Hi
I have wanted to get into building a full suspension MTB for a while now and I just got to rent a really nice full suspension bike at beech mountain park. I was curious if there are any ways to build a bike for less than a few hundred as I am only 14 and don’t have a great source of income. If possible I would love a 200 mm shock but anything help is appreciated.
Thanks!
Good quality seamless CrMo tubes to make a frame only cost a couple of 100 (£ or US$). But a complete bike is more like 1000 minimum once you’ve got bought all the parts retail.
The cheapest option by far is to get parts from a second-hand bike. You can often find ones that have hardly been ridden. Then make a new frame for it. If you can find something for sale that’s been crashed with a broken or bent frame then that’s ideal.
the cheapest way to get a worthwhile bike is by far, to buy one.
even acquiring the tools alone to assemble a bike, let alone build a frame, will usually consume a few hundred dollars pretty quickly.
getting deep into your local second hand listings and asking a family member or family friend who rides mountain bikes for some help to learn more about what you’re actually looking at, and what you want is a good first step towards getting something you actually want to live with;
most bikes with 200mm of travel have a suspension service interval of 50 hours or less, many are 30 hours, and that servicing alone might cost a few hundred dollars for fork and shock.. and you don’t want a bike you can’t afford to keep running..
There are TIG welders on Ali for as little as £50. You would need a footpedal, a bottle of gas, and to learn how to use it all. But it could be done.
Hot take: people who try to build a bike frame without being taught, via apprenticeship (ideally) or at least a two-week framebuilding class, usually make a dangerously bad frame. It will break and hurt you. No number of youtubes or tiktoks or instructables can give you what you need to make a ridable frame.
Before you start in with counterexamples, I’ll admit there have been a few geniuses who did it on their own, but they’re extremely rare. And most of those were folks with engineering degrees, or they were master machinists, welders, some kind of crossover skills. And/or a lot of money.
Buy a used bike.
Well I taught myself everything (with the help of YouTube) and have been riding my frames and forks for a few years and many thousands of miles now with no failures. I don’t think the OP should be discouraged!
What was your background before starting? Handy with tools? OWN any tools? We’d need a lot more info about OP to have an idea of how successful he’d be.
The average 14 year old these days doesn’t know which end of the hammer to hold onto. In this era of participation trophies, there’s a lot of unearned confidence out there, not to mention Dunning-Kruger effect.
Tom Ritchey was a teenager when he started, but he had a machine shop, and mentors. Technically I was a teenager too (19), but I had a job as an apprentice at a bike frame building factory… not too many of those jobs these days. Oh and I’d built bikes from parts starting at age 8 (with dad’s help), built my first wheels at 13 and worked in a bike shop starting age 14. By 15 I was properly stress-relieving wheels, and aligning frames, thanks to a great teacher, an old pro mechanic from Italy who worked at that shop. I was taught how to hammer, drill and file. Everything gets much harder if you don’t have those advantages. Still possible if you’re a “natural”, with grit, determination and a strong work ethic.
Don’t worry, a kid with enough grit and determination to become good at this will not be discouraged by some old crank on the internet. If he doesn’t have what it takes, then maybe he should be discouraged.
“Didn’t listen when people said he couldn’t do it” is a common story element in biographies of successful people, but it’s less often mentioned that it also can result in a short life with a painful ending. (“Hold my beer” stories.) I don’t know which ending to the story is more common, but I suspect it’s the latter.
I built my first set of wheels (to replace the rims) when I was about 14. Had no clue, but managed to copy the lacing pattern for each wheel from the other one I hadn’t disassembled yet and eventually got them sort of true. But the concept of “dish” never occurred to me, so the rear rim was centred between the flanges. Then I just “centered” it up in the frame which had those old-school diagonal horizontal dropouts that forgive everything. Rode it around for years like that not realizing anything was wrong until the internet and Sheldon Brown were invented 
It really was the dark ages. All you had to go on was whatever snippets of Myth and Lore you could pick up from local bike shops before they lost patience with you. A good teacher in those days would have made a huge difference. But now I think you really can learn anything from YouTube.
i’m going to suggesting its possible to be both encouraging and pragmatic.
“you really can learn anything from YouTube”
and
[its reasonable to acquire the tools, skills and materials to design and construct a 200mm travel full suspension bike frame, (let alone build a whole BIKE which is what has been asked about) for a few hundred dollars]
aren’t both parts of the same productive conversation. My perspective is that the implication presented by the first statement, Is simply not a pragmatic reply to the second.
‘harbour that enthusiasm and use it to take on smaller, achievable, projects and look for other ways to grow your skills and involvement on the way towards that larger goal, (and understand why thats a better pathway,) is
(edit) OR, as Lester says below, go for it, but there will need to be a dramatic increase in budget (with an explanation as to the depth involved)
I’m a big proponent of learning by doing and diving into the deep end with a project that’s way above my pay grade.
However, i think if the motivation are financial reasons then you should definitely NOT build a bike. A used frame is going to be substantially less expensive than materials, tools, consumables, mistakes and do-overs that definitely will happen. And you can invest the time you have into developing skills that you want to develop.
If you want to build a bike because you love creating things, then yeah go ahead! Figure out a spot where you can get started, see if there is a fablab close by and what tools they have, what you need to do to get trained on these tools and start practicing!
Yeah so by all means go out an get your hands dirty and start making some stuff. I built my first frame with $200 of frame materials, the $50 oxy-mapp gas torch from canadian tire, a hundred dollars of those little red oxygen bottles, and a can of spray paint. The jig was build on an old door and the tubes were spaced with blocks of wood and masking tape for shims. I had a battery drill, a hack saw, a bench vise and a two files. At the time I already had a decent background in metal work and I still made plenty of mistakes.
A full suspension bike is probably too ambitious. There are a lot of notions of tolerance and alignment that are very, very critical in a suspension bike and these aren’t things you can train your brain to understand with anything but experience. Real sparks-flying time in the saddle and lots of mistakes too. Youtube can’t do this for you. I’ve got a new apprentice in the shop right now and in spite of being very competent and having previous metalwork experience he can’t hit +/- 3 thou on the lathe even when I sit there and tell him what to do. You can’t build a suspension bike that isn’t wabbly AF with those tolerances. That level of precision only comes through developing a certain “feel” which is to say a deep rapport with the work. You’ll need a lathe, mill, and a few thousand dollars of tooling if you’re building a suspension linkage from scratch. And you’ll need to understand the tools.
Build some freak bikes. A chopper, a tall bike, a push bike for you’re neighbor’s kid. If you’re still standing after that, make yourself a “real” bicycle, then use that to talk your way in to some place where you can get access to some machines. A local machine shop, a maker space, a farmer-mechanic, or an old crumodgeon who builds miniature steam trains. If you start that now you could be building a respectable FS bike by next summer.
ah, the ol boomer “participation trophy” remark. they always seem to forget they’re the ones that invented participation trophies in the first place.
i’m with bulgie though, don’t even bother trying. stick to your ipad and skibbity toilet, kid.
i’m kidding, don’t do that. i don’t care if you’ve never seen a hammer irl, if you want to build something, go do it. lots of awesome advice in here. you can get an oxy acetylene set up used for pretty cheap, or a new one can be around $400 plus cost of gas. i hear you can get a decent enough tig welder even cheaper these days, if you got power for it in your garage.
maybe don’t focus on building a full suspension as your first go at it but like jacquese suggested, build some freak bikes. tall bikes are hella fun and easy to build, you don’t even have to be good at welding/brazing to make something functional to get going. start small and easy and work your way up to the bike you want.
in the meantime, mow some lawns and get yourself a recentish used bike and go have fun
As for suspension linkages, I have never made a full suss, but don’t some people just use BBs for them? Then you don’t need to machine anything.
Ok yeah that was a cheap shot on my part, and a cliché. But although I’m a boomer, you can’t pin participation trophies on me! I can’t forget doing something I never did. I’ve never even seen a participation trophy so I should shut up about them.
You don’t like my negativity, but it sounds like you basically agree with my advice, which is that OP should not try to build a full-sus MTB for cheapness. Your advice to make a little money and buy a good used bike gets my full endorsement.
Also get a few tools and start making things? I fully agree. Keep that hand-made boinger as the goal, but learn to hammer, file, drill, saw and weld first, on projects that can’t kill you.
Do schools offer shop classes anymore? I made a steel box in Jr. High, with tin snips, a crude shop-made bending brake, overlapped edges soldered with lead/tin. (Wish I still had it but a relative stole it to trade for a bag of weed.) I don’t imagine they let kids do that anymore. First thing I welded was a garden sculpture for my mom, made with a neighbor’s MIG and collected junk from all the folks on my block, that they were glad to be rid of. The welds weren’t “good”, but it wasn’t going to hurt anyone if it failed. I was lucky enough to have such a nice neighbor with a MIG, but that’s just one way to start getting practice on the cheap. Improvise. The main thing is to keep making things.
Oh and start collecting useful scrap, a good scrap pile is a must! I made a wheel-truing stand from a steel bed-frame someone put by the road with a Free sign. It was more rigid than the one I had access to at the bike shop.
Oops there I go again dating myself. I’m thinking about steel, but today’s kids should be concentrating on learning 3d CAD and composite lay-up, right? Ugh.
Agree with all the above. I made a lot of other projects before I had the confidence to tackle a bike frame. You have: round tubes, thin walls, difficult access in a lot of places, thick-to-thin, something that flexes in use, needs to be well-aligned, and is safety-critical. All those things make it much harder than the usual welding carts, garden tables and truing stands etc. we normally start with. But, still, the main investment you need to make is time rather than money.
If you have the time then go for it, post lots of pics. You are going to make a lot of mistakes but don’t feel like a failure, we were all there at one time.
Many people on this forum make/made a living framebuilding. Coming here and suggesting that you can build one cheaply is insulting to those who charge $$$ for what you are looking for.
You can make a frame cheaply but it isn’t insulting to anyone to point that out because it takes a lot of time and skill. When you pay someone $$$ that’s what you’re paying for.
When it comes to projects I am a believer of dreaming big but also doing some research and be careful not to commit to something too big. And also, assume that every project takes more time, effort and money than you plan for.
Building your first custom frame is hard. Building a full suspension is even harder. Making a bike that’s “good” is even harder. But if you are determined enough you can make it happen. Even if you’re 14 and you don’t know how to weld or cut steel there are steps you can do to get you closer to that goal.
If you got involved in a welding/fabrication class you could learn the skills, and eventually use the shop tools to make your first bike frame while you only buy the steel. That’s one way I could see being able to build a bike frame for “cheap”.