To Buy, or Not to Buy? That is the Question!
That’s not the real question, it should be “to buy, or to build” but I just couldn’t resist the title…
It seems we are faced with this question time and again while adulting. Buy a house or build one, buy takeaway dinner or make our own, buy clothes or sew for ourselves, buy a trike or…you get the drift. Making your own always sounds attractive but there is always some level of capital expense and equipment needed, be it kitchen appliances, sewing machines, tools, skills… No wonder takeaway pizza does so well!
Semi-regularly I get visitors who declare that trike prices are outrageous and there’s no way that a trike can cost so much money. They then head off to spend “a couple of hours with a CAD program, and then have a trike built in a few days”. Now I’m all for an entry level trike at a reasonable cost (you know, as a gateway drug) and would love to partner with someone to do this but thus far none of these entrepreneurs have returned with any further ideas. I haven’t seen any trikes flood the market either!
What’s prompted this line of thought then? Chiefly an irritation that we as a nation seem to manufacture precious little in the way of goods these days. We do have a manufacturing industry, dominated by food, beverage, pharmaceuticals, chemical and chemical products, and a handful of other things. Search – The Australian Made Campaign for a full list of Australian made products. Bicycles? Nope. Correction, there are 2 entries for penny farthing bicycles.
And always in the back of my mind is the fact that all our trikes are sourced from overseas and as such we are at the mercy of international exchange rates and trade policies.
So where do our options lie? Face down on the ground as I see it and struggling to even turn over. But just for the exercise, let us have a look at the practicalities of making a trike.
Setting Up
First up some tooling. While it’s possible to make lots of things with a hacksaw and some files, let’s not pretend we are crazy enough to do that!
- We’ll need a welder, preferably a TIG welder.
- We’ll have to make many round cylindrical things and that means a lathe.
- To shape and drill metal accurately means a milling machine.
- Add on a variety of hand tools, files, drills, grinders, plus the various extra tools needed for the machine tools.
Say $10,000 worth (and these are only small but capable machines).
Oh, and a means to draw and design our trike. And don’t forget we need to have or be prepared to learn the skills to use all this stuff. Otherwise we have to pay some else who does have the skill.
Frame Decisions
What will we make the frame from. Aluminium? Make a decent light frame hey! Ahhh, but the high strength weldable aluminium alloys aren’t available in AU. 6061T6 is available in limited sizes (mostly for the aerospace industry) but heat treating this after welding is pretty much a no-go, and the current state of the art bicycle frame material 7005 is simply not available in any size.
OK then, we’ll use steel. Budget bikes from Asia often advertise they are made from “high tensile” steel, ok for our entry level trike we’ll use that. Ah, maybe we won’t…not readily available here. Right then, mild steel it is, at least we can get that!
To save some frame weight (about 25%) we can use higher strength chrome molybdenum steel (4130) that is typically imported for aviation and race car use. It’s significantly more expensive but in the quantities we want it’s tolerable.
Parts
Now we need some cycle parts. Lots of cycle parts. Hubs, spokes, rim strips, rims, tubes, tyres, brakes, brake discs, steering bearings, handlebar grips, shifters, derailleurs, cables, crankset, pedals, odd nuts and bolts, the list seems endless. Throw in the recumbent parts like idlers, steering track rods and bearings, and then make provision for accessories like headrests, accessory mounts etc.
Sourcing from within Australia is desired, but the choice can be limiting as the importers bring in parts to support the bikes they sell, not to support budding builders.
Take wheel hubs as an example: on a trike’s front wheels we want to use a hub with a through axle configuration to match our axle (12 or 15mm). This limit’s our choice significantly, and when we then choose a spoke count to match available rims we are probably down to a choice of two, neither of them cheap. A manufacturer in Asia can order several thousand hubs built to their specification for a fraction of the cost per hub compared to our option.
Choosing, for the point of this exercise, components that are low to mid-tier, the cost price for enough parts to fit out a trike (3×9 speed) comes to $1300 in round terms.
Building it
Labour is a tricky question, it’s really hard to know how long it will take until it’s done. Let’s allow 60 manhours, remembering we are making everything other than standard bike parts. (And I think this is actually on the low side.)
Commercial welding rates are between $60 and $100/hr, so we’ll use $75 and halve that for the cost rate (but I don’t think there will be many welders working for $37.50/hr). Labour cost is therefore $2250.
Finally, throw in the cost of materials, consumables, and contract services like powder coating the frame and our cost price is now a little over $4,000. Or very close to the base price of some imported trikes, indeed comfortably over the price of some (new Terra Trikes are between $3,000 and $4,500).
And the results ……
| Description | Cost |
|---|---|
| Steel (mild steel) | $ 60.00 |
| Cycle Parts | $ 1,300.00 |
| Power coating | $ 350.00 |
| Labour | $ 2,250.00 |
| Consumables (gas, solvents, abrasives PPE, etc) | $ 140.00 |
| Seat mesh materials | $ 50.00 |
| Total | $ 4,150.00 |
Prices are wholesale, conservative and approximate as at April 2025.
And there, in a nutshell, is why we do not have a recumbent trike manufacturer in Australia. The cost price estimated in this article is literally the direct costs involved yet is higher than the retail price of a trike sourced from the USA (but made in Asia). Additional values must still be added to account for all the business type expenses, light, power, rent, insurance…that list is seemingly endless too. Finally, add the markup to get retail price…
