This being Bike Month in Colorado, I decided to designate today as Ride Bikes That Look Lonely and Unloved Day.
First I rode the Soma Double Cross — tricked out as a touring rig, with triple crankset, XT rear derailleur and panniers front and rear — to the Natural Grocers/Vitamin Cottage and fetched home 21.5 pounds of grub.
The bike handled pretty well despite all those spuds, onions and greens weighing it down, but then again I wasn’t climbing any hills and the ride was all of 9.6 miles, round trip; 26 minutes each way. I’m guessing that hauling 21.5 pounds of this and that up Hardscrabble Cañon might be an entirely different sort of lactic acid trip.
Next I broke out the old DBR ti’ mountain bike, cousin to my Sandvik-built road bike, and spent 90 minutes fooling around in Palmer Park, riding some bits that stymie me on the ’cross machinery. There’s something to be said for big fat tires and a cushy suspension fork in certain situations, and Palmer Park has many of them.
This bike is as wild a hodgepodge of components as its road cousin. It still has much of the original drivetrain — eight-speed XT derailleurs front and rear, OE bottom bracket, industrial-looking AC crankset, Tioga Alchemy headset — but the rest of it is from all over the place. The bike is so old I can’t remember the original spec’, though I do still have the original wheelset; Mavic 217 SUP UB Control hoops laced to Hügi Compact hubs.
Today the bike sports a set of Mavic CrossMax tubeless wheels, but I dislike tubeless and run ’em with tubes inside some burly Panaracer 2.1 knobbies. The RockShox Judy SL is courtesy of the fine folks at Hippie-Tech. There’s a Sachs front twist-shifter and a SRAM Rocket rear, XT V-brakes and Avid levers, Easton EA70 bars and stem, RavX bar ends, a USE seat post topped by a Flite saddle, a Cateye Enduro 8 computer and a little brass bell to startle the mortal shit out of the clueless.
The latest addition to this rig is a pair of XT pedals for style’s sake and because I had run flat out of Time ATACs. I like the cheapo SPD pedals on the road, and these XTs treated me just fine in the sand of Palmer Park, but I still prefer Times or Crank Brothers in the mud.
When do I ride in the mud these days? Uh, never, is when. Is there anything sadder than a retired cyclo-crosser?
Mad Blog Media 
P-great frame, hubs, crankset, etc–such sweet irony that these ‘old’ parts can’t be parted with simply because the value (monetary&sentimental) is unrecoverable, its nice some of them are still usable in this age of plastic incompatibility–also credit due to you for not making the old Diamond Back a piece of wall art (do Wiensy & DeMattei still ride theirs?)
It’s a beautiful thing. Maybe it’s time you hauled it out to the Left Coast again so we can ride up and down the trails around Tahoe. If memory serves, that machine felt right at home in that neck of the woods.
I hear ya Patrick….I’m currently trying to find a way to move some 8spd Campy stuff onto a more girl-type frame. I gave a road bike to my gf (now my wife) a few years ago and she tells me she would be more apt to ride if she had a bike with a dropped top-tube rather than the traditional-style Trek sttel frame I gave her originally. The parts began their service life on a steel Pinarrello I got back in 2003. The Pinny is now sporting 10 spd and this Trek has collected dust for a while. So I want to use the wheels, gears, brakes and rear derailleur on a townie type-frame. Any ideas on frames and parts compatabilities?