Oooooh…A proper debate about fings wot I knowz abaat…
Bitd I had a tiny Campag equipped GLF Attitude which at the time was completely ‘otherworldly’ (imagine scenes of a 15 year old lad carrying his bike upstairs to his bedroom every night after a ride, much to the chagrin of his parents, to wash it down with ass’ milk and dry it with Egyptian cotton towels before singing it lullabies to send it off to sleep!) right up to the point that the fragile campy bits started wearing out and falling to bits and this 15 year old could no longer afford to maintain the exotic green machine, which meant many weekend race meets were cut short because of mechanical failures and I had to listen to a disgruntled dad giving it the old “I should’ve just bought you a normal bike, like all the other kids have!” all the way home! (This is of course born from the purchasing agreement of “If you buy it for me Dad, I promise to maintain it myself and will be World Champion this time next year!”…Neither of which happened of course!
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Anyway, I digress…My attitude was amazing but extremely fragile, so it went to make way for less exotic, but equally as good machinery which didn’t cost my soul to maintain….And on to today…I currently own 2 Attitudes, both ‘Trek’ Kleins albeit Chehalis made bikes and I do love them!
The ‘98 is a NOS Attitude Race that I purchased (stole) for £300…
…And the ‘99 is an Attitude Comp that has been built for abuse, wears its battle scars with pride and is an absolute blast on the trails!
Now I know neither of these are going to carry any of the ‘acclaim’ that the pre trek bikes have, however they are great bikes! And when you look at some of the details on both (internal cable routing, bubble headtube, weld finish) they were still fairly special in the marketplace at that time…
Will I own another ‘proper’ Klein? probably, however there are a few holy grail builds I want in the collection before I invest £3/ £4k on another one…In the meantime one of mine is going off to
@KOMRAID to be painted GLF and built as a modern interpretation of my old Attitude and the other one will continue to be enjoyed without the worry of breakages or me riding the value out of it!