Re:
The desire for me as a collector of e-stays is that it's yet another example of the e-stays that were produced between 1989 and 1994.
In fact, I've collected MUCH worse. The Sears F.S. Elite and the Mountain High Country Road are both great exampes of e-stays seemingly made from lead and pig iron (VERY heavy), and equipped with bottom-of-the-line parts, yet they sold BITD. I have examples of each, and they are indisputable historical proof that these turds were actualy produced and purchased based solely on the hype and exposure that e-stays were getting at the time.
Right around 1990, it seemed that manufacturers were crawling out of the woodwork to get into the mountain bike business, and it seemed that most of those manufacturers produced e-stays to get into the game because e-stays were what was "hot" at the time. In addition, it seems that many of those e-stay manufacturers disappeared just as quickly as they appeared; they got in, made a bunch of money based on hype, and then got out. A google search of "Mountain High" bikes shows the "Country Road" pig iron e-stay as the only model found. I therefore believe that the only model that "Mountain High" ever made was the "Country Road" e-stay.
On the other end of the spectrum, as I'm sure we all know, many of the biggest names in the business were also producing e-stays, and even though they made both e-stays and non-e-stays, the e-stays were offered up as their top-of-the-line bikes, while their "two-triangle" brethren were (more often than not) relegated to lower echelons and hence adorned with less-than-top-of-the-line groupsets.
There were also many manufacturers that filled in the space between those 2 extremes. It was an interesting time, indeed.
Now THIS bike, with it being aluminum, I'm guessing is a fairly light-weight specimen, and only by riding it will I be able to tell if it's strong enough to hold up during typical riding. After all, unless it cracks, how bad can it be? My intent is to breathe new life into it by stripping it completely of all parts, repainting it, and rebuilding it with some nice XT parts, and if it holds up, well then, it becomes part of my stable, and if it breaks, I strip the parts for another build and the frame goes up on the wall as yet another example of the e-stay's brief, 5-year window of time within the bicycle's 200-year history.
