Hi
Looking at buying a new or second hand mountain bike. I don't know anything about bikes, but was told that the brand 'Giant' is good enough for my purposes. I"m planning to ride from Brunswick to Carlton (Melbourne) 4-5 times a week.
Thanks in advance for your help
All manufacturers make crap bikes, and most also make good bikes too. So a better way to determine how good a bike is is by the components used on it.
If you ever intend to use it properly offroad, then you should get something with mostly Shimano LX components. That is the base level range of components that are actually designed to be used offroad. Next is XT, then XTR is top of the range (and extremely expensive). Anything else is not worth considering offroad.
If you are going to be commuting too then you would probably be best not going any higher than LX as well, since it will be more likely to get stolen, especially if it has any piece of XTR bling on it.
So in summary… Any MTB from any big brand that came with a mostly LX groupset when new will be a great MTB giving many years of service. Because no big manufacturer ever puts LX components on their crap MTBs.
Hopefully that will help you sort the wheat from the chaff.
dont know much about MTB but I got my bike at Ivanhoe cycles and it looks like theyre selling the older 09 models.
http://www.ivanhoecycles.com.au/bicycle/mountain-bike/cat_3.…
check it out, i noticed one bike is down from $2000 to $1200