abr303
Retro Guru
First out of the work shed for 2025 is something I’ve been after doing for a long long time……
I really liked the Diamond Backs of the late 80’s and early 90’s and thought they were so cool, it was the first mountain bike I took off-road. I had borrowed a mates ‘89 ‘Smokey’ Apex, went 1/2 way up Snowdon and back down…
I was hooked.
Having spent years looking for an 89/90 model year Apex with that lovely smoke finish in my size has proved rather fruitless. It was always big frames that kept turning up bar the odd very small one and had pretty much given up looking….
So when a 1990 Ascent EX turns up as a frameset recently and in my size I had to have it as it was as near to an Apex I was going to get….but it was in Romania
! A deal was done and within a week it surprisingly turns up.
It’s a decent period build with Deore DX M650 running gear, headset, Deore thumbies etc. XT M730/732 hubs on Mavic 261 CD’s, Smoke/Dart tyres and a good smattering of Tioga/Avenir finishing kit, even found a Tioga bottle cage and bottle to match.
Maybe a bit of an over kill component wise for an EX but I love how this has turned out and captures that classic early 90!s lines and that smoke finish looks just as amazing now as it did back in the day. I’lm still going to be on the lookout for 1989/1990 Apex though but this will be more than adequate as a go between for now
I really liked the Diamond Backs of the late 80’s and early 90’s and thought they were so cool, it was the first mountain bike I took off-road. I had borrowed a mates ‘89 ‘Smokey’ Apex, went 1/2 way up Snowdon and back down…
I was hooked.Having spent years looking for an 89/90 model year Apex with that lovely smoke finish in my size has proved rather fruitless. It was always big frames that kept turning up bar the odd very small one and had pretty much given up looking….
So when a 1990 Ascent EX turns up as a frameset recently and in my size I had to have it as it was as near to an Apex I was going to get….but it was in Romania
! A deal was done and within a week it surprisingly turns up.It’s a decent period build with Deore DX M650 running gear, headset, Deore thumbies etc. XT M730/732 hubs on Mavic 261 CD’s, Smoke/Dart tyres and a good smattering of Tioga/Avenir finishing kit, even found a Tioga bottle cage and bottle to match
.Maybe a bit of an over kill component wise for an EX but I love how this has turned out and captures that classic early 90!s lines and that smoke finish looks just as amazing now as it did back in the day. I’lm still going to be on the lookout for 1989/1990 Apex though but this will be more than adequate as a go between for now
