Modify your bike for happiness
This is the first blog where the date is correct!!! I have made the font not orange also. Orange is fun, but if we’re not looking at a black screen with green letters, it’s a gimmick.
What’s new? I built 2 mullets in one day Saturday. One as a customer request, and while the momentum was there I mulleted a Kona that’s for sale used. As an added bonus, the Kona has adjustable travel between 130 to 150 mm of travel. So you can get that bike and have a mullet, or with the flick of a switch have a super mullet! I would like to highlight the word “mulleted” is not in the dictionary based on the red lines underneath it as I type. This seems strange as there has to have been multiple hairdressers who have mulleted dozens of people in Grand Junction in one day.
Often, and with good reason we “over fork” bikes. It is a fun thing to do. You can use your sag in a versatile way and do lots of things a dinosaur mountain bike rider couldn’t have dreamed of in the late 1980’s.
Why mullet, why over fork? Because you can. In the days of full rigid, I made sure my bike had a 50 tooth outer ring so I could go as fast as possible. Similar to over forking, it made the bike do something it wasn’t really designed for. Bikes let you do unreasonable stuff like that. I almost won a race ish thing in Fruita with a 20” wheel on a 700c bike (to fit the steel drum) and had a great time. My sunglasses fell off and I had to drop out.
I had never seen a front gear reducer until a few were traded into the shop a few years ago. Lower than 22 tooth for a front chainring was madness from my point of view. This madness is out of ingenuity, boredom, and loving the bike. Someone had to discuss how cool it would be to hammer up the sTEEEEPEST shit while their friends watched in amazement. And then they machined a piece that reduced the “granny” gear below a 74mm bolt circle diameter. I’ll get back to this later, time for an akward aside.
Tom Palermo and I weren’t likely to meet. He was from the east, I was from the midwest. We were given a hotel room together for a mechanics conference in Seattle. We were very similar; married with young families, bike mechanics, loved to ride and both were working for the same employer. When we were getting ready to go to the conference one morning I noticed his tattoo of a 24 tooth Onza Buzzsaw chanring. In a pevious shop I worked at, if you were the 11t that meant you were the fastest gear. Roadies. Tom was an awesome guy and I’m lucky to have known him as a friend. We had a few other meetings together, and attended Barnett’s Bicycle Institute together. Don’t google his name if you don’t want to cry.
The 24 meant you could climb it, 22 was crazy. Such a low gear, but then I moved to Montana and it made more sense. If nobody made the trail, you made the gear.
How could you pedal like that? Push the pedals, what does it mean if you dab? Nothing. Keep pedaling up the hill because downhill is really the good stuff. Keep trying and think of how you can get outside and ride the trails you love. If you have the volition make something that gets you to where you want to be. A mullet or gear reducer can be something to try because there’s no reason not to.
22 tooth chainrings fortunately are less of a reality now ( you can’t hear me deeply exhaling in relief but I am). 1x drivetrains are getting better and better, but as I’ve seen before many dusty old mechanics are not happy. They want your bike to have the equivalent of a transfer case. Would you give your 7 year old a car with a multiple range transfer case? Do you understand the last sentence? If the answer is no to both previous questions 1x drivetrains make more sense.