Even once huge Raleigh only welded/brazed frames. All the components were outside bought, with few parts from the UK.

This place is a great model for others. http://www.bicyclekitchen.com/
_check out_and share_ www.peakaware.com

Most of what you see WRT degrading bikes are cheap bikes that are poorly maintained. The parts that die out in the elements are chains, saddles, and tires, usually in that order. On many of these bikes the bottom bracket isn't sealed at all, so the bottom bracket bearings start eating up their cups, but you can't see that damage. The chain is the weakest link in any bike, since it has to be maintained frequently and starts to destroy the chainrings and sprockets (cassette or freewheel gears) quickly when the chain wear (we call it stretch) gets past a certain point. The biggest problem I see with junk bikes out dying on campus around here is chains that are rusting like mad. If you get a cheap car, never maintain it, and leave it out, it will start falling apart quickly too.

Of course, the simple solution is to avoid buying cheap bikes and leaving them out in the rain. Snow's not so bad, though road salt and slush tend to do in a chain pretty quickly if you don't take care of it.

I bike about 600 trips by bike per year, for around 1800-2000 miles per year. I usually have a tire on about half to 1/3 of the year each year (switch to studded tires in the winter, slick tires in the summer, and Avocet cross or similar tires in the shoulder seasons). Each of those sets of tires last me over five years like that. Any company that makes car or ag tires could make bike tires. Clinchers are just two wires for the beads, strong fabric for the casing, glue in key places, and some rubber for the tread and sometimes sidewalls. Sew-ups are even simpler. So tires are much less of a problem than people think. I think the roads will become unusable much faster than bike tires will become unavailable, but I live in freeze/thaw country.

Inner tubes last even longer, and can be patched many times.

Chains are a different story. Even with good maintenance, I only get about a year out of a chain. Once it gets to 1% stretch, I get rid of it to protect the rest of the drive train. If you're going to stock bicycle parts, I recommend chains and brake pads first. I service all of our 12 or so bikes in my household, including stocking parts, and have done almost all of my own bike work for over 20 years. I've never owned a bike stand. A truing stand is nice when you're building your own wheels, and mine (minoura?) didn't cost nearly as much as a bike stand.

BTW, I was just at Greenfield Village a few weekends ago. They have the original Orville and Wilbur Wright bike shop. One of the bikes there was a shaft drive. If things were to get so bad that we can't get chains, we could always switch to shaft drive. A single speed shaft drive is basically a pipe with some gears welded on and only four lubrication points. Hard to beat that for maintainability.

Bicycles are great in that they are standardized. Personally I am not too concerned about bicycles degrading when ill-maintained; that problem will solve itself. The issue is parts, mostly. Assuming that people are not busy being subsistence farmers or killing each other, manufacturing bike parts will require industrial activity. Although tires are not made in North America now, North America does contain all the things necessary to make a bicycle. All you really need is steel and rubber and lubricants. North America probably still has enough manufacturing capacity to produce the bearings and chains and gearwheels for bicycles. The oil used (I realize that kerosene is not what they use to make tires although of course it could be done) for flying to vacations in North America is probably many times what is necessary to make bike tires for everyone.

Yes, if civilization collapses bikes are not realistic, but if that happens, most of us will be dead. Those of us who are prepared for total rapid collapse will have a chance, but I suspect that they will be killed by survivalists or ex-military with guns sooner or later if they are trying to farm. If you found a Cold War era nuclear bunker and stocked it with enough food and water to last a couple years then your odds would probably be a lot better on the surface - as long as nobody else knows about your bunker. And you would be weak and probably deranged from living in a bunker for several years.

The problem I would see is that the bicycles tend to degrade rapidly if left outside for long periods--at least that is my impression.

You obviously never ride bicycles ;)

The degrading is mostly just rust. Unless the thing has rusted up into a solid lump - which takes some decades or extraordinarily harsh conditions - you can scrub it up to functionality. It won't be pretty, but pretty bicycles get stolen, rusty ugly ones are left alone.

Honestly, bicycles are not a high-tech and complex thing. The latest road bike an Olympian trains on at a velodrome, sure, that's high-tech and complex. But something to take a person and up to 30kg of cargo, or up to 250kg of cargo with a trailer or carrier, that is not a complex thing. They were made before the Oil Age, and can be made after it, too.

Worry about spare parts for your fuel-injected, computer-operated SUV. Do not worry about spare parts for your ordinary commuting bicycle.

John Michael Greer has done an excellent writeup over at The Archdruid Report this week on exactly this type of scenario. This is a fundamental problem of our current economic paradigm. A post crash guild system, if we accept historical precedent, will remove this constraint, but the question is how do we proceed from here to there?

I think the answer is, nobody really knows, and whatever the migration path is, it will be messy and painful. Suffice it to say you will have to accept a period of significant unprofitability in order to be prepared. If you are not willing to accept this, you will have to accept the pain that comes along with a paradigm shift. That means there will be an extended period where such products simply will not be available. There is no perfect solution.

Are we still talking about cycling in an economic depression or post-collapse world? What is wrong with the roads and bridges we have already? The volume of motorised traffic will drop heaps, and the number of cyclists rise a lot. That's a much safer environment for cycling than the motor-vehicle-saturated one we have now!

I really don't know how much business one could reasonably expect in other places working as a bike mechanic but in my part of the world even if bikes become very popular there will be very little opportunity to earn anything like a decent living working on them -for the very simple reason that they are too easy to fix.

Of course there may be a number of people who will ride very expensive bikes simply because they must due to regulations of the roads or unavailability gasoline and they might pay for repairs.

But in a working class town or mioeghborhood, at least every third man or teenage boy and quite a few women and girls are handy enough to make thier own repairs-and not only without paying labor but also usually faster than hiring out the work.

When I was a kid we rode old American made single speeds on dirt roads and thru the fields for years without doing anything other than oiling the chain and replacing a tire occasionally.

If you buy a good heavy duty single speed it will need VERY little work -probably no work at all -except tires-for years on end, other than lubing the chain etc.