I thought this would be a good place to document my current bike rebuild experience because there are not enough 26" frankenbeater bike threads available in this sub forum. Fair warning: If new and shiny and expensive is what you are looking for you have come to the wrong thread my friend
Ok. So a while ago I bought this 26" rigid mtb from a thrift store for $50 basically because it was fairly light, I knew it was Chromoly steel, and the components were pretty good. It had a funky flat black spray bomb paint job and once I got it back to the lab and scraped some of that off I discovered a 1992 era KHS Montana Comp underneath. Here's the catalog sheet about that:
I swapped out the tires and changed the stem and bars for some flipped north roads and rode it around for a while as a gravel bike and found it really zipped along well.
For a while I debated leaving it with the basic ghetto look it had as there was no stress as far as ruining the paint job was concerned. I played around with different hand grips and tires and even fenders but eventually my need to tear things completely apart got the better of me and into the rebuild bin it went.
To be continued...