ShannonM

I've been wanting to build a commuter / utility / street bomber out of an older mountain bike for a while now. So, when this 93 (I think) Karakoram came into the Eureka Bike Kitchen, I decided to start cookin'.

A drop bar conversion was my first thought, since I loathe straight bars, even with bar ends, but the price of ingredients was an issue. So then then I wondered, "what about alt bars?" I liked the idea of the Velo-Orange Crazy Bars, but, again... money.

So I rummaged around the Kitchen, and found a set of unknown, aluminum, 580mm North Road-ish bars. Time to mount'em up!

I immediately hit some snags.

The KORE stem was a tiller, and the closed-faced clamp was too wide for the bars. The bar-ends that were on the bike were too long and curved for where I wanted to put them. The GT-branded grips were, I think, original to the bike, and so worn that they had an oval cross-section. (Thickest at ~4:00, thinnest at ~10:00.) The cables and housings are all too short.

So, I start digging into the parts bins, and come up with this:




Next steps, cables, saddle, and pedals.

--Shannon

ShannonM

The previous owner had upgraded the bike to 8-speed, with XT levers and XT v-brakes. Also, they put on a RockShox Pilot SL fork, which I think I'll eventually swap out for a rigid. There's a GT cromoly fork in the Kitchen that I'll probably use, although I'd want to paint it... The pink-to-blue fade is pretty hideous. Black would be best, I think. And it's got no crown race, so I'd have to figure that out as well.

--Shannon

krakhaus 

That looks later than 1993. I had a 92 or 93, it was purple with splatter and different decals. It was my messenger bike, and also the bike I won my first cross-country race on. It got ran over by a taxi.

ShannonM

It might be a 94. That black 7-speed Deore LX stuff was only around for a couple of years. My 1994 Trek 9000, (aka "the worst full-suspension mountain bike ever made," aaka "The Pogo Stick,") came with the same group.

The catalogs I found online were not super informative.

--Shannon

ShannonM

The parts are correct for a 1993-1994. The decals look like the 1996-1997 bikes, but the only catalogs I could find are in German.

Further research is required.

--Shannon

3speedslow

Whatever the year, you have a good frame to start from.
The Kar… were top dogs for a
few years. I have an 88-89 frame and a 91 K Elite.

ShannonM

Ladies & Gentlemen, we've got ourselves a bicycle!




--Shannon

ShannonM

Cables, brake pads, pedals, and saddle.

Easy Peasey, right?

Not so much.

I'm now pretty sure the frame is a 1996. It's got the later paint and decals, and the crank is a 94/58 BCD, (the crank was what was throwing me off before... I thought it was a 110/74,) but it was clearly made for cantilever brakes. A little guide tube welded under the top tube, and a weird, tapered housing stop on the seat tube. I'm not sure how the previous owner bodged the cable housing and noodle for the rear brake, but I ended up hacking an adapter stop out of a presta valve cap. I cut off the closed end and worked it over the tube, and the housing fit right into the valve stem end.



It's not ideal, but it works pretty well. The rear brake is a bit soft, but that's about it. Not a bad bit of hackery, if I may so so.

The other thing that was weird was that the XT v-brakes needed the washer stack on the pads reversed from how they were in the package. The thick washers had to go on the outside of the mounting slot, or the pads sat too close to the rim. I don't recall having to do that before.

--Shannon

ShannonM

Up next:

The headset is done. You can either overload it to the point of stiction, or it clunks. (I did clean and re-pack it.) Weirdly, it's not indexed at all... not sure what's going on there.

Swap the 94x32T middle ring for a 34T that I've had in my parts box for probably 15 years. This will give a nice 1.5-step with the 42T outer and the 11-28 cassette, with a 22T granny. The existing 32T is overlap city. A new drivetrain is going to need to happen, at which point I'll swap the cassette for a 12-32. On this bike, trading a 93.5" high gear for an 85.7, and gaining one lower gear (16.8") seems like a good trade.

Replace the MKS Sylvan pedals with Odyssey Grandstand V2 platforms.

--Shannon

3speedslow

Reads like this GT found a great home!

squirtdad

is that the bike kitchen in the background in the first pic?

(son is in Aracata and his buddy has a bike.....also possible retirement relocation place for me so, hence the interest)

ShannonM

Yep, that's us. Right now, we're open on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.

--Shannon

ShannonM

I think I've figured out what's up with the headset... and it's my fault.
When I swapped the stem, I set the stack just a teeny bit short, so the top cap is hitting the top of the steerer tube before the headset is tight. One more thin spacer should fix the problem.
​

ShannonM

I decided to swap the Brooks B17 and Carradice Lowsaddle Longflap from my 1985 League Fuiji over to the GT, for two reasons:

1) This is going to be my utility / commuting bike, so the bigger bag should go on it.
2) The GT is going to get more riding time for a while, so the Brooks should be on it to get more broken in.
3) The WTB Rocket V is way too narrow for the GT with the North Road style bars.

So now we have this:



Rode it to the local market, about a 4-mile round trip... about a mile on the shoulder of US 101, and then a mile of terrible, broken, cracked, potholed chipseal that sucked a whole bunch even before the 6.4 earthquake we had in December.

So far, I like it.

The 26x1.25" tires are not too bad at 70 psi. I'll probably keep them until they wear out. The front is an IRC Smoothie, the rear is a Tioga City Slicker. When they die, or when I've got the extra bread, they'll get replaced with a ~2 inch kevlar bead tire, as nice as I can afford. (So, probably not Rene Herse...)

The Carradice does touch the backs of my thighs, but not enough to be annoying. At least, not in long pants, in this position, and at the pace and cadence this bike wants. On my road bike, in shorts, with a more aggressive position and at 90-100 rpm, it'd probably drive me nuts. Long-term, I'll want to solve this, but for now, it's OK. On the upside, the bag holds a lot of stuff, is easy to load, and doesn't sway... even though it's currently attached with nylon toe straps from my parts bin, since Perennial Cycles forgot to put the straps in the package. (And they haven't been at all responsive to my mom's enquiries about this.)

It's kinda slow. I mean, I'm slow, but I'm noticably slower on this bike than I am on the Fuji. It's not that painfully slow kind of slow you get from a bike that's just a dog, it's more like the bike only wants to go so fast, and if you try to go faster, you just do more work and gain no speed. Putting my hands in the curves or on the bar ends gets me at most one more gear, sometimes just a few extra RPM.

I think I'm gonna keep the Pilot SL fork. It doesn't seem to have any oil leaks, the compression adjustment / lockout works great, parts seem to still be available, and Humboldt County roads utterly, irredeemably suck. Plus, replacing it would cost money.

--Shannon

ShannonM

I was right about the headset. Adding an additional spacer to the stack got rid of the play, but it still dragged too much. That turned out to because the plastic top seal was destroyed. I found one that fit, and installed and adjusted, and... now my headset doesn't totally suck. It still needs replaced, but the urgency is gone. I can wait until I can afford a good one.

Having fixed the headset yesterday, I took the bike out for about a dozen miles of rambling. Went up to the next little town north of where I live in Fields Landing, a funky, cute place called King Salmon. Right on Humboldt Bay, with a beach and some little shoreline trails.



Even in February, the midday light isn't great, but you are where you are when you are where you are, so you just take the picture.

I'm liking the bike more the more I ride it. There's still some tweaking to be done... the gearing isn't ideal, I'm going to tape the bars and the extensions, and it wants wider tires, especially on dirt, but there's nothing about it that I actively dislike. It remains, and likely always will remain, a slightly slow bike. "Party pace," indeed.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that I actually kinda like the XT Rapidfire levers. I've always hated underbar shifters, but on this bike, I don't. I think it's because of the very different wrist and hand angle that I get from the North Road bars, which makes the thumb motion much less awkward.

--Shannon

LesterOfPuppets

GT ran U-brakes in back for a long time, with a cable yoke between the top and seat tubes, a plastic cable guide on the seat tube for the straddle cable to crossover around the seat tube on.

Looks like 1994 was all cantis for them though.

Korina

@ShannonM, nice. Looks like it's really coming together. Have you been on the Hikshari' Trail extension? I rode it last November, before the end was finished, and still it was impressively busy. I should get back out there; I hear they fixed the rather hairy connection to the Hikshari'; I'd like to see it. Rick Knapp, of the Humboldt Bay Bicycle Commuter's Assn., pestered the city about it.

PS Subscribed.

ShannonM

I'm not familiar with the Hikshari' Trail extension... is that the section that they seem to have added south of the Herrick Rd. park & ride? I've not yet checked it out, but I've seen people riding and walking across the slough between Herrick and Humboldt Hill. I'm not sure how to access it from the south end... we got nuthin' here in Fields Landing.

--Shannon

Korina

Yep, that's it. Access is on Tooby Rd.

ShannonM

Thanks!! I'll have to check it out.

I didn't know that that weird little spur road that comes off the side of the SB 101 Humboldt Hill offramp had a name... I wonder who Tooby was?

--Shannon

Korina

Good question.

Google is your friend; it seems the Toobys were one of Humboldt's many rich (white, of course) ranching families. There was a hullabaloo some years ago when the then current owner of Tooby Ranch wanted to subdivide it into ranchetts or something; here's an NJC story about it. And one of the Mrs.Toobys created a park. Gotta wonder why a stub of a road has that name.