you've come a long way baby

[Anthony]

you're still using V's on a frame designed for canti's.

I doubt whether that is quite fair Paul. At the time when Vs were coming out, some die-hards (the retrobikers of their day, no doubt) still preferred cantis, so some frame makers provided for either to be used. Similarly you sometimes see 93ish frames with top tube front mech cable routing, but with a seat tube-mounted pulley so that you could still use a down-pull fm if you preferred. The existence of the pulley doesn't mean that you're supposed to use it, nor does it mean that the frame was designed for down-pull. Rather, it was designed for either down-pull or the then-new top-pull.

 

[Faghetaboutit]

i think ive got worse in the bike department! nothing matches or works on any of my bikes :roll:

 

[Anthony]

if you have a herd, what best represents you when you got here, and you now?

I guess I'm in a rather different position Keir. It's not me that's come a long way, but the bike. I don't think Retrobike has had any influence on the way I build bikes though.

I have no photo of it when I bought it, but the catalogue picture below shows pretty much what my 97 Kilauea looked like when I bought it in 1998. Since then it has been through many iterations, the most recent being shown below that in a picture taken a couple of days ago. It has had several competitors for my attentions each day. More expensive steel ones, a full-suspension scandium one, a titanium one, an aluminium one, all excellent and all different, but I still seem to choose it a lot of the time. It's light (slightly lighter than your 96 for some reason that I don't understand), nimble, lively, fun, comfortable. I don't think it's a question of whether my best bikes are better than one another, but more whether I like them better, and I like this bike as much as any of them. I guess I was just lucky to hit on a good bike right from the word go. It was my first proper bike and cost me £500 one year old, having been £999 new. The avid levers are the only original part. I still have the P2, but I'm very unlikely to ever fit it again, although I probably wouldn't sell it.

 

[makster]

Below is a link to my first ever 'Readers MTB' post. Love Gibblekings comment....and how right he was!

http://www.retrobike.co.uk/forum/viewto ... lpinestars

So, the history reads as follows....

This hasn't included a multitude of others that have take a brief residence and then been moved on. I've just included the ones I've loved (and lost )
All I have left of these now is both of the Red Jamis Dakota's and the Overbury's.