We Put $1000 Parts on a $50 Walmart Bike

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– This is a used Walmart bike
that I just bought for $50 – And it’s a piece of junk
– And that is a brand new bike
straight off the showroom floor that costs almost $2,400. Now obviously that bike
is nicer than this bike, but hopefully not for long because today we are gonna
upgrade every single part of this Walmart bike to see if
it can match the performance of something top of the line. And we’re gonna do it for
less than half the price. – That’s ambitious. No fate. – Our goal for this build is
to make a solid city commuter to make it perform as close as
possible to the $2,300 bike. In order to do that, we
have five main objectives. One, make the bike lighter. Two, make it shift more smoothly. Three, have good power delivery. Four, improve the braking, and five, make it more
comfortable to ride. But actually before we
took anything off the bike, we wanted to set a baseline to see how much we could improve. To do that, we created a short
circuit in our neighborhood to test different situations that we want the bike to perform well in. It includes a dirt path to test how the bike will do on unpaved surfaces, a steep hill climb, some
flat smooth street riding and a long descent into a stop. – All right, we wanna make sure
that this bike doesn’t lose just ’cause it wasn’t tuned well. So I’m just making sure even
though these parts are bad, that they have like the best
chance possible for success. Oh my god, dude, I’m about
to throw up. Relay starts – Now. Oh god. Terrible gear. Now you might be wondering
why we’re doing this and the short answer is Spike. I wanted to build a nice
little commuter bike to ride around town, the grocery store, Zach and Jesse’s house, the beach. Zach is my bike friend. He’s the guy who told me to buy that climb that you see in the background
of a lot of our videos. So I said, Zach, what kind
of frame should I get? And he said, really the
frame doesn’t matter. It’s all about the components.
And I said, really? He’s like, yeah. And I’m – Like, okay, James is
trying to build a bike. And I said, don’t spend as
much of money on a frame. And then he came up with this video idea and he is gonna try to pretend like I said that a frame doesn’t
matter, which is not true. I just said the parts can be more important than
the frame. Now here we are – Kind of started as a joke, but now I’m really curious to
see how this thing turns out On our first run with the Walmart bike, the gear shifts are clunky. It feels especially heavy on the climb. Oh damn dude, I forgot that I have to go. The front suspension takes
away power on the flat streets, – The Walmart bike, it’s like 50% of the power you put out gets to the road – And it doesn’t break very well. – That thing did not wanna stop at all. – Oh yeah. And the chain fell off. Chain – Fell off – 13 minutes, 18 seconds. I’m giving her a Walmart
bike like three out 10. – Yeah, I’d say three outta
10 is pretty accurate. – Time for the expensive bike
– One go. The $2,300 specialized is
immediately faster and more agile. The lighter weight and lower
gear ratios make a huge difference on the climb, the stiffer frame and fork plus skinnier tires
made it much quicker on the streets and the brakes were smoother and more dependable on the downhill. Plus the chain stayed on. – I’m glad we did the Walmart bike first ’cause I was kinda like,
you know it’s not that bad. And then you get on that
and you’re like, oh my God, 10 52 way better bike. – Crazy. How much
– Better? Yeah, – After comparing them
back to back, it’s clear that our Walmart bike isn’t
even close to the quality of the specialized. I mean if it were, it would
be the hack of a century. But we are gonna do our best to get our little Walmart
bike’s performance as close as possible to our $2,300
bike at half the cost. – All right, so what’s
your bike experience? – Pretty minimal I’d say. I mean I’ve owned bikes my entire life, but I’ve never like built a bike. – All right. So James tasked
me with upgrading this bike for around a thousand dollars. We’re trying to stay under half the price of that specialized. I did a mix of getting
some really nice parts and some places that I thought
we could save some money and we’re gonna go
through every single part. See what I bought. I’ll explain why we’re making the upgrades that we are. And hopefully this can show you that upgrading a bike is not that scary – Already. Taking that thing apart is way easier than taking your car apart. – So this is the bottom bracket. This is basically what
supports your spindle that your cranks are on. And so these are the bearings
that go into the frame. – So your pedals are on each side of – This? Yeah. So your pedals
are on each side of this – Poly lube, 1000 poly lube for people who are not in monogamous
miss relationships. – Okay, so the stock one is a
square taper bottom bracket. This is a hollow tech. The bearings are sealed cartridges and because they sit on the
outside of the frame, you’re actually wider. So you have a stiffer spindle. I will say though, our frame
is six to eight millimeters. And so we have to have these
spacers on our bottom bracket, which is just like kind of strike one against the
frame. All right, first part – On, it’s already looking way better. Got silver on there, some
little notches, some writing. Anytime there’s tiny writing
on a part means it’s nice. – All right, next thing
to really point out, these cranks go on this spindle, right? So this is taking all of that weight and that’s how you’re transferring power. New fancy spindle, old wimpy spindle. – Whoa. Not only am I a novice,
I’m a relatively dumb guy and, but I can tell
that this is way nicer. Dude, this is so nice. – Gonna be using lots of lube today. The thing to know about
components, Shimano, Sam, campan, those are all good brands,
but our Walmart bike came with Shimano, so that kind
of doesn’t mean anything. If you see Shimano Ttorney or like Altus or something, there’s
like weird Shimano lines that are crap. So you need to not only
make sure you’re getting Swm or Shimano, you need to make sure you’re getting their good line. So QS is kind of a new line from Shimano and so far people say it’s pretty good. Dude, that looks nice. Let’s
get into our chain ring. – This one’s got more gears. – That is three single gear. Front chain rings like one by 11, which is what we’re doing has become
way, way, way more common because there’s a way smaller
chance of the chain coming off with the single gear up front. You don’t have to worry about a front me. And another reason that you
see single chain rings becoming more popular is ’cause
you can do something called a wide narrow. If you look at a chain, you’ll notice that it goes wide narrow,
wide narrow, wide narrow. The little holes right inside, outside, inside, outside, right? What a wide narrow chain ring
does is it lines up the teeth with the wide narrow holes, right? So you have a tooth made for a wide spot, you have a tooth made for a narrow spot and that keeps the chain more secure. – This gear, all of the teeth
are the same width. Yeah. So it’s more likely to jump – Off. Yeah. All right, let’s take how
much this weighs altogether. 1066 grams stock about 1.6 kilos, so about 60% heavier shaving off a third of the weight’s pretty good. – Yeah, – This is cool wheel. It’s a cool wheel. It’s, it’s probably my least favorite pick. The issue was we wanted to
do disc brakes up front, but there was no way to do
a disc brake in the back. The frame just wouldn’t supported. So I was looking for a set
of wheels that had both that disc brakes and rim brakes so that we could have the same wheels front and back and it would match. And this was one of the
only ones I could find. They’re just a little skinnier
than I would’ve liked. For our tires, we got
these Conti ride tours. A lot of people don’t like
continental like gator skins or tires that are meant to be really tough and avoid puncture because
they’re not as smooth of a ride. We live in la. I’d rather just not have to deal with punctures all the time. Boom. Hell yeah, dude. Yeah, dude. All right, cool. Next up
we got our rear cassette and as you can see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This has six gears. Our new one as 11, this is from Sun Race. This is gonna be our only non-GE
component in our group set. So because we don’t have
those three gears up front, we’re making it up in the rear. – Whoa. Cool. Tool bikes have cool tools. – All right, so this is 87 bucks. Not too bad, but not cheap either. Nice. – I’ve been saving money on gas by riding my bike more often,
but sometimes you gotta drive. Obviously you know what hurts more than riding
a Walmart bike up a hill. Gas prices. That’s why I use Upside. It’s a free app that gets
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an extra 25 cents back per gallon on your first tank. I may be building a bike this summer, but if I’m gonna drive you
better be damn sure I’m gonna get cash back for it. – All right, up next, the derailers. So rear derailer is what lets you shift on the back of your bike. This one has a clutch.
Basically what that means is that the clutch basically
lets you make this a lot harder to move. So once it’s in place, it
wants to stay where it is. Once you shift it, it wants to stay there. Versus this one will just
like wiggle around like crazy. And so you’re gonna get a
bunch of like chain slap as you’re going versus this
one’s gonna hold tight in place. This is the hanger, this
is the derailer hanger. This is one of my least
favorite things about what we’ve had to do for the bike. The derailer hanger is
how your derailers mounted to the frame and it’s
basically, its only job is to be a disposable part. That way if you drop the bike, the hanger will bend and your frame won’t. So then you don’t have to
try to repair your frame. You just buy a new hanger
for like two bucks. This hanger is integrated into
this derailer, which means that if it does bend, you either
have to try to bend it back or you have to get an
entirely new derailer because of these dropouts and the way that the original
bike came, we have this kind of janky hanger that has to go in before the wheel does and then the wheel helps hold it in place. And then our derailer hangs off of that. It should have its own hole. So our frame doesn’t even have
a hole for a derailer hanger. Once again, a cheap frame
is leading us to try to do some weird stuff
to just make it work. – There’s a lot of that on this – Bike that does not look right. It’s gonna work, it does not look right. – This is the bike version
of backfiring on a de cell. – It might be a little
early to the party for this, but I just wanna see what our derailer
alignment is looking like. So this is a derailer alignment tool, bro. That’s way off. Way off. – So what Zach’s doing
is bending the actual derailer hangar. – If the derailer iss not
parallel with your wheel, then it won’t be parallel
with all of these gears. And so it’s basically,
imagine the chain, instead of being straight, it’s gonna
be at like an angle, trying to go up the gears. So you just get like a lot of like, let’s put the seed on man. There was a shoot day recently
where Jesse just turned to me and he goes, I think I
need to go to the er. – Yeah.
– And he did because – He ripped his taint on his bike. Whatever happened with that? A nerve. Yeah, he pinched a nerve. He pinched a nerve in
his taint from his bike. Dude, pudendal nerve.
How’s it feel? Really good. You can tell this is way cheaper. That’s probably why I
like it. This thing is, so Brooklyn whip this thing
up to horses and divorces. This is our stock fork. This thing’s heavy – Forks with suspension in them. Like this can often be
marketing gimmick. It’s – Got shocks,
– But you know, you can’t even adjust them or tune them in any way. I think for our application
they’re unnecessary. We’re not bombing down a hill, even though we’re putting some
pretty legit mountain bike parts on this bike. That’s not our ultimate goal. – This is way lighter dude. This is carbon – Fiber. Yeah. Now this is a super cheap fork. It’s like a hundred bucks. It’s definitely one of those
Chinese carbon fiber forks. And I was on the border of like, oh, should we get carbon fiber or not? But the reviews are like good. All right, this is one inch threaded. And so this drops in like that, right? And then this expansion bolt is what holds your stem in place. And what’s nice about it,
easy to adjust the height of your handlebars, but
it’s not very strong new standard thread lists. And these are the bearings
that hold it in place. Basically you just slide
this up through your frame. You have some bearings here, then you use this for your handlebars. And so you can kind of adjust
the height you use spacers. It’s a bit more of a hassle than just one
bolt, but it’s way stronger. And in fact, I don’t think you
can even run disc brakes on a threaded style fork. There’s a problem though that
I didn’t really think about when I order all these parts and that’s that threadless designs are an inch and an eighth. And I kind of forgot that these old threaded stems are one inch. So we’re gonna press these in here. So this is a bottom one
and then that is the top. That’s 10 fit. You should measure it. I think it’s supposed to be 34 mil mill. This is the right headset for this fork. So, so when I found out that I had made this big mistake and that we have a frame
that’s suited for one inch – And we were halfway
through making the video, – It was like, okay, so what
are our, what are our options? We could order another fork, but it’s probably gonna be an older one. Probably won’t be carbon fiber. We’ll not be able to support
disc brakes and the stem and handlebars that we picked
out aren’t gonna work on it. Not an option. The other option – Is call my brother Chris to
cut the front off of our frame and weld in a new pipe. Yep. – Dude, it looks awesome. The thing is rad, dude, I think when we were first
building this yesterday, I was kind of like, I didn’t like it ’cause we were making
all these compromises. Now I fully surrendered
to the kind of stupidity of the build and now I’m stoked. I’m ready to like get every
part on this bike. Tune it up. – Yeah, dude, this thing fricking rules. Zach says that these two things are the nicest part of the bike, – Dude. All right. So I kind of splurged and I got this red shift
shock absorbing stem only because the specialized
had a very similar thing. – So basically this is like
it’s got a spring in the stem, we’ll get a little bit
of relief like in our hands from the bumps. – Yeah,
– But it won’t, we won’t lose any energy
down here from pedaling. Yeah. Yeah dude, just look normal. Maybe up a little bit. Okay.
We can always go down, right? We just keep, yeah, we can always go down. I think putting this bike
together is another example of a great fun thing
that gives you an excuse to hang out with your pals. It feel like a civil war surgeon dude – That is very not straight. Really? Yeah. So to hold everything
together, there’s a cap that goes on top and then
there’s a bolt that kind of pulls it all up and together. So usually to get that nut in the center and you’d have a star nut goes in there, it’s kind of a one-way thing. You hammer it in, you
cannot pull it out, right? You can tell, you can
tell by the way it is. That’s really bad for carbon fiber though. ’cause it would eat into all
the layers of carbon fiber. So we have this plug that’ll go in that will tighten and
press out against the wall and hold itself in place and that will be our nut that our cap uses to
pull everything together. Torquing it down, six
newt meters. Six. I know. Yeah, that looks good to me. My front a little bit of a
space or never hurt anybody. All right, so now you
basically want enough pressure that everything’s held nice in place, but if it’s too much pressure, that’s gonna put pressure on the bearings and then it’s not gonna spin very well. – Got it.
– Some people will give you like a number. They’ll say like two
newton meters, you’re good. I mean it’s like almost no torque. You want it just perfectly
holding everything together, but you just gotta tighten it. And then when it starts to
feel like it’s too tight, you like back it off a little. So a lot of times it’s
just by feel perfectly. All right, time to put
the rotor on the front. The funny thing with bikes is you do want to torque everything down to spec, but it is insanely low torque. If you’re used to working on
cars, classic star pattern. It doesn’t even have a satisfying
click towards the spec. Nice dude. Now we’re a real bike. That’s cool. Okay. Like I said, we’re running
V brakes in the back. V brakes have a little pin on them and this pin is what
kinda locks it in place. Mm. And so these three holes
let you run it at different levels of like stiffness for the spring. We did a lot to get here. We did a lot for this disc break that compared to the Walmart bike is nice. Cool shifter break. I will say I wish that
our brakes were identical. You know, having a a disc
brake with a cable break and the levers look a little different. What are we missing dude?
Are we just cables and chain? Are we just a couple cables and a dude? – What a question, bro.
Are we just, what are we? What are men? But just cables and chain. Just two cables and a chain away. – Shifter cable housing and brake cable housing
are different. Actually for – Zach, these look exactly the same. – Well if you look on the
very inside, you’ll see that the metal reinforcement is different. This one’s wound horizontally,
like a spiral almost. And this one, the reinforcement goes
along the cable housing. And the reason for that is you
want your brake cable housing to be super strong because
you’re applying a lot of pressure and so it’ll compress a little, but that cable is not gonna potentially break through your housing. Where this one, it won’t compress at all. It’s not as strong. But
when you’re shifting, you want the amount of cable that’s moving to be really precise – Shift. Your cable has more strength this way and break cable has
more strength this way. – Yeah, you want it loose
enough so you can turn lover. – Lover always starting, but you liar when it comes to true. Faster. Faster. Who’s the master? I – See Happy. But I don’t see you. The cable routing on this bike
is like very Walmart bike. Yeah. Anytime you see the cable is exposed, it’s a cheap bike. I hate it when you go to
like pick the bike up, you’re grabbing your cable,
obviously the nicest stuff. Now it’s all like in frame. – Oh yeah. So it goes
straight through the frame. – So it actually like goes
inside and then comes outside. – Yeah, my client is like that. – Yeah. – Yeah. Guys, we
might have bad news. Bad news. It is possible that we have a fake chain. We may have been bamboozled. – Well, okay, so I’ve kind
of, I’ve heard about this and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but like when you get apart from Shimano, often there’s these little
boxes you can select, like which model it is. – This one you can see is made with a pen, which means someone looked
at it and checked the box. – I’ve heard, and it’s
specifically with chains that if you’re getting one that it’s like a digital
check mark that’s just printed with the box that that’s
fake. But I don’t know. – Yeah,
– Because what’s the point of printing a check mark instead? You should just print the thing and not have the other options. Like the checkbox is for
like quality control. So – Yeah. So if anyone has any information on that, yeah, let us know in the comments. – Is it fake? Doesn’t matter.
It is going on the bike. – Yeah. Is this the last – Part? This is the last step. It needs to feed through the derailer. So rest it on top of this. And then the last one
is down through here. – Yep.
– Nice. There we go. Smallest skier. – Dude. That’s some clean
– Action. – Yeah.
– And so now we kind of like a good chain length
here, so we just wanna make sure that that still works
even up on the high skier. – That feels good. That feels
like getting a splinter out – Nittle spaghetti. – I’m just kidding. I’m not a robot. – Nittle. Spaghetti arrow is direction of travel for the chain. – This – Goes on either
side. That side’s good. Yeah. Okay, lemme get the tool. There we go. Surprisingly not bad though. Woo. And – Dude, good action, bro. Hell yeah, dude. It’s a bike bro. Speed is one years old. And to celebrate, we are
gonna make every limited piece of merch on Gar available
for a limited time only. So if you ever wanted a
Japan went hard in 1999 shirt, it’s available. A garden shirt, it’s available. Take the money shirt available all for a limited time right now on speed.co. Thank you guys so much.
It’s been one year of speed. Here’s to a hundred more years of speed. Our Walmart bike, dude, we
built a bike. Walter Martin. Walter Martin. You are officially
not a lame bike anymore. You are a cool – Bike. Bike. Just ’cause it’s a huffy
doesn’t mean it can’t be cool – With the bike complete, we
head back out to our course to see how much it’s improved. – Also at Continental. Lied. There’s no way. These are 30 twos. – I mean, that’s gonna be wobbly, bubbly. – Don’t worry, dude. I have rock steady plus turned on on this thing. – 3, 2, 1, go. Immediately it feels better. I mean, this is kind of
a stupid way to test it. Oh, I almost ran over a squirrel. The bike now weighs 28 pounds,
a 15 pound improvement. The gears shift quickly and smoothly even under load. Oh dude, – How many more gears I got? Oh, I got plenty. Many more gears. – The rigid fork, thinner tires and stiffer drivetrain all make
the power delivery feel more confident and direct – Moving. Downshift for you. – Where are we at sport mode? Ugh. The braking is stronger and more precise. The wider handlebars, newer seat and griper pedals all lead
to a more comfortable ride. – All right. It’s
undoubtedly a better bike. – This is a way nicer bike
to ride than it was before. – Ultimately though, James
proved this point when he showed up with that Walmart bike. Way easier to shift.
The frame does matter. It doesn’t need to be an expensive frame. But the Walmart bike with the
one inch head tube, the slots where the wheels go in, instead
of having through axles, not even having a derailer hanger or a mount for derailer hanger. Also taking this from
a mountain bike to kind of a hybrid commuter bike
made us make other sacrifices. So the whole time just like compromise, compromise, compromise, – Home stretch,
– It kind of proves that, okay, sure, maybe you don’t need a nice frame. I still totally stand by investing in the
components over the frame. But you still need to make sure that your starting point is
gonna make sense for your build. But I still, I love this bike. It’s a weird, weird bike
that I hated until today. I started, I started
liking it, which is just what happens when you like
put work into something and we went 10 40. Yeah, like three minutes faster, – Dude. It’s way better. Yeah, It’s night and day. Like in many of our
videos I’ve talked about how important it is to express yourself. Clothes you wear, the car you
drive, the words you speak, they all inform the world of the type of person that you are. And bikes are just another way to do that. Another opportunity to take
something otherwise utilitarian and use it as a form of expression or an opportunity to experiment and grow. So what does our Walmart bike
with $1,000 worth of parts and a welded on head to say about us that we’re just two idiots who barely know what they’re doing. I mean, yeah, or maybe it
says that we’re two YouTubers who sometimes do things because
it makes for good content. Oh for sure. Definitely says that. But also it says that we’re curious. We like to tinker and build. We like to challenge
ourselves and each other. And I hope this inspires
you to do the same. And also that it gets
like 25 million views that would be so sick. And we are doing a bike ride. Come meet me, Jesse Redpath and Walter Martin. We’re gonna have very limited merch. It’s gonna be a bunch of
dudes riding their bikes. And that’s it. We’re mobbing
baby. Yeah, we’re mobbing dude. We’re mobbing. Straight up dude. Well put for more [email protected].
We’ll see you there.