Brake disks are the same story.
When you fit an exceptionally rare racing disk, you start to feel like…
“It seems wasteful to actually brake?” (True story.)
One day I realized: “You don’t really need to make it super authentic.” (・´з`・)
(´∀`*) Hehe. The year’s biggest sale—Amazon Prime Day, 7/12–13
One-offs take forever to source. (; ･`д･´)
There are times when you can’t fit a brake disk without making a one-off—issues like inner offset or pad contact surface.
With consumables, you can plan ahead and arrange parts to some degree, but crashes and accidents come out of nowhere. If the part is still available, that’s fine, but if the shop and the fabricator both disappear and there’s no data left, you could end up in a real jam.
What starts as a disk problem can snowball into a serious headache.
Consumables like sprockets are tough too.
There are always situations where you have to make a single custom piece.
There’s no off-the-shelf compatibility, so it can’t be helped.
But if you think about future use and mileage, you could rebuild the hub side on the rear and use a stock sprocket instead.
That way you can get parts faster and have way more options for final drive ratios and manufacturers.
The downside is that costs jump dramatically, so neither approach is clearly better.
When a bike gets too special, maintenance becomes a nightmare.
That’s right. That machine probably has specs only the builder understands.
Shafts, brake disks, sprockets, colors—all different…
Custom bikes get a bad reputation for exactly this: configurations that make no sense, puzzle-like setups, or special fastening methods (like loose bolts) that are the only way to make it work. You see it all the time.
Funny thing is, the owner often doesn’t know the situation and assumes any shop can do the work.
I think every day that it’s safer not to push a bike to extremes, and ideally you should be able to reverse your changes. (Though deciding never to revert is also an option. (‘ω’)ノ)
The key is to build things so you don’t run into problems in the first place.
