Open source bike comparison and review

Horray! This is an idea I had a few months ago, threw around in my head, and realized it's something I'd never have time to build.

I'm thrilled that you have!

For those of you who aren't super-familiar with the agonizing process of choosing the proper bike, I'll try to clue you in.

Say you wanted to buy a Full-suspension 29'er from a well-known manufacturer for about $2,900. You'd narrowed your choices down to the Giant Anthem X 29er, Trek Fuel EX 8 29er and Specialized Stumpjumper FSR Comp 29er.

At this point, if you wanted to know which option gave you the best value in terms of components, you'd have to obsessively comb over the manufacturer's sites, and (if you're like me) possibly build your own spreadsheet that listed every "important" component from the bikes you were considering.

Now, you can just go to http://bikebook.io/, select the models you're considering, and look at features side-by-side.

Then, quite honestly, you should just ride them all and pick the one you like the most based on how it feels, but that's beside the point.

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A couple suggestions:

* When comparing models, I think that a table-view with individual features lined up would be more useful than the current comparison view. That way I could quickly scan between models.

* I noticed some areas that could benefit from increased granularity. For example, right now if I look at the "Trek Fuel EX 29" I see that it has a single field for "Rear Suspension" that reads: "Fox Evolution Series Float w/DRCV, CTD (climb-trail-descend) damper, rebound, tuned by Trek in California, 7.25x1.875"" - That's nice, but I think it would be more helpful (especially when comparing to other bikes) if that data were split up into something like:

Rear Suspension - Travel: 184mm

Rear Suspension - Manufacturer: Fox

Rear Suspension - Model: Evolution Series Float

Rear Suspension - Features: DRCV, CTD (climb-trail-descend) damper, rebound, tuned by Trek in California.

That way, I could quickly scan across the comparison page and realize that if I chose the Trek over the Specialized, I'd be leaving a full 11 mm of travel on the table?! OMG, how could I even consider such a thing?! I feel like such a fool.

But seriously, this is wonderful. Spec-obsessed bike nuts everywhere owe you a debt of gratitude.

Thank you thank you thank you! We're excited about it too and pumped that you see how useful it is.

We're definitely working on parsing things better, and I agree, tabular view might be beneficial. We'll work on making it a pretty table.

I did this as well and was rather disappointed with the reality.

I wonder if there are enough open source bikes for a worthwhile comparison.

Clearly we need to make some. There was that cardboard bike guy?... But I think that flopped. The future is yours!

What materials could we use to prototype? Cheap materials and rapid construction should probably take precedent, to ensure speedy iterations by a large number of people.