Saturday, June 12, 2010

Standard Rivendell-inspired city bike mtb conversion


About 7 years ago I did my first Riv-inspired city bike mtb conversion.

I ended up doing a bunch of these conversions. At least a dozen for friends and family. I remember wishing I could find fenders, good city tires, nitto bars/stems, shifters, etc at cost so I could do these conversions cheaper. I think that's partly how P2P came to be.



I'm visiting my brother. Both he and my sister-in-law, Gina, have one of these conversion bikes. Gina's Rockhopper is one of my favorites and I'm pretty sure the first conversion I did for someone else. I always tune it up and find time to ride it when I visit.

It's interesting to see the details of this build now. It's a 6 year-old snapshot of my bike thinking.

For some reason I removed the inside crank and made it a double. I'm not 100% sure what my thinking was there. Maybe to simplify? Was I thinking of putting a shorter spindle in there at some point?

I hadn't discovered cable tips yet. Nor are all of the shifter cables capped with ferrules. There's a lot of frayed cable ends and some split housing. I only spent the time to cut down the excess stays on the front fender. And I still ignored fender lines.


Baskets shipped on all these bikes. As did pretty Nitto bars. I also did the Walds on some bikes, but I preferred the Nittos and tried to convince my people to spend the extra coin on the Dove or the Albatross bars. Nitto Periscopa stems make these conversions work for any person on any bike.

Now that P2P has the accounts to buy most of these components at cost, perhaps I'll build up a few of these for P2P and see how they sell.

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