1994 Kona Lava Dome - A Modern Classic?

Cheers for all the comments foks, I am pleased with the outcome. It's not amazing light, around 26lb on my suitcase scales, but it's still nice and quick on the trails. I'm still playing round with stem length, 90mm was too short and put my weight too far over the back of the bike, I've got a 120mm on it now which feel better that the 90mm but I want to try something in between next.

The only real problem the frame has is with tyre clearence, the 2.1s that are on it are very close to the inside of the chainstays so it wouldn't be very good in the mud without skinny tyres.

Handling wise, it's good too. Only starts to struggle on the really rough stuff at high speed due to the lack of fork travel. But this isn't much different to my 100mm forked bikes. I've been riding my on one C456 quite a bit lately and you kind of get used to plowing though stuff with a 150mm fork on the bike

Anthony":cibvw587 said:
I don't see any issue about the parts being modern, it's just that they're black and this frame colour needs silver parts. This is the case with many Konas of that time. They were designed to look good with silver parts, not black, so it's no surprise that some of them don't look right with black.
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Interesting statements this considering the original crank was balck, rear mech was black, fork crown was black, brake levers were black and the shifters were mostly black. So the only real siver bits were the rims and seatpost. Hence can't really agree that black parts don't suit is as that's what was mostly speced on the original bike.

I've taken a photo of it standing next to my Voodoo Wanga, and the geomety looks pretty similar. The main difference is that the front end is 20mm lower unsuprisingly (100mm forks on the Wanga). So it looks like Joe Murray has kept pretty failthful to his original designs, only tweaking them to suit longer forks.
 
Silver post, stem, bars, fork, rings, rims, makes quite a difference.

You need the shorter stem to counteract the longer fork.
 

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I prefer the look of the black kit over silver and that's why i.used it for the build.

A 90mm stem didn't make the bike handle properly as it put myweight.too far back rides much better with the 120mm.
 
That's up to you, I'm only trying to help.

Reducing the stem length to counteract a longer fork/slacker head angle isn't just some idea of mine, it's the way bikes are designed (including by Joe Murray, and by Doug Lafavor at Kona). You won't find many 120mm stems on modern bikes, even though they were designed for long forks. And as your frame was designed for a short fork, it needs a shorter stem even more than a modern frame does.

It could be that you just don't like sharp handling, some people don't. But oftentimes people don't give themselves enough time to adapt to a new setup before writing it off.
 
I did listen to the advice and agree that with the fork at 100mm it needed the shorter stem. But at 80mm the fork is very close to its original fork length and I've found the original stem length suited the frame better . I like fast handling bikes, and non of my.modern bikes have stems longer than 90mm.
 
Re:

Just bought a 94 lava dome frame. Have very similar parts to this, plan to build it up within the next few weeks. Retro with a modern twist! love the way it turned out. great job!
 
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