rparedes said:
The IMMORTAL SPIRIT Motobecane frameset (frame, fork and headset) sells for $780; very good reviews.
Yup. There are a host of "sticker" brands that are less expensive and are proven, excellent frames. You can go out and find any number of re-branded Fuji frames, that are top notch frames. As mentioned, the Pedal Force frames are universally acknowledged to be great frames, and they beat the NEO on price. It only takes about 5 or 10 minutes with Google to find frames that are cheaper and offer the same "features." Of course, the NEO's "features" have only been vaguely described. For a customer in the US, where to buy the NEO is a non-starter: $750 vs. $1400. IF these sellers are somehow business related, and IF this frame were actually "designed"--in full or in part--in the UK, it's even more suspicious that there'd be two widely varying prices.
One "feature" that hasn't been addressed is customer service and/or warranty. With Pedal Force and the others, there is at least a website and contact info. So far with this NEO, there are just two rather anonymous personal sites. They are far from having any professional appearance and give the appearance that the sites will be there at least until your check clears.
$1400 is shitload of money for a generic, "put your name here" frame. Moreover, marketing spray for such a frame is even more suspicious. With Scattante at least you get the generally "no questions asked" replacement policy of Performance Bikes.
Of course, people might be willing to pay for a no-name product just to get something "lighter" or allegedly "stiffer." Well, I guess then people deserve what they get if they don't ask what actually is stiffer, what is meant by stiffer, and where is the proof. Those same people, I guess, might just want to get the new Zipp stem that has the dimpled face plate. After all, dimples are faster, right?
Claims as seen with this NEO are just further proof that customers need to get off the "stiffer and lighter" propaganda train. Sean Kelly seemed to damned well with his whip-like Vitus frames. And there were frames, at the time, that were much stiffer.
It is important to keep these performance benefit claims in perspective. Just like how comparing the performance of a CF in the tailplane of an F-16 to the performance of CF in a Pinarello Prince is completely irrelevant, so is qualifying the performance benefits of increased stiffness in a bike with performance benefits of increased stiffness in some F1 component. In scientific or engineering parlance, such comparisons would be called "****ing stupid." Similarly comparing the stiffness parameters and their performance influence on fully suspended mountain bikes to the same on road bikes is idiotic at best. It's not even in the ball park to draw even some very faint comparison. The same is true with weight comparisons. Weight doesn't appear to be a factor for most ProTour riders and teams, given the average bike weight in the ProTour is in the 17lb range.
As proof of how specious some of these claims are, at Weight Weenies, Mark McM, modeled a bike/rider system based on the appropriate scientific ideas, i.e. Newtonian Mechanics,
on this page, calculated the form of the solution, and then ran values through the equation to find out how, in this case, wheel weight and a wheel's rotational moment of inertia affected performance. The answer oh-so very little. The equation is equally valid for the bike weight claims independent of rotational mass difference, in general. In fact that simplifies the equation and makes the answers even smaller. Those are facts that cannot be danced around whether your Stephen Hawkings or some guy working in some capacity on an F1 team. If you're interested in how stiffness affects bicycle peformance, well, you're gonna have to wait for answers because no one has done any study that showed that stiffness makes a substantive performance difference. Cervelo (leading stiffness snake oil salesman) haven't done it. Canyon--makers of some of the stiffest bikes in existence--haven't done it. No university has done it, and last I checked neither CERN, NASA, or the American Dental Asssociation was interested in doing it. Hopefully, the cutting edge stuff done in the creation of the NEO will be published in Science or Nature and the lead scientists in charge of said research and analysis will speak at engineering and science conferences so that other scientists and engineers can understand just how the NEO's creators were able to make such revolutionary improvements.
As usual, buying a NEO should really only be done based on four simple things:
- You like the way it looks and gets you excited about riding.
- It fits you.
- You like the way things feel when you ride it.
- You're willing to spend the money on it.
Any other reasons are likely the result of drinking the NEO koolaid.