Re:
Update...
I know I'm amongst friends here so I can say this without risk of being labelled a freak.. nothing can help get to grips with your new ride like stripping it down to the naked. Eyeballing every nook'n cranny, counting the scratches and fearing damage. That beautiful relief when you're satisfied that everything is grand, then the excitement of the cleaning and sorting and building... and you just know the final build is going to be f*cking awesome. I'm at the stage
Stripped of componentry and cleaned, the frame and paint proved to be in epic condition. The pictures below do it no justice. The orange is incredibly vivid and unfaded and makes my other Beast drab in comparison. There are a one or two minor scratches but amazingly zero chain-suck. Its clear this 'Dale has lived a cushy life.
The thought process behind this one is to keep it completely catalogue spec but i've already hit a snag. Despite everything on the bike being original (even the inner tubes).. well the BB isn't. For some reason this has been changed to an unknown cheap and nasty which means replacing! Sadly its difficult to find the standard BB which has forced me to replace with an M730 version from me parts drawer. So already there's been an upgrade.
Snag two... the crankset. The original M550 wasn't in bad nick until soppy bollocks here mashed up the threads on the non-drive side after forgetting to remove the crank-bolt before going at it with the pulling tool
. For now I've put on an XT crankset doubling the number of upgrades from one to two.
Other than that, EVERYTHING will remain original. LX front & rear mechs, DX brakeset, Tioga grips, M550 hubs, Ritchey rims, Vetta saddle, DX STIs, Smoke tyres, etc etc
Some picture progress so far:
[before]
[after]
Thanks for looking
CB