A new bike has been recently introduced which is designed with the goals of products in the 1960s-- rugged, simple, built to last. Nothing is flimsy on this bike. Even the fenders and sprockets are thick. The design focus was two main goals: robustness and simplicity so owners can fix it themselves. The gears are internal, which seems to reflect ruggedness being prioritized over self-repairability. Derailers are inherently fragile and cassettes wear down relatively quickly and also would impose a thin chain. The internal gears enable the chain to be thick and wide.
The website is in French but I machine-translated the “about” section:
A Bruxellois, magnet to travel by bicycle in town, activist in several environmental associations and working in the design and manufacture of cycles since 2014, established the SUGG srl in 2021 to provide simple, solid, practical, fast, fun, designed and assembled bicycles in Brussels with high quality components often produced in Europe.
The SUGG bikes are aimed at young people from 9 to 99 years of age who wish to move by bike without assistance and prefer to exploit the powerful resources often ignored whose nature has given them. Indeed, with no electric assistance, SUGG bikes are more economical, light, ecological, simple, reliable, durable and fun. At SUGG, the efficiency and ascent qualities of the bike are optimized by the choice of geometry and components. It’s fun!
A few objectives of SUGG: to contribute to the improvement of life in our cities thanks to less air and noise pollution, calm and friendly streets, intelligent and respectful traffic, efficient, beautiful and funny movements; to participate in the fight against unemployment in our regions, on the one hand by repatriating the design and assembly in us and on the other hand by procuring the parts with manufacturers not too far away from us
I don’t have one myself but if I wanted a bomb-proof bike that would last my whole life, this is probably what I would get.
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Bicycles in general are not flimsy products with short lifespans if you buy a good one. A modern, run of the mill, road bike with mechanical groupset will likely last many decades and tens of thousands of miles if well maintained and looked after.
It’s honestly weird to me that we are talking about 1960s bikes in a good way here. Bikes now are just so tremendously better than anything you could have gotten in the 60s.
Bikes now are just so tremendously better than anything you could have gotten in the 60s.
It’s the other way around. Modern bikes are less sustainable. Unsustainable cheap Chinese bikes have flooded the market. In the past couple decades proprietary parts have become widespread along with needless excessive introductions of more standards. So bicycles are being thrown away on a large scale with perfectly good frames due to compatibility issues.
Steel frames have become less common, in favor of aluminum and other metals that are more energy intensive, and carbon fiber which significantly degrades over time.
SUGG frames are made from steel. And they make an effort to avoid Chinese components. iirc there’s only one component from China on it.
I needed a new crank, chain and sprocket on a modern Mongoose fat bike. That brand goes back to my childhood so I was surprised to find what a big fiasco that common need was. It was insufficient to simply buy a square taper crank. In the struggle to track down a compatible front sprocket, I had to go to the manufacturer. They told me they couldn’t help me because the part was no longer made. WTF? I called months later and they said they were able to track down a compatible replacement. But of course getting official the parts from the manufacturer is costly. Of course they take full advantage of the compatibility fiasco. I think they wanted $90 for another cheap quality crankset. In the end, I said fuck this, I bought the cheapest square taper sprocket i could find and took a gamble. The result: chainline issues. My threshold of tolerance was pegged, so I simply decided i will not shift into the gears that cause the chain to rub the tire.
BTW, the reason i needed a new crank was because a peddle came loose as i was peddling. The aluminum threads in the crank are soft, so it didn’t take much peddling with a loose peddle to destroy the threads. The crank is part of the sprocket (a poor design). That forced the sprocket to be replaced. Funnily enough, the damage was done when i was test riding it before purchase. I pointed out to the seller at the end of the test ride that the peddle fell off. He offered to fix it or reduce the price. I was far from home so i opted to reduce the price. We both thought it would be cheap and trivial to fix. I think he knocked off ~$50 or so. Well, I could not have predicted the nightmare from such a seemingly minor problem.