A day spent mucking around with bikes

isn't always wasted.

I've had this idea for a while. The older mountain bike doesn't get much use, and I've wanted to turn it into some kind of any day any ride bike, if that makes sense...

I want to ride it to the shops or on an adventure like this. Or round the river, or up a very big hill.




The old Norco at 10am.

I think the suspension forks are a waste of time and energy for road riding, so changing them out to rigid forks was the main focus. The bike will be needed next week to tow Stuart around at Caloundra (I'm not sure why his tag along even has a chain, I've never seen him pedal!) so I needed to attach a bracket to the seat post. And the bike needs a new seat, it seems to have picked up the oldest and most uncomfortable seat that circulates the Lanham bike shed.




The aluminium frame is built like a brick out-house.

I have a pair of 26x1.25 road tyres that should make the bike roll along quite well.

So. The forks. A quick online search and ringing a few bike shops left me thinking this could get expensive, and so I gave Bicycle Revolution a call. "Ya, youse should comes on in, I tink you find sumptink out-der-bach" I went in, to be told by another cheery fellow that they didn't have what I wanted, but I could look around anyway. And as luck would have it I found one set of forks that was suitable. So I bought them, and the frame they were attached to, and the stem which looked a better length and angle than my original, all for $50. Sweet.




Frankenstein in the making.

The forks were off a cruiser style bike, with a very long head tube. I cut the forks down to size and fiddled around for ages getting the headset right. I wacked on a new seat and reassembled the rest of the bike.

I had a few ideas about inverting the (almost flat) handlebars to give me a more racer style seating position, but this didn't really work. I also intended to cut the handle bars down a bit, but decided not to do this yet. Once cut cannot be uncut. I was aware that the suspension forks made the frame higher than  the rigid forks and as the rebuild continued I started to worry that the pedals might be getting too close to the ground for cornering.

A quick lap of the block, no suspension to be seen.

A test ride proved that this wasn't really an issue, and if I am really worried about it in the future I guess I can look into shorter cranks. The bike is quiet and smooth to ride. At 19" the frame is large for a MTB, but feels very compact on the road. I found it very controllable.



The finished (for now) product. Anybody want to paint my bike?

So after clocking up a few klicks on it tonight it gets a run around the river for a W50 tomorrow! Should be an adventure.

Footnote: The bike survived the river ride, it seemed a little down on power and developed an annoying ticlunk about 3/4 way through the ride, so a bit of fine tuning is required. But it does have a very comfortable set up.