I like this bike, but I ride it the least of any of them. Mostly this is because I usually ride solo, and the type of riding that this bike inspires me to do is not the type I should be venturing into the woods alone to do. I used to put the most miles in on this bike when I would volunteer for PA Vent Camp in June, but they paved all the trails around the camp over the last 2 years, so the knobbies are a little of a drag to roll around on now. If I’m going away for the weekend and I know all I’ll have time to do is goof around and practice wheelies or side-hops for 30 minutes, this is the bike I’ll take. Built like a tank except for the 2002 LX Hollowtech crank with the wimpy aluminum hollowbolts and the Easton Carbon fiber seatpost. In their defense, I put some extra hurting on both of those parts on every bike I’ve ever owned…
The observant reader might ask, “Why didn’t you use this frame with it’s horizontal dropouts to try singlespeeding?” The answer is that I wasn’t thinking about that when I bought it in ’03, only that I wanted a nice hardtail. 1 – The disk brake tabs on this year bike are not set up for adjustment when the rear wheel travels for chain tension, so disk adjustment would not be the easiest. 2 – I couldn’t just swap out for v-brakes in the rear because the rim is disk specific. 3 – I experimented on the other bike because it was the one which needed new parts.
Since this photo I’ve replaced the bars and seatpost (purged the bike of unreliable carbon parts), but it’s essentially the same bike from when I bought it. With the low number of miles I put on, it will probably stay this way forever.
Editing this page makes me want to take it out more.
