With an improvement in strength on the hills this winter’s training goal, coach Ada has decreed that I should get a singlespeed mountain bike. Not wanting to spend much money as I need a new race frame this year I decided to try and build it from bits.
Bringing together all my spares, old bits and Cath’s bike I started to think of how perhaps I could end up with not just a singlespeed but a bike better suited to Cath. Cath has been riding an ancient steel framed Diamondback Apex which we bought second hand from a friend at least 9 years ago. It has early air front suspension , V brakes and a very old school long framed design. It has always been too long for her and we have tried various stem and handlebar options over the years to help shorten it.
After much prevaricating I decided to build Cath a decent bike with all the best bits and hack the rest into a serviceable singlespeed for me, lucky Cath! Merlin Cycles, near Preston, had a great deal on their 2004 aluminium frames, complete with headset and seatpost – £99. Caths new bike was built around this and has the following spec: 15 inch Merlin Frame (new), cheap FSA chainset (new), XT rear mech, Deore front mech, Hope XC / Mavic 819 wheels (tubeless), Magura Julie disk brakes, Rockshox 2004 SID team, and various original bits of finishing kit – not bad for £160 + old bits
On to the singlespeed then. After various conversations and web research I settled on a conversion kit from Charlie the Bikemonger. ( who I can reccomend highly) They have some great videos
showing how to bodge a singlespeed using a cost effective kit which Keith Floyd style seems to involve drinking beer between tasks. The kit consists of some spacers to use on an existing Shimano freehub, two cogs (16 and 18 tooth), new shorter chain bolts, an 1/8 chain and a chain tensioning device to make up for the frames lack of sliding dropout all for about £40. STX RC V brakes (1995), XT 110 bcd 5 arm 18/36 chainset – (1992), XT / Mavic wheels (1995 ish) and the yet unidentified front air shock completed the setup, however much to my dismay the diamond back was just too small (15 inch) to be comfortable and the seatpost was just too far past its max, it also was in desperate need of a new headset. After the first build I gave in and again visited Merlin to get another one of their 2004 Malt frame deals, this time with a bottom bracket thrown in rather than the seatpost, and moved everything across onto it, only to find the old air shock headtube to be too short. A work colleague kindly gave me a very old set of spring / elastomer Manitou forks which although very soggy fitted but it was obvious that they were just too soggy to be of much use.
An evening of web research led me to try boiling the elastomers on the stove and replacing of the fork oil with Castrol GTX ( much thicker) which has more or less made them serviceable again. Fantastically luck did eventually catch up with me and I didn’t need a chain tensioner to start with, the chain fitting perfectly, but after 3 or 4 rides the stretch on the chain and lumps and bumps has had it off a few times so the tensioner will be going back on soon.
First impressions of singlespeed riding is I love it and would ideally like to build a modern spec quality singlespeed at some point to make things more comfortable but for the time being my thrown together budget bike should do the trick.