Sunday, October 24, 2010

Obsessed dudes report to BJA

I know I'm obsessed, but I can't help myself. I'm gonna turn myself in to Bike Junkies Anonymous, just one more fix...
Just got this sweet thing for a hundred bucks. I almost pissed my jeans when he pulled it out of his garage and I saw that chrome chainstay. As always the picks on craigslist were crap, so I was surprised to see all the details in person. Although the model is Stumpjumper, each year has several other designations as well, like Sport, Pro, Team, and Comp. The frame doesn't say anything, but this is certainly radder than the 85 Sport in the basement. MOMBAT has specs but it's hard to decipher because none of those specs match what I have. Anyway enough yammering, here's the candy:




Chrome chainstay with a little piss on it


Sweet lug

Reinforced brake bridge

Fastback seatstays

Embossed fork crown

Futuristic slingshot stem with Specialized alloy bars

Tomaselli grips and levers, suntour XC shifters

Best guess is 1985 or 86.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

bikes on the brain


Just goofing off drawing the other day. I love the names of those early mtbs.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Emma's project bike


Q: What are these dude's doing?
A: Thinking about vintage mountian bikes of course


This is the little bike I've been working on for Emma. The frame is nothing too special, and has bad paint and some dings, but it fits and it's still a Bridgestone. In cobbling this thing together I ran into a little mystery. We had a set of these old specialized touring triple cranks in the basement:

Cool cranks, but I couldn't find the BB spindle length. Sheldon Brown is really the only database I could find that had BB specs but nothing on the old Specialized crankset. Luckily the orange stumpy in the basement has the same cranks so I just took those off and measured, and came up with 120mm (I have janky calipers, but I tried to be accurate). So if you've got the same problem, now it's on the web somewhere.