worst bike

the thread where you post the worst bike youve ever owned.

still trying to find pictures of my 26" LHT from 2012 with components I stole from a Klein Attitude. Almost killed my interest in riding bikes forever.

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This was pretty obnoxious.

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Really? That looks like a rad bike.

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Yeah I would totally ride that.

This thread should focus on the bike you hated riding the most. Not the shittiest. My shittiest bike was probably my Raleigh folding bike and I loved that thing.

I did so many cross season on this bike, but it was always pretty terrible due to poor equipment choices and very old school geometry.

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My least favorite bike was probably a purple Klein Quantum that some dude from my ADVrider days sold me. It actually looked kinda cool but it was from a time when road bikes weren’t built for guys like me. The gearing was just too high for me at that time, and it was not really feasible to replace the crankset without wrecking the chainline because the BB was not simple to replace. I probably could have smanged a bigger cassette on there, but then I would have needed to replace the dangler. Also the wheels creaked a lot, again probably because big guy. Managed to sell it without taking a huge loss thankfully.

single speed cyclocross is where fun goes to die. theres a reason you have to wear a costume and drink with other douchebags to have fun.

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My worst bike is definitely the space grey Rocky Mountain with the crooked shock mounts. It rode like shit. In retrospect, it probably was a harbinger for what was going on at RM, along with the cracking chainstays on the Slayer.

desperately searching for the Phillippe that I had a stem shifter on.
I loved that bike but I believe it upset a fair amount of folx

edit:

can’t find the drop bar with stem shifter photo
but here it is, a 1 of 4 bicycle frame with a water bottle cage duct taped on and I think tricolor rear running 8 speed with a falcon thumb shifter

again, loved riding it, very aggressive, but I really cobbled it together with junk

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I was gonna say that I’ve never worn a costume, but there was one year where I dressed up as @EuroJorch for the Halloween race.

Last season was the first time in a decade that I raced both single speed and geared and I discovered that my single speed times were consistently a few seconds faster per lap.

I don’t know if it so bad as to be a Worst Bike but this setup rode so terribly that I took it apart days after finishing the build. Looked cool though atmo

This bike gave me none of it despite being made of fancy steel and being a generally well regarded frame.

I loved this bike but for the fact that the rear triangle juddered so hard under braking that it was nearly unrideable.

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Mine was a Ridley Compact. I had just started riding again back in 2010 after buying a 1985 Merckx Professional and thought I should experience a modern bike. It helped me learn about how a road bike handles without enough weight on the front wheel. It was probably a fine bike for people with normal body proportions. Sold it a year or two later through a local used sports consignment shop and just happened to see it again at the same shop in 2017.

I had a FORT brand track frame I bought from some importer circa 2006 that was too big and barely cleared 23mm tires and was happy when I made it someone else’s problem.

I had an absolute blast making a fool of myself dressing up like a bee and sucking at SSCX.

This eye catching abomination was the beginning of the end though. I had always wanted a purpose-built SSCX bike. Instead I got this slacker version of a tarckbike with canti bosses. Boneshakingly rigid. Twitchy. Awful.

…and still for sale if anyone is interested…

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This was my first mtb, a marin nail trail. It was not fun until I took all the parts and put them on a karate monkey frame. Then it was fun.

I had a spooky for a while. I felt very cool riding it but it was very harsh and was not fun on the road. Light though. Put the parts on a black mountain cycles and had that for years.

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i almost forgot about this bike when reading through this thread until i got to @Bootus 's post. The ridley oval was far and away my worst bike. It was very steep old school track goemetry except with a really tall headtube. The 75.5 head tube angle was just a disaster at alpenrose’s super sharp turns and I could not keep this thing tracking in a straight line around the bends.

I rode it 1 track season then sold it to some poor soul on ebay iirc.

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Is that my old Traitor?

This was fun to collect parts for and put together and it was a great attention-getter. But it just kinda sucked to ride. The slack geo sucked to ride with drop bars and in general it was heavy and not really fun. Not really terrible, but later tigged rockhoppers were 100x better.

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sounds like ridleys suck

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yessir, that was probably like a week after you sold it to my roommate
it then became my bike for years when I totaled the Philippe