk pounds less than a Trek. "We don't have to pay Armstrong!" came the reply.

To me most Treks I've seen over here in Thailand are not very well set up, also I know peeps that have bought Treks only for something to break or go wrong. As far as pure road bikes go I think Trek have dumped a lot of stuff onto the market which actually needed a bit more thought before being sold.

Another anecdote: There is an American company that sell a lot of carbon online. A friend bought exactly the same frame via Hong Kong for half the price. It was a track bike. Beautiful, 400 us$. Shame that he couldn't put a chainring larger than 48T on the bike though. Anything larger scraped the frameset. That says it all.

Biased, yeah I think so. But after all, why buy a Trek when there is Specialised, Bianchi, Pinarello, Condor, Gios, Colnago, Cervelo, Planet X and many other beautiful bikes on the market?

You do realize that those "beautiful" Specialized (it's an American company so they spell it with a "z") bikes are all made in Taiwan by Merida. You can buy a nearly identical bike with Merida decals for much less. Several of the other bikes mentioned here are also made in Taiwan. There are only a handful of factories in the world that can mass produce enough carbon frames for every bike company that wants to sell them and all of those factories are in Taiwan (although many are opening factories in mainland China to handle the demand). Why pay for the decals when you can get the same bike for less?!

How strange! I've searched Merida's entire full suspension bikes catalogue and cannot find a single model which has the same specs and/or frame geometry of my Stumpjumper??!!

[OriginalPoster]

Blind prejudice on my part.

However, I have been around this sport since I was 10 years old. I have seen many beautiful bikes over the years and have owned and do own a few. I like bikes with a heritage or built with passion and love. These days many frames are mass produced in Taiwan and China with an increase in brands available to us westerners. Surfing yesterday I found one Taiwan manufacturer with a host of frames - but curiously the geometry and the graphics posted for the geometry seemed multi-sourced which suggested to me that they would undergo a project for an overseas company and then rebrand the same frame as their own. When I bought my first carbon frame (a Condor made in Italy and designed by cyclists in the UK) I asked why the price was 1000 uk pounds less than a Trek. "We don't have to pay Armstrong!" came the reply.

To me most Treks I've seen over here in Thailand are not very well set up, also I know peeps that have bought Treks only for something to break or go wrong. As far as pure road bikes go I think Trek have dumped a lot of stuff onto the market which actually needed a bit more thought before being sold.

Another anecdote: There is an American company that sell a lot of carbon online. A friend bought exactly the same frame via Hong Kong for half the price. It was a track bike. Beautiful, 400 us$. Shame that he couldn't put a chainring larger than 48T on the bike though. Anything larger scraped the frameset. That says it all.

Biased, yeah I think so. But after all, why buy a Trek when there is Specialised, Bianchi, Pinarello, Condor, Gios, Colnago, Cervelo, Planet X and many other beautiful bikes on the market?

You do realize that those "beautiful" Specialized (it's an American company so they spell it with a "z") bikes are all made in Taiwan by Merida. You can buy a nearly identical bike with Merida decals for much less. Several of the other bikes mentioned here are also made in Taiwan. There are only a handful of factories in the world that can mass produce enough carbon frames for every bike company that wants to sell them and all of those factories are in Taiwan (although many are opening factories in mainland China to handle the demand). Why pay for the decals when you can get the same bike for less?!

How strange! I've searched Merida's entire full suspension bikes catalogue and cannot find a single model which has the same specs and/or frame geometry of my Stumpjumper??!!

Contract manufacturing is a widely misunderstood thing. Trek, Specialized, Cannondale, Meridia, etc may in some cases be having their bikes manufactured in the same factory but that does not mean that they are all really the same brand nor that they all are of the same quality. There may be cases where a contract manufacturer offers as stock design that anyone can have built with their name printed on it, but on higher end bikes the bike company is going to design the geometry of the bike, specify the materials, specify the components, and agree upon a quality control plan with the manufacturer.

Edited April 21, 2012 by OriginalPoster

[ianf]

Orginal Poster is right that Companies such as Specialised do exert full quality control over the manufacturing of their products in China or Taiwan. Generally I have found Specialised products well-produced and I would be happy to ride their frames. However El Jeffe is also correct because many of these companies use the design expertise of their customers to produce frames under their own name without any branding. I have just spent hours searching companies in Taiwan and Asia in order to locate sources of frames at a lower cost. One experience was related in my previous post but I think there's a lot of cheating going on. On a slightly different topic (but related) I bought a Cinelli RAM seatpost at great cost here in Chiang Mai and it broke a few months later. I sent it to Cinelli and it was a copy and they kindly explained to me why it broke: it looked virtually identical to the real thing but the technology of how the carbon was laid up was in correct hence the breakage. Global manufacturing presents many challenges (I know before I retired I used to produce my products (not cycling stuff) in China and we had to be very careful about copying and so on. We also, in our contracts, specifically debarred our printers from producing similar items for educational markets and surprise spot checks of the factory kept them on their toes.

Back to cycle frames: Condor make their carbon frames in Italy, Time has their own weaving and manufacturing facility for carbon in France and my best bike: A Dimar was also hand made in Italy. So not everything has to come out of the Far East.